All of krzhang's Comments + Replies

The main line I'm thinking of is: I don't think this story quite captures the data, because I can construct a model where both of these are true but we don't get this effect. If you have the same link between income and education for each group conditioned on knowing group membership (and a net positive relationship without knowing group membership), but you have the blue group mean only to the right (i.e. more educated) than the green group mean, then you don't have this effect because equal education lines don't have blues earning more than greens (they earn less; this is a straightforward 'discrimination against blues' story). I would use the language of B to mean "in the three node model which has color, education, and income, the direct effect of education on income is positive," which does not appear to be true in the graphs, which look like they could be generated from a E<-C->I model. While it could also be used to mean "in the two node model which has education and income, the direct effect of education on income is positive," that seems unnatural in a case where you know that the link from E to I is spurious (that is, it flows backwards along the causal path from C to E; changing your level of education can't change your color). But this could just be me expecting an unreasonable level of precision from your wording, since the straightforward interpretation, though unnatural, does fit the data (although I think it reduces the strength of the "this doesn't show discrimination" claim, because it does show that what looked like a virtuous education-income link is now a questionable color-income link). It's very possible I've imagined the difference / misunderstood what you've written. My appreciation of the filtering effect of the slices is also very recent, and I may think it's more important as I think about it more. It seems that I'm quick to jump to a graphical model with nodes that captures the effects between these groups, and want to keep direct, i

Step 1 is to spend too much time posting comments. I'm not sure I recommend this to someone whose time is valuable. I would like to see you share your "street rationalist" skills here, though!

Welcome! It's good to see you here.