“We rationed medical care based on race, excluding elderly Whites from needed care based purely on race, and now they don’t trust us as an establishment.”
Really? — being racist to people makes them distrust you?
If only people had been screaming racism is wrong for decades — maybe even the same political party who advocated for race-based privilege in medicine.
And people wonder why anti-intellectualism is on the rise...
What do you expect when your "experts" spend their time on nonsense like this?
Can't even count how many "science has proven white people are racist" papers I have seen over the past few years. Ofcourse there is no alternative perspective, because that would get you fired at a university.
People are becoming more intellectual across a wider range of society — driven partly by how effective the internet is.
What I see as precipitating this distrust in institutions is that people on average are more connected and more engaged and reading more information. So we see the fallout as parents getting engaged, informed, and organized to protest CRT; or young men getting engaged, informed, and organized over the heart problems caused by the second dose of certain vaccines. Which is why the response has been to censor community platforms like Discord, in an attempt to regulate the information flow.
This is the debt of our intellectuals systemically lying to us, eg the persistent denials of CRT praxis or attempts to hide Pfizer clinical data, which shows the second dose causes elevated risk to the heart for young men.
What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy.
> What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy.
When you get to this point that there's just this big lying orthodoxy instead of complicated interactions, goals, realities, and that orthodox institutions like the NIH, Harvard, FCC, FDA, etc. are all just lying or something you throw the entire house out with the bath water. I see this in people who are inclined to believe conspiracies and those who are religious. There's always some "entity" that's "doing something" and we must "oppose/believe/support" that entity. It's a fear reflex that you're not in control. The list of entities is huge. CIA. "Wall Street" "Hedge Funds" "The Deep State" "Them" "The Other" "Liberals" "Moon landings" "Fauci" "FEMA". This is actually a strain of anti-intellectualism. You're not intellectual or empowered, you're just wrong.
I do think people feel more empowered to be informed but we definitely have not developed enough social skepticism and responsibility. This is evident by people watching pundits like Tucker Carlson talk about US bioweapons labs and "believing" that this somehow matters even if it were completely true. You yourself make a clear example of this with your "heart problems" assertion, without the proper context about the risk of catching COVID, long-term health effects caused by COVID, etc. It's dishonesty couched in intellectualism.
Let's do a simple exercise. Exactly how many people have died from heart problems caused by the second dose of "certain" vaccines?
Meanwhile, the worst case in America is around a million excess deaths have occured due to COVID-19. Don't believe those "liberal" numbers? Ok. 10% of that number. 100k people. Compared to... how many have these so-called heart problems? You are completely failing at understanding risk and cost-benefit analysis. Completely.
I have a very negative reaction to your post here because it's cynical and sinister and whether intentionally or not it undermines everything we have with no discernible benefit. The logical conclusion of your comments is something akin to burning down Harvard and the NIH and the SEC and replacing them with nothing and then pretending you are somehow "empowered" and "intellectual". You're not. All you've done is destroyed everything.
I think both you and the parent are both probably correct (from a US perspective) to varying degrees. There is less trust in institutions because information is more quickly and widely disseminated. Thus we more often see through attempts at dissembling and manipulation by large institutions (e.g. government, universities, corporations, etc.) that would have been quietly covered up in an earlier age.
Simultaneously, some of our institutions are becoming increasingly invested in identity-based politics and more prone to intolerance and silencing dissent which breeds another layer of distrust and resentment.
I was a big mask wearer from the start. The baloney about N95's not working for some reason against THIS airborne hazard (with lots of great evidence of efficacy against other airborne viruses) was ridiculous.
The other issue - despite the case rates / volume of data that SHOULD be publically available, these scientists WILL NOT quantify stuff numerically.
Fatality rate risk by age / gender / race tables should be trivial to pull up for the US. Add in vaccine status once you have it. With the number of cases / size of data / money spent it's just crazy.
Same thing with vaccine efficacy against variants. The math on these things should be pretty straightforward. Look at fatalities from covid, ask if they were vaccinated, publish some numbers. Just backwards looking at rates by county I wasn't seeing huge differences with some variants.
However, there's nothing trivial about collecting and validating all this information. The US has thousands of individual healthcare providers across the country that all have to coordinate to produce it. Also remember that the numbers might be unflattering for certain government leaders who've taken the pandemic less seriously. Florida was particularly notorious in trying to suppress Covid data [0].
We have more fitness equipment and awareness than ever, our athletes go further - and yet - we are fatter and more sedentary.
We have the opportunity to be more intellectual, and many are, but on the whole, we also are a bit busy and are predisposed to consume information 24/7 which is misrepresented (and almost all of it is, some of it more than others).
So on the whole, I think it's a lot easier for sources of misinformation to propagate more widely.
I suggest that the anti-vaxx movement is an example of this. More 'bad information' propagated than 'reasonable information' and so you have a lot of reasonably intelligent people being misguided.
Disinformation is really easy and cheap and it's nary impossible to undo.
All you need is someone with an ounce of credibility (like a Dr. or 'Kennedy' family member), and a kernel of truth (i.e. vaccines actually do some harm, we know that) and poof - you can blow up any material reality.
The 'Big Lie' about the elections similarly.
It's a really big deal, and I don't think we have any obvious solutions.
I agree with this. Distrust in institutions can come from increased sophistication, although the institutions themselves may not see it that way.
This can be true even when institutions are generally correct, and giving reasonable advice... but are simplifying or glossing over true complexities, because they don't think the public is capable of any nuance or reasoning. They don't think that people are capable of understanding something like 'masks can reduce spread in certain circumstances, and have little effect in these other circumstances', and so hammer an obviously simplified rule in every press release, as if they are hawking a product.
