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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32809 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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If you check the raw emails you can also see someone warned them about controlling for birth weight but they ignored the warning.

https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/U-MN-FOIA-concordance.pdf

I was talking with a health economist about it & he asked 2 questions.

...

[2] When discussing possible mechanisms, he asked whether there is an effect on birth weight (and I would add gestational age). I said that this is conditional on the hospital stay when giving birth, so there's not much scope for affecting these at that point. He suspected that the patient-physician relationships might pre-date birth and we might see a legitimate good effect on it. Alternatively, seeing nothing could be interpreted as evidence against selection, a placebo. These competing interpretations make it a bit dicey.

[2] We do have controls for low weight and early term in the estimations. Do you want me to split based on these?

[2] No. The idea would be to use them as outcomes, rather than controls. But I'm not sure we want to go down that road. It could be a mechanism but it requires that the baby's doctor (not the mom's) exert some influence during the pregnancy. Given that we think the mother's doctor is more important prenatally than the baby's, it would be more informative if we could see the effect of mother's doctor race on child birth weight and gestation. But this is not possible, I think.

Yeah the Meddit thread goes into some of this and that's a very sympathetic audience going.....oh my.

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