Tuesday's Times contains a story that reports on the work of two researchers, a Penn professor and a Cornell grad student, in demonstrating through statistical analyses a pervasive racial bias in the calling of fouls by officials in NBA games. The story contains passages that do a good job of explaining the strategy of the study to lay readers, such as the following one:
With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.
Furthermore, the
Times submitted the study to a panel of three experts, all of whom found the research to be sound.
Why, then, did the authors of the
Times story pad it with !@#%ing irrelevancies?
They cite two current players, both African American, noting that
each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently.
The authors also note that
Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims.
Hello?!? The point of the study -- as one of the experts solicited by the
Times, Ian Ayres of the Yale Law School, notes -- is that it is reflective of
a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.
Given this fact, it's little wonder that such trends would be invisible to casual observers ... and it should be obvious to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with critical thinking skills that such trends could only be established through sound statistical analysis. Furthermore, it should be equally obvious that the anecdotal reports of a few players or coaches in the NBA, whether African American or not, is not probative in the slightest. Indeed, such reports have no informational value at all.
The level of innumeracy and absence of critical acuity demonstrated by the
Times in including this sort of irrelevant information in such stories is appalling -- almost as appalling as the fact that they were out-thought by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who displayed eminent good sense in noting that
We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.
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