In some sense it probably works, as does most marketing, but it comes with a growing feeling of distrust.
Maybe because people buy nonsense opinion pieces that twist the truth to try and imply experts spend their time on nonsense as described?
What actually happened, if you read the sources, is a Catholic healthcare company set some wrong parameters when deciding who should get the treatment. No "woke left" racism against white people, a Catholic company that actively protests contraceptive use (about as far from "woke" as you can get) messed up, and then changed it as soon as someone pointed it out.
Respectfully, no, you're the one who's been misinformed here. The Atlantic article describes a large number of independent organizations doing this, including at least three state health departments in Minnesota, Utah, and New York. New York in particular didn't change this even after it was pointed out, and still has published guidance (https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/system/files/documents/202...) that "Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity" should be considered a risk factor for prioritization purposes.
Except the examples they give of absurdly high weighting are from the case I mentioned.
It being a factor is not unreasonable, there are lots of risk factors for diseases and race is often one of them, clearly for COVID-19 age is an extremely important one. Plenty of diseases are much more common for certain races—it's imperfect as all indicators are, but that's hardly a new or unique problem.
> Minnesota’s Department of Health used a scoring calculator that counted “BIPOC status” as equivalent to being 65 years and older in its risk assessment.
That seems like an absurdly high weighting, and is from the article and is not from the specific case you mentioned.
Well, what's reasonable? As my hardline progressive friends have pointed out to me, conventional medical practice employs racial triage in all sorts of contexts (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/take-racism-out-o..., although I don't agree with 100% of their analysis), so you're right that this isn't new or unique. But it's a big problem despite being old! If you went to your doctor for a sinus infection, and she held up a little skin color chart to decide whether you're allowed to have antibiotics, nobody would struggle to identify that as unacceptable even if you had unimpeachable studies showing racial disparities in sinus infection rates.
When we don't have enough of a treatment, we have to prioritise somehow. Are you arguing it was wrong to prioritise older people for the vaccine, for example?
If you think that the metrics they are using are bad, make the case, but arguing that race should never be a factor is absurd when we know there are lots of cases where race massively changes your odds, just as with age. How much time and money that could be spent just producing more treatment is it justified to spend trying to make sure the exact people get the treatment?
Maybe we can do better, but it being just racism against white people to ever take race as a factor is an absurd characterisation of that.
No. In State of New York being a person of colour is effectively a 'primary condition' towards the calculation regarding distribution of the more expensive antiviral therapies.
On the same level as 'not having had a vaccine'.
If you have had a vaccine, then you need to be 65+ and in very bad shape to get the antivirals.
Without the vaccine you need to be a 'person of colour' or have several seriously mitigating factors, like Diabetes, Cancer etc..
Especially since there is actually no apparent physiological difference between racial response to COVID, and that it seems to be entirely 'health' related ... it's really bad.
It's one thing to save the antivirals for those in 'really bad shape' - fine - but just define what that is, and don't use race as a crude proxy for it.
While I think the study that is posted here is perfectly reasonable, and discusses mostly issues of perception, the racial approach to rationing healthcare services is worth of discussion and much more. I'm surprised it has not gone to the Supreme Court.
We're 100% on the path to the Courts on this, and unless it comes out reasonable, there is going to be some serious existential problems in the Western World over this.
The assumption is that the median person of color has poorer access to healthcare (go visit Jackson Park Hospital in Chicago if you don’t believe me) and moreover the Neanderthal genes in South Asians do predict worse COVID outcomes.
Yes I fully accept that Race is a crude proxy for access to healthcare.
Also, Neanderthal genes are mostly Europe, not 'South Asian' - and even if there were some medically material issue, that's not what they are doing i.e. it's just all 'people of colour'.
There are probably just as many White people who've had limited access to healthcare. Obviously, that still implies 'disproportionately bad' for Blacks, but nevertheless, large cohorts of others aka Whites.
And so the policy is just unfair.
I think it's better to give people a questionnaire about their medical history and go from there.
In fact, I believe there's a 100% chance you could more readily identify those in need with just a few questions and measurements.
Literally BMI, age, smoker, pre-existing conditions, status of healthcare insurance for the last few years, cholesterol, blood pressure and couple of very simple questions.
Fill out that form, put it in the computer and it gives you back a score of 1-5 on the priority list for the local Hospital.
I'll bet with just that data they could arrive at something considerably more accurate.
New York isn't getting rid of their policy because it is medically defensible:
- COVID-19 is known to harm people with certain chronic illnesses (e.g. diabetes) far worse than the general population
- There are subsets of the population which are far more likely to not treat or even detect these illnesses
- For various socioeconomic reasons that subset happens to correlate very well with race
- Ergo, we can assume race as a risk factor for those diseases, and thus a risk factor for COVID-19
Almost all of the opposition I've seen to this policy has been on political grounds, not scientific ones. i.e. people who aren't aware of the racial disparity in COVID-19[0] arguing that this policy constitutes "reverse racism"[1], rather than arguing that the scientific basis for the policy is wrong. My assumption is that most of the outrage is from people who aren't paying attention and want to air grievances about whatever left-wing cultural thing they don't understand.
Knowing most of the facts (or at least, what I can reasonably presume to be facts), I can say that this policy is "tolerable" iff it actually works to effectively ration care based on need. This is the sort of thing that needs careful, periodic review and revision, not knee-jerk reactions that just make everyone involved circle their political wagons.
