Tag Archives: Yale

How We Talk To People

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On Friday, Hot Air posted an article that a Yale study that proved exactly the opposite of what it was trying to prove.

The article includes the Yale writeup of the study:

New research suggests that bias may also shape daily interactions between racial minorities and white people, even those whites who tend to be less biased.

According to new research by Cydney Dupree, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

…The team found that  The difference wasn’t statistically significant in speeches by Republican candidates, though “it was harder to find speeches from Republicans delivered to minority audiences,” Dupree notes. There was no difference in Democrats’ or Republicans’ usage of words related to warmth. “It was really surprising to see that for nearly three decades, Democratic presidential candidates have been engaging in this predicted behavior.”

In plain English, that says that Democratic candidates talked down to minority audiences and Republican candidates did not. Isn’t that a form of unconscious racism?

The article includes a chart of median income of ethnic groups in America. Please follow the link to see the chart. Average white Americans are not the highest earners in the nation.

The article concludes:

The correlate here is not race, but education. Particularly what kind of education, as the Asian-Americans represented tend to be highly educated with technical skills in high demand. Indian Americans average 80% higher incomes than White Americans. Black immigrants to the United States make $15,000 a year more than American-born Blacks. Race is not the variable that matters.

If liberals really wanted to help minorities who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder, improving our public education system would be the obvious answer. And, of course, there is no institution in America harder to reform than our union-dominated public school system.

It’s easier to accuse conservative Republicans of racism than to fix the schools. Also, if you fix the schools, you might lose the issue as a talking point.

When Politics Overrides Science

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Yesterday Just the News posted an article about some recent statements by Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale and director of that school’s Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory.

The article reports:

Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale as well as the director of that school’s Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory, argues in a Newsweek op-ed this week that “the data fully support” the wide use of hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment of COVID-19. 

“When this inexpensive oral medication is given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control, it has shown to be highly effective,” Risch argues in the column. 

…Risch, at Newsweek, argues that multiple studies over the past several months have demonstrated that the drug is a safe and efficacious treatment method for COVID-19.

Among the successful treatment experiments, he writes, are “an additional 400 high-risk patients treated by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, with zero deaths; four studies totaling almost 500 high-risk patients treated in nursing homes and clinics across the U.S., with no deaths; a controlled trial of more than 700 high-risk patients in Brazil, with significantly reduced risk of hospitalization and two deaths among 334 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine; and another study of 398 matched patients in France, also with significantly reduced hospitalization risk.”

The media’s portrayal of this drug (which was approved for medical use in the United States in 1955 has been commonly used to treat arthritis, lupus, and certain types of malaria) has been almost entirely negative. It should be noted that the drug costs about 60¢ a pill. Some of the other drugs pharmacy companies are recommending to treat the coronavirus cost as much as $6,000 a pill. You don’t suppose there might be a financial as well as a political aspect to the objections to hydroxychloroquine.

The article concludes:

Risch says the drug is most effective “when given very early in the course of illness, before the virus has had time to multiply beyond control.”

Though according to Risch the benefits of the drug are clear, he nevertheless concedes that the subject “has become highly politicized.”

“For many, it is viewed as a marker of political identity, on both sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “Nobody needs me to remind them that this is not how medicine should proceed.”

He also argues that “the drug has not been used properly in many studies,” and that delays in administering the drug have reduced its effectiveness. 

“In the future,” Risch says in the column, “I believe this misbegotten episode regarding hydroxychloroquine will be studied by sociologists of medicine as a classic example of how extra-scientific factors overrode clear-cut medical evidence.”

“But for now,” he adds, “reality demands a clear, scientific eye on the evidence and where it points.”

Some objectivity on the part of the media would be nice.