I am not going to sink into a detailed methodological critique because 1) while I hate their antique methods this is unnecessary to make my point, and 2) I am writing for a general audience and want to demonstrate that any idiot can reject papers that uses such methods badly
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heres some text from the methods section along with some of the figures from the paper depending on your background you may find your eyes glazing over before opening it or you may be shouting imprecations at your phone good news if your former! it doesnt fucking matterpic.twitter.com/Kowy5rCDSn
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heres a dumb person version of the Findings meditate on it for a moment before we continuepic.twitter.com/xH2bmj9qnH
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"black babies were three times more likely to die if overseen by a white doctor" really REALLY fucking really
@Fixed_Effects is the corresponding author and he may take this thread as my Correspondence2 replies 3 retweets 82 likesShow this thread -
suppose for a moment that this were actually true what do physical reality do you imagine might cause this outcome? what specific actions can you imagine all white doctors taking that no black doctors take that would *triple* infant mortality independent of everything else?
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stray intrusive thought 'average white doctor kills black babies at triple rate of black doctors' factoid a statistical error. average white doctor kills black babies at same rate. Racist Georg who delivers in a cave and eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not h
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generally when a model produces fantastical results you should feel good about discarding the model. and this is absolute insanity there are a million things that can go wrong in this kind of estimation and the approach used by the authors handles like . . . five of them
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this kind of cockup is the *norm* in reduced form microeconometrics it is remarkable only for being wildly unreasonable, and nevertheless making it through a paper-thin review process (by people whos careers are built on the same methods) because it produced the Correct result
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the authors are careful to run through a series of apotropaic tests to ensure that a few well-understood issues did not obtain in their model its thorough, people myself included spend years learning these Rituals its akin to making sure submarine screen doors are up to code
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Replying to @eigenrobot
Can you explain what they mean by "control[ling] for the 65 most common comorbities?" https://twitter.com/MaiqTL/status/1295951227952353280/photo/1pic.twitter.com/8KvO6aNgr7
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yeah they ran a giant regression with ever feature they could find without thinking about it for more than half a second
uh
does that answer your question 
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