[0] Or have selectively forgotten about it, through the same mechanism as the purported Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
[1] More generally: most complaints of "reverse racism" do not attempt to actually argue against a particular policy choice (e.g. affirmative action, progressive stack, antiracism etc), but make moral arguments about how racially-aware policies are facially immoral in any set of circumstances.
This is true of literally all indicators. Should we also not prioritise on age because we could in theory isolate a ton of age-related factors that are comorbid with COVID-19?
Where to draw the line is a hard question, maybe we can do better, I agree there should be more visibility and oversight on these things (just like with algorithmic sentencing and so on), but that doesn't make any use of race as a factor anti-white racism.
> - For various socioeconomic reasons that subset happens to correlate very well with race
> - Ergo, we can assume race as a risk factor for those diseases, and thus a risk factor for COVID-19
So race isn't really a risk factor but rather an imperfect proxy for an actual risk factor (lack of access to healthcare). So why not address the genuine risk factor on the questionnaire? It's simple enough to ask the patient questions like:
- Do you have a family doctor?
- When was your last physical, blood work, etc?
- In the last five years, have you skipped or delayed medical treatment due to cost?
> [1] More generally: most complaints of "reverse racism" do not attempt to actually argue against a particular policy choice (e.g. affirmative action, progressive stack, antiracism etc), but make moral arguments about how racially-aware policies are facially immoral in any set of circumstances.
Even boomers stopped using the term "reverse racism" years ago, discrimination based on race is racism, full stop.
I can just lie and say I've never been to a doctor to get ahead in line, but lying about your race is more difficult.
That being said, I don't know if this was the actual reason for not considering prior medical history instead of racial proxies for such. Most rationing schemes aren't that particularly well thought-out. More likely what happened is that when this scheme was being figured out, someone mentioned racial disparities in healthcare, everyone else agreed that it was a good idea to consider that a risk factor, and that was that.
I didn't realize that all of a sudden, the primary overriding concern of Americans (and white Americans in particular) is total equality of access to medicine.
I'm assuming all of these concerned people will now be lobbying hard for single payer, and we'll see it on both party ballots in 2024?
Not sure if that was an attempt at a steelman or a strawman, but I think you are missing critical distinctions for the group that you are addressing.
People, in general, don't enjoy when powerful monopolistic entities directly ration access to goods & services based on immutable characteristics such as race. Groups not receiving the positive discrimination experience by said powerful entities will of course be frustrated.
My read is the exact opposite on the group you are addressing: I would not expect the concerned people to be lobbying hard for single payer. Why would they want to give more power to an entity that shows it's willing to discriminate based on immutable characteristics such as race?
Ah, but rationing based on mutable characteristics, like how much money and access to professional opportunities that your parents were born with, and whether or not you grew up in a broken home[1], or whether you grew up in a redlined apartment with lead dust peeling off the walls is fine?
[1] Because dad's in prison for a crime that the right kind of people get community service for. And he wasn't the right kind of person.
I'm sensing a theme here in creating strawmen. My advice to you would be attempt to steelman opposing views. Attempt to find synthesis between your initial notions and the best parts of the opposing views.
To answer you question at a high-level: Rationing based on things people have ZERO control over seems worse to me than rationing based on things people have SOME (even if a little) control over.
And there of course will be a litany of hypothetical/real scenarios that we could drum up for each rationing strategy that shows people losing out (it's rationing, no matter what some people will not end up with access!). And highlighting one side of the costs doesn't immediately mean that the other side isn't more ethical.
> People, in general, don't enjoy when powerful monopolistic entities directly ration access to goods & services based on immutable characteristics such as race.
How would you describe current health insurance systems?
I'm not sure that I'm the authority on describing current health insurance systems, and if I attempted to describe it here, I'm not sure if I would stand by it completely upon further investigation and reflection. My understanding is fuzzy.
If I were to read between the lines of your question, I can guess the direction you would want to go with this. My response (and you can treat this rhetorically) for that direction would be:
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'direct' vs 'indirect'?
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'rationing'?
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'immutable'?
-Are 'policies' and 'effects of policies' distinguishable concepts?
-Does 'cause' differ from 'effect' with your understanding of the concepts?
-Do humans have any control (i.e. free will) over their lives?
I'd simply further: people don't enjoy rationing of goods and services.
Inherently if there is more demand for services than there is capacity to provide them, then somebody is going to be left out. And there's a pretty good chance that they'll think the system is unfairly rigged against them, either individually or as a group.
I think you hit the nail on the head. My governor appeared to be bending over backwards to vaccinate minority neighborhoods while at the same time it was incredibly hard for people with qualifying conditions to get a vaccine. This anecdote isn't the same as rigorous data, but it doesn't appear to matter to the people in my life who it impacted. Their trust in the government has been shattered.
Details of how people highlight and act on Covid racial disparities in practice seems like important context for interpreting a scientific article about the potential effects of doing so.
This feels like you read the headline and didn't even read the conclusion, and are just injecting another issue.
This paper suggests when told that there are racial health disparities, white people felt less worried about it (as they felt less at risk), and so rejected control measures more.
To take the bait a little and address the article you linked, calling a Catholic healthcare company that is actively against contraception the "woke left" pushing race-based treatment (that company claims they used an outdated set of metrics by mistake and changed it as soon as it was noted) is clearly a massive stretch to reach a conclusion the author wants.
Looks to me like one (very conservative) company made a bad decision about how to judge need for a treatment, not some left-wing woke conspiracy to deny white people healthcare.
I brought up a second topic related to the first — the impact of the medical establishment focusing on racial disparities during COVID.
I felt it was topical because the heavy focus on racial disparities led to other outcomes which also impacted the same ethnic group’s perception of events.
