USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? A Study by Atheist Shoes (2013)
atheistberlin.com
atheistberlin.com
So 178 items sounds like a ridiculously limited amount of shipments to consider. The Atheist post seems to imply that they only sent 1 package to Michigan. At best, on average, 178 shipments is a shade over 3 shipments per state. Hardly enough for good statistics, and definitely not enough to draw any strong correlations.
Also, it's important to note that in the comments, Atheist mentions that they did not have tracking on their packages. In my experience, more people lie or are mistaken about their package delivery than packages actually being lost. Year after year, I'm continually surprised by how many people end up finding their packages after you tell them "According to the tracking number, it's been delivered. Could you check with anyone in you live with or share a building with who may have accepted it?"
TLDR: As bad as the USPS is, 178 packages sent internationally without any tracking seems like _far_ too few to draw any correlations about wide spread religious bias in the USPS.
Edit to add: Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that atheists aren't discriminated against in the US. (I'm pretty sure we're quite a few years away from even the possibility of a POTUS being an atheist.) I _am_ arguing that the post by Atheist (the company) doesn't indicate discrimination.
"In my experience, more people lie or are mistaken about their package delivery than packages actually being lost."
Read more carefully: they sent exactly two packages to each person, with the only difference being the tape. This isn't affected by some random customer complaining about a package being late or lost; these are people who are each reporting the arrival times of two packages.
"So 178 items sounds like a ridiculously limited amount of shipments to consider."
If you agree that each of the 89 pairs of packages are more or less independent, then we can use p-values to determine whether the results are significant based on the sample size. They are.
There are still plenty of systematic effects that could have affected the study by invalidating the assumption of independence between the 89 "trials." For example, if the customers all knew the purpose of the study, some of them may have intentionally mis-reported their result. So I agree that you can't reach a firm conclusion based on this one study. I just wanted to point out that many of the objections you raised don't seem to apply, and that this is a pretty interesting result not to be dismissed so lightly.
I'm still having a hard time viewing it as proof of a religious bias. There's still a number of conclusions that could be drawn that aren't that... The decorative tape might be harder for automated postage-processing machines to deal with. The decorative tape might be less sticky than the non-decorative tape (they make no mention of that). I'm not sure how they delivered this stuff to the Post Office, but if the packages were presorted into a group of decorative tape boxes and a group of plain tape boxes, that could be the _entire_ reason one type was lost/delayed more than the other (if a whole bin or a pallet or whatever had an issue).
It's only 9 packages that went missing, too. So if 5 of those 9 went to one city, 3 of the 9 to another, and 1 of the 9 to a third city, then the conclusion to draw is that those 3 cities had issue with the decorative tape for some reason. Not that the entire USPS is religiously biased. If each loss were stated to be in a separate (and significantly different) city, that would be closer to the stated conclusion.
Finally, at the bottom in the small print (I read it a bit more carefully this time), you see that they were shipped via Deutsch Post then handed over to USPS when they reached the US. (That's pretty standard for how international shipping works.) Without tracking, how can they lay blame for lost/delayed packages solely on the USPS? And even if they had tracking only up until the packages left the country (as is how some international shipments work), there are still factors outside of the USPS that could affect this, for instance maybe someone at the Deutsche Post decided for fun (or maybe even some sort of processing reason) to sort all/some of the 178 packages. Then imagine that a single bin of packages went missing and it just happened to be one of the bins of decoratively-taped packages... That could mean one act of incompetence (or even maliciousness) is deciding the entire outcome of the study.
Really though, the fact that they're concluding this based on 10 lost packages still strikes me as odd. An issue with just 10 packages is so well below the levels of extreme incompetence that I've encountered with the Post Office in my years that claiming religious bias feels like giving the system far too much credit.
If there is no bias, the lost packages reports would have equal probability of having come from the athiest group or the non-athiest group.
The (frequentist) probability that the ratio would be 9:1 or worse (given 10 lost packages) is 10/(2^10) which is approximately 0.98%. If you're the type to care about p-values, here we have p < 0.01.
Suppose there indeed exists this bias as it appears (9 times more likely to lose athiest package), we might be curious to ask: how likely is it that we would have detected a statistically significant (p < 0.05) bias with just 10 packages lost total?
Doing a similar calculation as above can check that we only see a statistical significance bias if the loss discrepancy is (10:0, 9:1, 1:9, or 0:10). Now if we suppose the bias is 9:1, how likely are we to have seen one of those events? If we add up the probability of these events (10:0, 9:1, 1:9, or 0:10) occurring under a biased scenario, we get about a 74% chance of us detecting the bias.
A standard requirement is for this number to be at least 80%, our result is close but would like to see more data before publishing in the Journal of Atheist Footwear.
The latter metric is called statistical power or the probability of not getting a false negative, whereas p-value is the probability of a false positive.
And if you're curious, please see my other reply as to why I think, even including statistical significance of one type being lost more than the other, we can't really draw a "religious bias" conclusion.
