You need to know the law and numeracy

From Progressive Supreme Court justices can’t do basic math, peddle bogus statistic about black babies’ survival rate from Liberty Unyielding.  

Cognitive pollution (things believed to be true which are not true) is everywhere.  It is often most obvious when it crops up disastrously in operations but is perhaps most pernicious when it enters the legislative system where laws and policies are formulated and when it enters the judicial system where laws are interpreted.  

Relying of factually untrue information is a gross subversion of how the judicial system should work and justices who are unable to process or comprehend factual information ought not be interpreting.

In the article, Jay Greene is quoted with regard to an example of a Supreme Court justice relying on information which is factually untrue and should have been obviously untrue.  With any study, almost your first questions, even before the methodology, is whether it is large enough, randomized, controls for confounds and whether the effect size is material.  In this case, the most obvious and egregious error is the obvious error of not comparing apples-to-apples.

In her dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences in university admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson managed to pull off a trifecta: She was factually incorrect in describing the results of a study that should not be believed, which wouldn’t provide practical support for her argument even if it were accurate and credible.

Jackson claimed that racial preferences were essential in admission to medical schools because more black doctors were needed to improve health outcomes for black patients.

Specifically, she wrote, “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” That claim was taken from an amicus brief filed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which in turn was referencing a study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

First, the study does not claim to find a doubling in survival rates for black newborns who have a black attending doctor. Instead, in its most fully specified model, it reports that 99.6839% of black babies born with a black attending physician survived compared with 99.5549% of black babies born with white attending physicians, a difference of 0.129%.

The survival rate of 99.6839% is not double 99.5549%.

The claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians is just plain false. The fact that neither the Association of American Medical Colleges nor Jackson’s clerks could read and properly understand a medical study is an alarming indication for the current state of both medical and legal education.

Second, even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were accurately described, they should not be believed. The study’s comparison of death rates for newborns who have doctors of different races does not take into account the fact that black newborns have a greater likelihood of serious medical complications and the attending physicians assigned to treat those more challenging cases are likely to be white.

For example, the study does control for whether newborns are low weight (less than 2,500 grams), but does not control for whether they are very low weight (less than 1,500 grams). Black newborns are almost three times as likely as white newborns to weigh less than 1,500 grams.

Doctors assigned to treat very low-weight babies are more likely to be specialists, rather than regular pediatricians or family practitioners. Black doctors are significantly less likely to be found in those specialized fields.

More than 5% of pediatricians or family practice physicians are black, compared with 3.8% of neonatologists and pediatric cardiologists, and 1.8% of pediatric surgeons.

Rather than demonstrating the protective benefits of black newborns having black doctors, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study only documents that black newborns are more likely to have severe issues that increase their risk of infant mortality, and those severe cases are more likely to have white attending physicians because white doctors are more prevalent in the specialized fields that treat those complications.

The study provides no convincing evidence on whether black newborns with identical conditions would fare better, worse, or no differently with a black or white doctor.

Oh, dear.  What a mess.  The rest of the article is a more thorough indictment.   Know what you are talking about before you start writing judgements.  This sort of innumeracy is demeaning of the judicial system.