If the context had been black perception of the same events, then I would have posted an editorial about how mandates caused distrust and comparisons to previous experiments on ethnic minorities. But that wasn’t topical this time.
It's very clear to me, clicking through to sources, the author came into that piece with a conclusion and worked back to the data from their.
The case they cite was instantly changed when pointed out, and the company said it was a mistake. This is a valid complaint to have, the way formulas and algorithms are applied (often opaquely) to important aspects of our lives is a real concern we should deal with, not just because of the potential for mistakes like this.
Jumping from that to "the woke left want to deny white people healthcare" is more than an astronomic leap, when citing a mistake by a Catholic healthcare company that objects to providing contraceptives. I don't think blaming that on the "woke" crowd holds up to any scrutiny.
The definition of racism until very recently was basically identical to “racial prejudice”.
The alternative definition that requires systematic power over another group is a very recent and not the definition most commonly used by the general public now or historically, and by the way not even by highly educated people in universities in the past.
The connection of that word with systematic power developed in the 1980s and beyond. That new definition is convenient for some people because it means that for example what would clearly have been racism by the old definition is not, when applied to the majority group using the new definition. This new definition is being taught to university students and lately even earlier than that. It has changed a neutral definition of racism that meant exactly “racial prejudice”, to one that is more useful for certain social aims of its proponents.
Madness has driven us to this point, where instead of being colorblind we assign importance to race in every single thing that happens. Ironically those who spend their days and nights fighting racism have become the ultimate racists - As Nietzsche predicted they would long ago.
Ok - we are definitely at a 'bad point' wherein we intersectionalize everything ... but this is not an example of that.
This is classical stuff: 'the other group is getting the disease, so we should worry less about it' has probably held true since time immemorial.
This is just a study, I don't think it's even 'anti racism' really it's just about studying awareness.
By 'woke flinching' (i.e. assuming malign orientation by those promoting progressive issues) on every issue, than we can fall into the cynical trap and just ignore material issues, which is bad.
This is nonsensical. Caring about disparate mortality rates doesn’t make you the “ultimate racist”, and trying to frame white Americans attitudes as the fault of people willing to speak about the issues they see is just a cynical attempt at trying to justify their preexisting prejudices.
> We propose that describing COVID-19 as disproportionately impacting people of color may lessen White U.S. residents' concerns about COVID-19.
This does not seem controversial, if true. It seems, simply, that affluent (mostly white) people would make the not-far-leap that COVID-19 was a problem for the poor and working class (mostly people of color). This, in fact, hasn't actually been far from the truth for portions of the pandemic.
I agree. This seems identical to AIDS mitigations losing support from the heterosexual community once it became evident that it highly disproportionately targets homosexuals. People will naturally be most concerned with what affects them personally and specifically.
There was a LOT of push back in the scientific community regarding the risks of HIV by demographic with a ton of efforts to try to communicate it was a major risk equally for all.
I think this was similar in some ways to claims that things like N95 masks helped more (initially called disinformation by my local health department).
In these cases while there may be laudable larger public health goals, I do worry it impacts credibility a bit?
What is the actual risk of death for a 5 year old for example from covid? Do we have hard numbers? Mental health impacts, obesity, drownings, accidents, family abuse issues / foster care / divorce / single parent households / various mood and behavioral disorders?. I'm kind of curious about where COVID falls in spectrum of childhood risks.
We probably won't know for a while. We can see death/ no death right up front but it seems to be pretty savage with organs. And then you have long covid, which seems to clear up at some point but we'll be waiting a while to see what the long term affects are.
We don't have hard numbers and even keeping track of cases and deaths was a bit scatter shot.
I’ve had this talk a lot with my sisters, who both have young children. Lack of good information is paralyzing when you’re trying to do right by your kids. Their view is that while the risk of death looks to be low for their kids, they’re more concerned about the long-term developmental effects COVID could have. My sister lost her hearing after a bad illness as a child. The last thing either of them wants is for something similar to happen to their kids. Fortunately they’re both in positions where keeping the kids at home throughout the pandemic wasn’t much trouble. And now that the whole crew is vaccinated, they’re far less concerned.
>There was a LOT of push back in the scientific community regarding the risks of HIV by demographic with a ton of efforts to try to communicate it was a major risk equally for all.
Except HIV was not and never has been an equal risk to all, not even close. Which I think was their point.
This statement is factually wrong. I'll hope that in correcting it maybe some readers on HN can help learn about this common misunderstanding, and it's important ramifications for understanding the often demonized white working class.
The working class is not even remotely "mostly people of color". The most recent data I could quickly find (from https://talkpoverty.org/basics/) shows that there are 15.9 million white Americans in poverty compared to 8.5 million Black people. Poverty rates among Black Americans are far higher than among white Americans, but in absolute numbers there are roughly twice as many poor and working class whites. In a similar dynamic, there are far more poor whites than there are rich whites.
This creates the essential conflict when we use race instead of socioeconomic class or income. Instead of creating programs and policies to help the poor, we create programs and policies to help people on the basis of race. Those unfortunate 16,000,000 poor white citizens get double-excluded and then scorned as racists when they distrust a system that so clearly harms them.
The story here isn't that these people are racists, the story is that people are being harmed by a system that focuses on race instead of need.
> shows that there are 15.9 million white Americans in poverty compared to 8.5 million Black people.
That is insane! Consider that black people make up 12% of the USA's population while white people make up 76%. I didn't think the wealth disparity between white and black people was that bad in the USA, are you sure those numbers are accurate?
