I’m going to be honest — this has been a pretty bad week for my reading habit. I think I’m coming down with the flu, and so I have retreated into familiar comforts, like eCourts, Patrick Mckenzie, Sasha Chapin, and Scott Alexander.
In-group bias in the Indian judiciary: Evidence from 5 million criminal cases.
Abstract: We study judicial in-group bias in Indian criminal courts using a newly collected dataset on over 5 million criminal case records from 2010–2018. After detecting gender and religious identity using a neural-net classifier applied to judge and defendant names, we exploit quasi-random assignment of cases to judges to examine whether defendant outcomes are affected by assignment to a judge with a similar identity. In the aggregate, we estimate tight zero effects of in-group bias based on shared gender, religion, and last name (a proxy for caste). We do find limited in-group bias in some (but not all) settings where identity is salient – in particular, we find a small religious in-group bias during Ramadan, and we find shared-name in-group bias when judge and defendant match on a rare last name.
The story of VaccinateCA. I’ve been putting this off for a long time, but I finally read Patrick McKenzie’s doorstopper of an essay. It’s about twenty eight thousand words which, when double-spaced, is about 108 pages. The story it tells is more than a little bit inspiring, if familiar and horrifying at the same time.
We have a titanic gap in state capacity: The largest and most well-resourced organizations in the world did not conceive of, approve, and immediately execute an obvious and largely successful operational plan that nonspecialists were able to draw up on Discord in a matter of hours.
Also, here’s another excerpt, apropos of nothing:
There were parts of the VaccinateCA model that took advantage of relatively unique features of US healthcare infrastructure, like widespread distribution of privately operated pharmacies that had been turned by the government into a primary distribution channel for the vaccine. We didn’t think we’d be able to take advantage of that in most nations. We would instead be back to understanding virtually nothing about relevant healthcare infrastructure while facing even more disadvantages than we had faced on Day 1.
We also benefited from another major strength of America: You cannot get arrested, jailed, or shot for publishing true facts, even if those facts happen to embarrass people in positions of power. Many funders wanted us to expand the model to a particular nation. In early talks with contacts there in civil society, it was explained repeatedly and at length that a local team that embarrassed the government’s vaccination rollout would be arrested and beaten by people carrying guns. This made it ethically challenging to take charitable donations and try to recruit that team.
Stranded on the Space Mountains of Self-Loathing. I will not say anything further about this piece except that it was an interesting experience for me to read it.
It’s Bad On Purpose To Make You Click. Clearly, this Scott Alexander poem is one of the best things on the internet right now. I’m sure most of you have already read it. Here’s my favourite part:
No actual person believes it
It isn’t a national trend
Some loony in Maine with a turd for a brain
Said some idiot thing, the end
Some intern from Williams or Amherst
Wrote all of it up, real slick
And now it’s the front page of WaPo
But it’s bad on purpose to make you click.