Weinberger, Naftali (2022) The Insufficiency of Statistics for Detecting Racial Discrimination by Police. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

Benchmark tests are widely employed in testing for racial discrimination by police. Neil and Winship (2019) correctly point out that the use of such tests is threatened by the phenomenon of Simpson’s paradox. Nevertheless, they avoid giving a causal analysis of the paradox, and as a result
cannot adequately account for the relationship between statistical quantities and discrimination hypotheses. Simpson’s paradox reveals that the statistics employed in benchmark tests will not, in general, be invariant to updating on new information. I argue that as a result of this, benchmark statistics should not by themselves be taken to provide any evidence for or against discrimination,
absent additional modeling assumptions. Neil and Winship highlight ways in which benchmark statistics that appear to provide evidence for discrimination no longer do so given additional assumptions, but they lack an account of which sets of assumptions would ensure invariance. Causal models provide such an account. This motivates the use of causal models when using statistical methods as evidence for discrimination.

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Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Weinberger, Naftali naftali.weinberger@gmail.com
Keywords:	Causation; Discrimination; Modeling; Simpson's Paradox; Evidence
Subjects:	General Issues > Data General Issues > Causation General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Science and Policy Specific Sciences > Sociology
Depositing User:	Mr. Naftali Weinberger
Date Deposited:	17 Oct 2022 17:06
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2022 17:06
Item ID:	21276
Subjects:	General Issues > Data General Issues > Causation General Issues > Ethical Issues General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Science and Policy Specific Sciences > Sociology
Date:	2022
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/21276

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• The Insufficiency of Statistics for Detecting Racial Discrimination by Police. (deposited 17 Oct 2022 17:06) [Currently Displayed]
  • The Insufficiency of Statistics for Detecting Racial Discrimination by Police. (deposited 17 Jul 2023 13:37)

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