Untrue - the talkpoverty.org page being referred to distinguishes white and Hispanic, but non-Hispanic whites make up only 57.8% of the US. It was 75.6% in 1990, but their share has been dropping fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
Furthermore, while that page provides poverty rates for all sorts of groups, it somehow missed men (10.6% vs 12.9% for women) and Asians (10.1%, same as the white rate), according to https://www.povertyusa.org/facts (I assume the small difference is due to povertyusa.org using older data, from 2018)
The original number didn't distinguish between Hispanic or non-Hispanic whites, I assume you aren't counting Hispanic as a race? Assuming the 15.9 million includes poor white hispanics, that makes the disparity even more astonishing.
> The original number didn't distinguish between Hispanic or non-Hispanic whites
Are you referring to the figures on https://talkpoverty.org/basics/? Under the white poverty rate, it clearly says: "Percentage of non-Hispanic whites who fell below the poverty line in 2020"
This is a common theme over at /r/HermainCainAward. At first, Covid was seen as a threat similar to Bird Flu but even graver with the news from Italy and China. Then, as the Trump administration started to downplay mitigating actions due to possibly affecting the election, Covid denialism started to become a conservative in-group signifier. Shortly aftewards, reports came out about Covid disproportionately affecting communities of color and Democrat heavy areas which sealed the deal. From that point on, any conservative seeking to remain relevant had to get behind covid denialism in all forms because the virus was initially seen as hurting the "right people".
One thing when I looked at the data. Despite the hype / orthodoxy on the left about blacks and hispanics being the ones getting / dying from covid (disproportionate effect). The actual differences were not that large.
"Black people make up a similar share of cases relative to their share of the population (13%), but account for a slightly higher share of deaths compared to their population share (14% vs. 13%). This pattern has been consistent since October 2021."
So yes, disproportionate to a degree, but I feel the messaging ran away with this racial disparity angle. This was a fact changing virus, and spread was not even by community. In other words, asian community may have been hit hard early? But now has a pretty low rate?
Right, I thought it laid that call stack out well, even though my own view is elderly, overweight WHITE americans were actually at some real risk despite the positioning going on.
Talk about burying the lede.
At $2.50 over the Internet you don’t get a survey of “white U.S. adults”, you get a unique subset of that population at best.
The headline and conclusions are grossly misleading in that they generalize from mechanical turkers to the population at large.
The key is that the first and last letter of each word are in their original positions, which is what makes it easy for the person to decipher the text.
Another reason that race is a poor proxy for serious discussions about class inequality, food deserts, obesity in poor communities, covid and obesity, sugar policies, etc…
This is meta and nonscientific but if you just search for the word 'racial' on HN, there seems to be a relatively higher proportion of posts where there are more comments than points. Way more so at least than 'politics' or 'covid'.
The crowd here seems usually pretty split left and right, even if it skews in general towards various forms of libertarianism. Why do we think that studies and discussions about race are fundamentally more controversial? It seems like when we are discussing the long term consequences and effects of enslaving an entire race not 200 years ago, we should all share some humanity about it, whether you want socialism or less government. I don't know if I can account for this disparity in the current political miliue, what is it then about HN and race? Is it just something about these discussions that are particularly irksome to libertarian types? If so, why?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadhttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/race-based...
Really? — being racist to people makes them distrust you?
If only people had been screaming racism is wrong for decades — maybe even the same political party who advocated for race-based privilege in medicine.
What do you expect when your "experts" spend their time on nonsense like this?
Can't even count how many "science has proven white people are racist" papers I have seen over the past few years. Ofcourse there is no alternative perspective, because that would get you fired at a university.
People are becoming more intellectual across a wider range of society — driven partly by how effective the internet is.
What I see as precipitating this distrust in institutions is that people on average are more connected and more engaged and reading more information. So we see the fallout as parents getting engaged, informed, and organized to protest CRT; or young men getting engaged, informed, and organized over the heart problems caused by the second dose of certain vaccines. Which is why the response has been to censor community platforms like Discord, in an attempt to regulate the information flow.
This is the debt of our intellectuals systemically lying to us, eg the persistent denials of CRT praxis or attempts to hide Pfizer clinical data, which shows the second dose causes elevated risk to the heart for young men.
What we’re seeing isn’t anti-intellectualism, but pro-intellectualism challenge a lying orthodoxy.
When you get to this point that there's just this big lying orthodoxy instead of complicated interactions, goals, realities, and that orthodox institutions like the NIH, Harvard, FCC, FDA, etc. are all just lying or something you throw the entire house out with the bath water. I see this in people who are inclined to believe conspiracies and those who are religious. There's always some "entity" that's "doing something" and we must "oppose/believe/support" that entity. It's a fear reflex that you're not in control. The list of entities is huge. CIA. "Wall Street" "Hedge Funds" "The Deep State" "Them" "The Other" "Liberals" "Moon landings" "Fauci" "FEMA". This is actually a strain of anti-intellectualism. You're not intellectual or empowered, you're just wrong.
I do think people feel more empowered to be informed but we definitely have not developed enough social skepticism and responsibility. This is evident by people watching pundits like Tucker Carlson talk about US bioweapons labs and "believing" that this somehow matters even if it were completely true. You yourself make a clear example of this with your "heart problems" assertion, without the proper context about the risk of catching COVID, long-term health effects caused by COVID, etc. It's dishonesty couched in intellectualism.
Let's do a simple exercise. Exactly how many people have died from heart problems caused by the second dose of "certain" vaccines?
Meanwhile, the worst case in America is around a million excess deaths have occured due to COVID-19. Don't believe those "liberal" numbers? Ok. 10% of that number. 100k people. Compared to... how many have these so-called heart problems? You are completely failing at understanding risk and cost-benefit analysis. Completely.
