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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Replying to @eigenrobot
note that this is not actually what they found black infant mortality rate is triple the white rate, the effect they see drops that to (afaict) ~double the white rate
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Replying to @halvorz
somewhat less, I didn't bother to compute the ratios but squinting it looks like its estimated to reduce most of the marginal hazard from being black
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Replying to @halvorz
which rounds to 2/3
so the increase from conditioned on being black is cut by etc etc
I agree with your objection to this sloppiness on my part but also the black/white infant mortality base rate difference is so vast I don't think it makes a practical difference to my point1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @eigenrobot
the thing is, the base rate difference is, afaict, very real and it still shows up after you control for socioeconomic stuff, health, etc so there is something here that needs to be explained, one way or another
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I absolutely agree it's bad and fucked up and I wish people would look for genuinely plausible causes :(
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Replying to @eigenrobot @halvorz
yeah that's unlikely to happen, no one wants their name on a paper that pins black infant mortality on lifestyle causes, the risk of that is too great and y'know what? you don't need it. it's not like "don't smoke and drink while pregnant" is unknown advice.
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I should add: it's the "don't do risky things" paper we don't need the fact that the risk of Bad Results has a chilling effect on researching other causes and effective interventions really sucks.
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