Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ggdG 1164 days ago
>Yes, and that retraction was itself political in nature:

>https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cited-their-study-so-they-dis...

Indeed. The chronology is important:

1. Cesario et al [1] received some criticism [2], but they stood by their findings [3]

2. A student union / twitter mob was not happy with the findings of the study [4]

3. The resulting political pressure led to the ousting of Stephen Hsu from MSU, who had approved the funding for the study [5]

4. Only then retracted Cesario et al their study, while still standing by their findings [6]

______

There is a similar study done by economist Roland Fryer [7], while at Harvard.

Summarized, the two studies find the following:

Cesario et al:

Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being killed by police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.

Fryer:

- Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being the target of police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.

- Per interaction with the police, a black civilian is 1.5x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 1)

- Per interaction with the police, a perfectly compliant black civilian is 1.2x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a perfectly compliant white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 5)

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1903856116

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919418117

[3] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1920184117

[4] https://twitter.com/gradempunion/status/1270829004157849600

[5] https://lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2020/06/19/msu-vp...

[6] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2004734117

[7] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...

1 comments

Wow, this is really interesting. Per interaction is doing a lot of work here. Perfectly compliant seems pretty flexible as well.