I have a very negative reaction to your post here because it's cynical and sinister and whether intentionally or not it undermines everything we have with no discernible benefit. The logical conclusion of your comments is something akin to burning down Harvard and the NIH and the SEC and replacing them with nothing and then pretending you are somehow "empowered" and "intellectual". You're not. All you've done is destroyed everything.
Simultaneously, some of our institutions are becoming increasingly invested in identity-based politics and more prone to intolerance and silencing dissent which breeds another layer of distrust and resentment.
I was a big mask wearer from the start. The baloney about N95's not working for some reason against THIS airborne hazard (with lots of great evidence of efficacy against other airborne viruses) was ridiculous.
The other issue - despite the case rates / volume of data that SHOULD be publically available, these scientists WILL NOT quantify stuff numerically.
Fatality rate risk by age / gender / race tables should be trivial to pull up for the US. Add in vaccine status once you have it. With the number of cases / size of data / money spent it's just crazy.
Same thing with vaccine efficacy against variants. The math on these things should be pretty straightforward. Look at fatalities from covid, ask if they were vaccinated, publish some numbers. Just backwards looking at rates by county I wasn't seeing huge differences with some variants.
However, there's nothing trivial about collecting and validating all this information. The US has thousands of individual healthcare providers across the country that all have to coordinate to produce it. Also remember that the numbers might be unflattering for certain government leaders who've taken the pandemic less seriously. Florida was particularly notorious in trying to suppress Covid data [0].
[0]: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/584909-university-o...
There is some weird sensitivity to even releasing age banded rates on a consistent basis. This makes me skeptical of the reporting here.
We have more fitness equipment and awareness than ever, our athletes go further - and yet - we are fatter and more sedentary.
We have the opportunity to be more intellectual, and many are, but on the whole, we also are a bit busy and are predisposed to consume information 24/7 which is misrepresented (and almost all of it is, some of it more than others).
So on the whole, I think it's a lot easier for sources of misinformation to propagate more widely.
I suggest that the anti-vaxx movement is an example of this. More 'bad information' propagated than 'reasonable information' and so you have a lot of reasonably intelligent people being misguided.
Disinformation is really easy and cheap and it's nary impossible to undo.
All you need is someone with an ounce of credibility (like a Dr. or 'Kennedy' family member), and a kernel of truth (i.e. vaccines actually do some harm, we know that) and poof - you can blow up any material reality.
The 'Big Lie' about the elections similarly.
It's a really big deal, and I don't think we have any obvious solutions.
This can be true even when institutions are generally correct, and giving reasonable advice... but are simplifying or glossing over true complexities, because they don't think the public is capable of any nuance or reasoning. They don't think that people are capable of understanding something like 'masks can reduce spread in certain circumstances, and have little effect in these other circumstances', and so hammer an obviously simplified rule in every press release, as if they are hawking a product.
In some sense it probably works, as does most marketing, but it comes with a growing feeling of distrust.
What actually happened, if you read the sources, is a Catholic healthcare company set some wrong parameters when deciding who should get the treatment. No "woke left" racism against white people, a Catholic company that actively protests contraceptive use (about as far from "woke" as you can get) messed up, and then changed it as soon as someone pointed it out.
It being a factor is not unreasonable, there are lots of risk factors for diseases and race is often one of them, clearly for COVID-19 age is an extremely important one. Plenty of diseases are much more common for certain races—it's imperfect as all indicators are, but that's hardly a new or unique problem.
That seems like an absurdly high weighting, and is from the article and is not from the specific case you mentioned.
If you think that the metrics they are using are bad, make the case, but arguing that race should never be a factor is absurd when we know there are lots of cases where race massively changes your odds, just as with age. How much time and money that could be spent just producing more treatment is it justified to spend trying to make sure the exact people get the treatment?
Maybe we can do better, but it being just racism against white people to ever take race as a factor is an absurd characterisation of that.
On the same level as 'not having had a vaccine'.
If you have had a vaccine, then you need to be 65+ and in very bad shape to get the antivirals.
Without the vaccine you need to be a 'person of colour' or have several seriously mitigating factors, like Diabetes, Cancer etc..
Especially since there is actually no apparent physiological difference between racial response to COVID, and that it seems to be entirely 'health' related ... it's really bad.
It's one thing to save the antivirals for those in 'really bad shape' - fine - but just define what that is, and don't use race as a crude proxy for it.
While I think the study that is posted here is perfectly reasonable, and discusses mostly issues of perception, the racial approach to rationing healthcare services is worth of discussion and much more. I'm surprised it has not gone to the Supreme Court.
We're 100% on the path to the Courts on this, and unless it comes out reasonable, there is going to be some serious existential problems in the Western World over this.
Also, Neanderthal genes are mostly Europe, not 'South Asian' - and even if there were some medically material issue, that's not what they are doing i.e. it's just all 'people of colour'.
There are probably just as many White people who've had limited access to healthcare. Obviously, that still implies 'disproportionately bad' for Blacks, but nevertheless, large cohorts of others aka Whites.
And so the policy is just unfair.
I think it's better to give people a questionnaire about their medical history and go from there.
In fact, I believe there's a 100% chance you could more readily identify those in need with just a few questions and measurements.
Literally BMI, age, smoker, pre-existing conditions, status of healthcare insurance for the last few years, cholesterol, blood pressure and couple of very simple questions.
Fill out that form, put it in the computer and it gives you back a score of 1-5 on the priority list for the local Hospital.
