Abandoned and Set Adrift

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking is really hard. After a long day of work and then expending energy maintaining relationships, my body, and my home - I don’t always have much left to do the research necessary to form sensible, well-informed opinions about topics that I feel are important.

Health-care, police violence, taxation, welfare, immigration, and the list goes on - I have intuitions about the effects of various policies based on what I have read in the moments of distraction between things I should be doing - but I know that those are informed by my filter bubble.

Annoying Journalism

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s how much money doctors actually make - it’s a catchy headline, but it summarizes a single article and then passes it off as research…

I don’t mean to pick on Business Insider in particular, but this is a great example of the kind of journalism that I’ve found frustrating. BI has an annual article that pretends to analyze doctor salaries - 2016, 2017. In 2017, it’s just pulling two charts from a single Medscape article and then describing them… there’s a lot of interesting content discoverable with a google search or even a look at the Medscape references. The articles miss a ton of nuance, e.g., controlling for specialty, seniority, hours worked, and some other factors black male physicians earn 35% less than their white male counterparts, a significantly larger gap than the 13% the BI article indicates - but women don’t have a disparity in pay between black and white doctors (more here).

Journalism on Sasha Katsnelson

Abandoned and Set Adrift

Annoying Journalism