As a black statistician, I felt the need to look into this plot going around Twitter. As far as I can tell, it's being used to push the narrative that black people's poor relationship choices are causing bad outcomes for black children.
At first, I thought the analysis looked sloppy based on just the plot but I decided to dig in and realized the methodology was much better than I thought and it actually addressed my major concerns BUT the narratives on Twitter don't seem to reflect what's in the actual report.
1. CAUSATION. The actual analysis WARNS against making CAUSAL claims and admits that a "number of factors not measured...may confound the associations between family structure and child outcomes".
In other words, the report itself admits that they probably didn't do a good job controlling for all the possible causal factors because there are so many and it's so complex.
So bottom line: We shouldn't be saying that family structure or race CAUSE these outcomes because SCIENTIFICALLY and STATISTICALLY the analysis doesn't support that.
2. INCOME. The second thing which I was wondering about is this: two parents can have two incomes and one parent might only have one income. So this could be an issue right? What do they say about that?
Basically, they say income and having two parents in the home are highly coupled variables to the point where the individual effects of each variable would be hard to separate in an analysis. EXACTLY!
In my opinion, when you have a situation like this where you can't really tell if it's income or the two parents, the FAIR thing to do is to repeat the analysis looking at things based on income levels and see if that gives a more convincing story.
3. RACE. At first, I was going to criticize this analysis for not considering things on a multiplicative scale. What do I mean? Well, I noticed that 36/18 = 2 and 53/28 is almost 2. So it looks there might be no racial difference here on the multiplicative scale.
Assuming causality (which is a HUGE assumption), the idea would be that having two parents in the home MIGHT double the chances of graduating regardless of race.
Also, 24/14=1.71 and 18/8=2.4. Somewhat close again. At this point, I was starting to think race might not even be a factor here. I almost wrote a thread criticizing the analysis for not considering this and for not using a real statistical model like logistic regression but...
Look at that! They did do a logistic regression! And now we can see the numbers are very similar for both races. I bet if they added confidence intervals, we would see an overlap suggesting no evidence of race being a factor. So the racial interpretation seems inappropriate.
The logistic regression is much less sexy than the plot but it's probably the more accurate story. Bottom line: the analysis doesn't support the conclusion that race is a factor.
So basically, as far as I can tell, they did a pretty statistically defensible analysis but for some reason the framing on Twitter is misleading and introduces a racially-tinged, causal interpretation that's not supported by the data analysis.
Here's the report if you want to check it out for yourself: ifstudies.org/blog/less-poveโ€ฆ

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More from @kareem_carr

19 Jun
IQ often gets used to promote racism on the internet but it's also highly mathematical so people don't really understand it.

In this thread, I will explain:

1. How the math of IQ works at a high level (don't worry no formulas!)

2. Why IQ is partly socially construct... ๐Ÿงต๐Ÿ‘‡
An IQ test is basically a list of questions that a psychometrician (kind of a cross between a psychologist and a statistician) thinks might measure intelligence. If you give such a test to a lot of people, you will get a range of scores.
The first thing you might notice is that the distribution of scores isn't a nice shape. So psychometricians adjust the scores so that a certain number fall within certain percentiles so you get a nice bell curve like this:
Read 16 tweets
14 Jun
I have mixed feelings about the criticism that the public health community didn't do a good job communicating with the public. On the one hand, it's clear that things could have gone better. On the other hand, the criticism strikes me as extremely unfair.
First of all. Who was the public listening to? They were listening to random people on the internet with no expertise at all. They were listening to science communicators with no connection to government or authority over anything.
They were listening to professors in universities. Physicists and aerosol chemists and virologists. They were even listening to silicon valley venture capitalists.
Read 9 tweets
12 Jun
I think a lot of anti-CRT people would agree that "white" isn't a very useful label. People are Irish or Italian or German heritage or whatever or better yet we are all just individuals that deserve dignity. "Black" and "white" are weird social constructs that somebody made up.
If "black" and "white" and "race" in general are all just constructs that keep us divided then shouldn't we work together to dismantle these arbitrary categories so we can all just live our lives as individuals?
The good news is I think a lot of CRT folks also agree with this. As far as I can tell, many CRT folks also want to get to a point where we can abolish these arbitrary racial constructs so we can live in a freer society.
Read 9 tweets
12 Jun
I think that Ibram Kendi is just a consequentialist. Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges whether an action is right or wrong based on what its consequences are. By applying this to race, he concludes that all actions are either racist (wrong) or anti-racist (right).
Consequentialism has a long tradition in the West. It goes back to Jeremy Bentham (late 1700s) and John Stuart Mill (mid-1800s). It's also a cornerstone of Utilitarianism which is one of our main moral traditions.
To summarize, when Kendi says every social policy is either racist or anti-racist, this is just consequentialism, which is clearly grounded in classical Western thought. If you disagree with this then I think your fight is with Consequentialism as an idea not Kendi himself.
Read 4 tweets
12 Jun
I finally learned what CRT is. From what I understand, the idea is this: if you let people who assume black people are inferior create a social system then that social system will likely have the assumption that black people are inferior baked into it. This seems obviously true.
This isn't race specific. It should be intuitively clear that when humans design systems, they tend to bake their assumptions into their designs. As a statistician, I see the consequences of hidden assumptions all the time.
A lot of anti-CRT folks seem to think saying "the system almost certainly has racist assumptions baked into it" is the same as saying "EVERYTHING is racist". This is binary thinking which is a cognitive bias that happens a lot when people feel threatened.
Read 5 tweets
27 May
My opinion on Bayesian statistics is it flows naturally from a Bayesian philosophical perspective but since no philosophy is universally accepted among humans, Bayesian statistics is deeply in conflict with how many people see the world. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.
Frequentist statistics is grounded in frequencies of events. Since all humans can (objectively?) observe events and count them, Frequentism starts out from a more simple, less philosophy-dependent position.
People can and do add their own philosophies on to Frequentism which can make it seem a bit philosophically confused and incoherent. I think this incoherence and confusion is what Bayesians are often reacting to when they critique Frequentism.
Read 5 tweets

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