I'll bet with just that data they could arrive at something considerably more accurate.
- COVID-19 is known to harm people with certain chronic illnesses (e.g. diabetes) far worse than the general population
- There are subsets of the population which are far more likely to not treat or even detect these illnesses
- For various socioeconomic reasons that subset happens to correlate very well with race
- Ergo, we can assume race as a risk factor for those diseases, and thus a risk factor for COVID-19
Almost all of the opposition I've seen to this policy has been on political grounds, not scientific ones. i.e. people who aren't aware of the racial disparity in COVID-19[0] arguing that this policy constitutes "reverse racism"[1], rather than arguing that the scientific basis for the policy is wrong. My assumption is that most of the outrage is from people who aren't paying attention and want to air grievances about whatever left-wing cultural thing they don't understand.
Knowing most of the facts (or at least, what I can reasonably presume to be facts), I can say that this policy is "tolerable" iff it actually works to effectively ration care based on need. This is the sort of thing that needs careful, periodic review and revision, not knee-jerk reactions that just make everyone involved circle their political wagons.
[0] Or have selectively forgotten about it, through the same mechanism as the purported Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
[1] More generally: most complaints of "reverse racism" do not attempt to actually argue against a particular policy choice (e.g. affirmative action, progressive stack, antiracism etc), but make moral arguments about how racially-aware policies are facially immoral in any set of circumstances.
That's an argument for improving detection of these diseases which influence clinical outcomes, not for prioritizing care on the basis of race.
Where to draw the line is a hard question, maybe we can do better, I agree there should be more visibility and oversight on these things (just like with algorithmic sentencing and so on), but that doesn't make any use of race as a factor anti-white racism.
> - Ergo, we can assume race as a risk factor for those diseases, and thus a risk factor for COVID-19
So race isn't really a risk factor but rather an imperfect proxy for an actual risk factor (lack of access to healthcare). So why not address the genuine risk factor on the questionnaire? It's simple enough to ask the patient questions like:
- Do you have a family doctor?
- When was your last physical, blood work, etc?
- In the last five years, have you skipped or delayed medical treatment due to cost?
> [1] More generally: most complaints of "reverse racism" do not attempt to actually argue against a particular policy choice (e.g. affirmative action, progressive stack, antiracism etc), but make moral arguments about how racially-aware policies are facially immoral in any set of circumstances.
Even boomers stopped using the term "reverse racism" years ago, discrimination based on race is racism, full stop.
That being said, I don't know if this was the actual reason for not considering prior medical history instead of racial proxies for such. Most rationing schemes aren't that particularly well thought-out. More likely what happened is that when this scheme was being figured out, someone mentioned racial disparities in healthcare, everyone else agreed that it was a good idea to consider that a risk factor, and that was that.
I'm assuming all of these concerned people will now be lobbying hard for single payer, and we'll see it on both party ballots in 2024?
Or is that a bit too much equality?
People, in general, don't enjoy when powerful monopolistic entities directly ration access to goods & services based on immutable characteristics such as race. Groups not receiving the positive discrimination experience by said powerful entities will of course be frustrated.
My read is the exact opposite on the group you are addressing: I would not expect the concerned people to be lobbying hard for single payer. Why would they want to give more power to an entity that shows it's willing to discriminate based on immutable characteristics such as race?
[1] Because dad's in prison for a crime that the right kind of people get community service for. And he wasn't the right kind of person.
To answer you question at a high-level: Rationing based on things people have ZERO control over seems worse to me than rationing based on things people have SOME (even if a little) control over.
And there of course will be a litany of hypothetical/real scenarios that we could drum up for each rationing strategy that shows people losing out (it's rationing, no matter what some people will not end up with access!). And highlighting one side of the costs doesn't immediately mean that the other side isn't more ethical.
How would you describe current health insurance systems?
If I were to read between the lines of your question, I can guess the direction you would want to go with this. My response (and you can treat this rhetorically) for that direction would be:
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'direct' vs 'indirect'?
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'rationing'?
-What's your understanding of the definition of 'immutable'?
-Are 'policies' and 'effects of policies' distinguishable concepts?
-Does 'cause' differ from 'effect' with your understanding of the concepts?
-Do humans have any control (i.e. free will) over their lives?
Inherently if there is more demand for services than there is capacity to provide them, then somebody is going to be left out. And there's a pretty good chance that they'll think the system is unfairly rigged against them, either individually or as a group.
I'm going to use this argument to try and trick my angry relatives into supporting Obamacare next Thanksgiving.
This paper suggests when told that there are racial health disparities, white people felt less worried about it (as they felt less at risk), and so rejected control measures more.
To take the bait a little and address the article you linked, calling a Catholic healthcare company that is actively against contraception the "woke left" pushing race-based treatment (that company claims they used an outdated set of metrics by mistake and changed it as soon as it was noted) is clearly a massive stretch to reach a conclusion the author wants.
Looks to me like one (very conservative) company made a bad decision about how to judge need for a treatment, not some left-wing woke conspiracy to deny white people healthcare.
I felt it was topical because the heavy focus on racial disparities led to other outcomes which also impacted the same ethnic group’s perception of events.
If the context had been black perception of the same events, then I would have posted an editorial about how mandates caused distrust and comparisons to previous experiments on ethnic minorities. But that wasn’t topical this time.
The case they cite was instantly changed when pointed out, and the company said it was a mistake. This is a valid complaint to have, the way formulas and algorithms are applied (often opaquely) to important aspects of our lives is a real concern we should deal with, not just because of the potential for mistakes like this.
