Somebody named Andrew (but not me) writes:
Just curious to see if you might have any reaction to this study, “Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand have a higher risk of hospitalisation for COVID-19,” published in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
Some of the numbers are being widely quoted in NZ as proof of differential health outcomes by ethnicity, but a sample of 120 hospitalisations seems kind of small to me, especially with the number of parameters they are looking at.
Re the “widely quoted” the 20 year age gap between Māori and European risk of hospitalisation seems to be generally standard now – e.g. in this from a generally excellent local journalist:
A study released in July by Te Pūnaha Matatini found that, even after accounting for the greater prevalence of underlying health conditions among Māori and Pasifika communities, the average Māori person has the same risk of hospitalisation from Covid-19 as a white person 20 years older. For Pasifika, the gap was 25 years.
It might be true, but it seems a bit of a stretch to be so confident based on a logistic regression using such a small sample. It’s an important topic here, and unfortunately quite politicised, so was interested in an impartial take.
I see my correspondent’s point regarding small sample size; on the other hand, you gotta report the data you see, and of course it’s good news that the number of cases was so low.
My quick solution to the science communication problem here is to change from the present tense to the past tense. So, instead of “Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand have a higher risk of hospitalisation,” the title of the article could be, “Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand had a higher risk of hospitalisation.”
There’s a common pattern in science writing to use the present tense to imply that you’ve discovered a universal truth. For example, “Beautiful parents have more daughters” or “Women are more likely to wear red or pink at peak fertility.” OK, those particular papers had other problems, but my point here is that at best these represented findings about some point in time and some place in the past.
Using the past tense in the titles of scientific reports won’t solve all our problems or even most of our problems or even many of our problems, but maybe it will be a useful start, in reminding authors as well as readers of the scope of their findings.
But science is only interested in the future tense, what happen is just the dead past and only of scientific interest if there is a credible inference to similar things like this would happen with some probability (if the world does not change too much).
According to APA: “Use the simple present to describe a general truth or a habitual action. This tense indicates that the statement is generally true in the past, present, and future.”— But most statements are not generally true in the past, present, and future. Further, other than time, whether the statement being universally true could further depends on experimental location, population, etc.—But then we need to ask why most natural languages’ tense only depends on time.
> we need to ask why most natural languages’ tense only depends on time.
In Indogermanic and Romanic languages, verb forms depend on whether the subject is doing the action, or has it done to them; whether the statement is real or hypothetical; who the subject is (anf sometimes, what the relation of the speaker to the adressee is); you can indicate that one action happens while another action is ongoing; you can indicate that an action that started in the past extends to now, or that it has concluded, and even that another action began later.
Time is fundamental to our understanding of activity (you can have very few activities with time stopped), and verbs have the job of expressing temporal relations, but they do express more than that.
To describe other aspects of reality, other parts of the language are used.
So to me, your question sounds like “why does the aspect of language that we use to express time depend on time”, which feels a bit circular. I’m thinking, how can it be otherwise?
Related, but as a more general recommendation: http://jsomers.net/blog/historical-present
“Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand had a higher risk of hospitalisation.”
Isn’t “risk” an estimation of the future probability of something? When they “had” the risk, they weren’t yet hospitalized. Once they were hospitalized, whatever risk they had is no longer relevant. No one knew the risk before, and even now with a small study we can’t be sure this is the actual risk. It’s just the ratio of two different groups in a study.
“Māori and Pacific people in New Zealand were hospitalized at higher rates than…..”
Is a ratio automatically a “risk”?
The subtle downgrade from “Truth” to “Fact”
Nice.
I encounter this all the time (translation: once or twice a year) in climate change papers I review. Just this week, my main point in a review was: you must either do (a), (b), and (c) to try to shore up your claim that X is increasing, or simply change your framing and say that X increased.
Doing (a), (b), and (c) would take a couple of months; changing the framing would take 1-2 hours. Any bets on what they decide to do?