Jumping from that to "the woke left want to deny white people healthcare" is more than an astronomic leap, when citing a mistake by a Catholic healthcare company that objects to providing contraceptives. I don't think blaming that on the "woke" crowd holds up to any scrutiny.
The alternative definition that requires systematic power over another group is a very recent and not the definition most commonly used by the general public now or historically, and by the way not even by highly educated people in universities in the past.
The connection of that word with systematic power developed in the 1980s and beyond. That new definition is convenient for some people because it means that for example what would clearly have been racism by the old definition is not, when applied to the majority group using the new definition. This new definition is being taught to university students and lately even earlier than that. It has changed a neutral definition of racism that meant exactly “racial prejudice”, to one that is more useful for certain social aims of its proponents.
This is classical stuff: 'the other group is getting the disease, so we should worry less about it' has probably held true since time immemorial.
This is just a study, I don't think it's even 'anti racism' really it's just about studying awareness.
By 'woke flinching' (i.e. assuming malign orientation by those promoting progressive issues) on every issue, than we can fall into the cynical trap and just ignore material issues, which is bad.
This study is fine.
> We propose that describing COVID-19 as disproportionately impacting people of color may lessen White U.S. residents' concerns about COVID-19.
This does not seem controversial, if true. It seems, simply, that affluent (mostly white) people would make the not-far-leap that COVID-19 was a problem for the poor and working class (mostly people of color). This, in fact, hasn't actually been far from the truth for portions of the pandemic.
I think this was similar in some ways to claims that things like N95 masks helped more (initially called disinformation by my local health department).
In these cases while there may be laudable larger public health goals, I do worry it impacts credibility a bit?
What is the actual risk of death for a 5 year old for example from covid? Do we have hard numbers? Mental health impacts, obesity, drownings, accidents, family abuse issues / foster care / divorce / single parent households / various mood and behavioral disorders?. I'm kind of curious about where COVID falls in spectrum of childhood risks.
We don't have hard numbers and even keeping track of cases and deaths was a bit scatter shot.
Except HIV was not and never has been an equal risk to all, not even close. Which I think was their point.
> NYT reporter slammed for calling Obama’s 60th birthday party low-risk due to ‘sophisticated, vaccinated crowd’
https://www.yahoo.com/video/nyt-reporter-slammed-calling-oba...
The working class is not even remotely "mostly people of color". The most recent data I could quickly find (from https://talkpoverty.org/basics/) shows that there are 15.9 million white Americans in poverty compared to 8.5 million Black people. Poverty rates among Black Americans are far higher than among white Americans, but in absolute numbers there are roughly twice as many poor and working class whites. In a similar dynamic, there are far more poor whites than there are rich whites.
This creates the essential conflict when we use race instead of socioeconomic class or income. Instead of creating programs and policies to help the poor, we create programs and policies to help people on the basis of race. Those unfortunate 16,000,000 poor white citizens get double-excluded and then scorned as racists when they distrust a system that so clearly harms them.
The story here isn't that these people are racists, the story is that people are being harmed by a system that focuses on race instead of need.
That is insane! Consider that black people make up 12% of the USA's population while white people make up 76%. I didn't think the wealth disparity between white and black people was that bad in the USA, are you sure those numbers are accurate?
Untrue - the talkpoverty.org page being referred to distinguishes white and Hispanic, but non-Hispanic whites make up only 57.8% of the US. It was 75.6% in 1990, but their share has been dropping fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
Furthermore, while that page provides poverty rates for all sorts of groups, it somehow missed men (10.6% vs 12.9% for women) and Asians (10.1%, same as the white rate), according to https://www.povertyusa.org/facts (I assume the small difference is due to povertyusa.org using older data, from 2018)
Are you referring to the figures on https://talkpoverty.org/basics/? Under the white poverty rate, it clearly says: "Percentage of non-Hispanic whites who fell below the poverty line in 2020"
Untrue - the working class is still 57.6% non-Hispanic white, and it won't be minority-white till 2032: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of...
Furthermore, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta..., "Non-Latino whites make up 57.8% of the country's population", so you can't even say that white people are less likely than average to be working class.
One thing when I looked at the data. Despite the hype / orthodoxy on the left about blacks and hispanics being the ones getting / dying from covid (disproportionate effect). The actual differences were not that large.
"Black people make up a similar share of cases relative to their share of the population (13%), but account for a slightly higher share of deaths compared to their population share (14% vs. 13%). This pattern has been consistent since October 2021."
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/covid-1...
So yes, disproportionate to a degree, but I feel the messaging ran away with this racial disparity angle. This was a fact changing virus, and spread was not even by community. In other words, asian community may have been hit hard early? But now has a pretty low rate?
It doesn't really add anything to the discussion; the comment boils down to "conservatives bad".
TIL that scientific studies use Mechanical Turk.
>Quality Control Questions
>If I hvae trihty ehgit coayrns and I gvae aawy evelen how mnay coayrns wulod I hvae?
>Waht motnh cemos aetfr dcemebr but bferoe fberruay?
Link...https://osf.io/fksqj/?view_only=c8155ae67c7640189efcefeb6c8a...
https://osf.io/4cvbt/?view_only=c8155ae67c7640189efcefeb6c8a...
The crowd here seems usually pretty split left and right, even if it skews in general towards various forms of libertarianism. Why do we think that studies and discussions about race are fundamentally more controversial? It seems like when we are discussing the long term consequences and effects of enslaving an entire race not 200 years ago, we should all share some humanity about it, whether you want socialism or less government. I don't know if I can account for this disparity in the current political miliue, what is it then about HN and race? Is it just something about these discussions that are particularly irksome to libertarian types? If so, why?