The statistics is entirely identical to flipping a coin 10 times and asking the following questions: * Given that I saw 9 heads and 1 tail, how likely is it that the coin is a fair coin. This is the p-value which was about 0.0098 (less than 1% chance) * Given that we are only tossing 10 coins, how likely are we to have seen a statistically significant bias with the predicted bias in place. This is the statistical power, which was 74%.
As you suggest in your other comment, the stats only point to a bias, the origin of the bias is left for people to decide. That said, the packages were sent in pairs, so subdividing the country into states and offices is irrelevant since a given states saw the same number of packages from each category as did each given office, the statistics are saying that on average (across the whole country) there is a bias.
To ease your worries a little, this is not saying the USPS hates Atheist packages 9x more than non-Atheist packages, most of the packages were delivered successfully. All this is saying is that, for the ones that were lost, it is very likely that they were lost because of their labeling. This is the effect you would expect to see if 97.3% of USPS employees treated the packages identically and the other 2.7% have a strong bias.
If we had more specifics about the delayed packages as well, we could get a more nuanced picture, I suspect we would find that 80+% of USPS employees are unbiased, some 10-15% might have some bias against Atheist labeling (would delay an Atheist labeled package), and 2-3% have a strong bias against Atheist labeling (would lose an Atheist labeled package).
If I was at USPS, I would push to conduct an experiment to try to identify which offices were most likely to have some bias one way or another (not necessarily specifically about Atheism, one could test whatever they wanted presumably).
I know your point is that USPS has high variance but I think statistical tests should account for this.
It's true they didn't say whether or not they properly randomized the boxes. But I assume they were competent enough to do that, and they certainly don't say that they didn't. They did say they had no issue in Europe and that the problems were entirely from the US. I really doubt it's with the quality of the tape or the automated systems, using a different kind of type shouldn't make such a huge difference.
It really seems like you are just looking for any reason you can think of to disregard the results. Religious bias is a huge problem in the US. Their hypothesis is totally reasonable. And their experiment, while not perfect, provides evidence for that hypothesis.
Additionally, based on my experience with the USPS, it's far more likely to be attributed to negligence/incompetence than religious bias.
Finally, I'm not denying there isn't or can't be a religious bias in the USPS, and such a bias may very well be what's causing this company's problems. But this "study" is far from conclusive, and fails to even acknowledge the possibility of a different conclusion.
1. Jews
2. Catholics
3. Evangelical Christians
4. Buddhists
5. Hindus
6. Mormons
7. Atheists
8. Muslims
Surprisingly (at least to me), Atheists is second to last.
Interestingly enough, the low ranking of Atheists persists across party lines. Both Republicans and Democrats rank Atheists only slightly higher than Muslims, and by similar margins too: 2 points in the former and 1 point in the latter.
[0] http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-...
Atheism has been attached to communism and socialism for a long time in the US so has a bad rap. But now with almost 40% of the us public calling themselve non religious and Bernie's socialist leaning campaign shows that is changing.
The Jewish ethnic group are people historically descended from the people of Eastern Europe and the Middle East who practiced ancient Judaism (the religion). That's why 23andme can identify someone as X% Jewish.
95% package loss rate incoming
As an experimental design that would be pretty good, but as a product experience I would not be very happy to unbox one shoe, then wait days for the other one to arrive or find out it was lost in the mail.
If you read the small print, you learn that the packages passed through Deutsche Post before going to the US. So it could actually still be the Europeans.
> So the other theory is that any worded tape
It might not be people at all... There could be some computer vision issue at play. Or hell, maybe it is people, but it's a similar problem: packages with worded tape might be harder for the eye to quickly parse and figure out what to do with, and that's why more issues happen to those packages. There are definitely possibilities other than the one you stated.
Edit to add: All that said, I don't support the tone/spirit of the post you were replying to, so please don't group my response with theirs.
Read through all the information, they pretty much excluded Deutche Post (by comparing with packages sent to European recipients) and US customs (by noticing how rarerly their packages are picked for inspection).
I agree that there are more possibilities and further research is needed but I don't agree with people believing that what they did so far amounts to nothing.
Then compare that to a few other packages. One plain brown cardboard with clear tape and a large, crisp shipping label. I expect that will sail straight through all the automatic sorters.
A few with various words (some, perhaps, more likely to be found offensive than "atheist", some less) on tape in high-contrast black and white. In addition to "Shoes", you could write "Merry Christmas" (in mid-January, of course), "Green", "Cleveland" (note: the box doesn't need to go to Cleveland), "Dildos", "FedEx" (sending the box by USPS, of course), "Kittens", "Kidneys" (the box shouldn't contain kittens or kidneys, just have the word on it).
Then one with a complete coverage of wrapping paper with a variety of words, fonts, barcodes, receipts, invoices, and colors all over the box, and a little smudged shipping label on the bottom of the box. It would be like a Where's Waldo for postal workers: Find the one complete shipping label. See how long that takes to get through!
Anthrax, Plutonium, Guns, Gasoline, Cocaine, Cobras, Ivory
And recently, 22,000 pcs were not delivered because the mailman was unhappy about a transfer or something.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/mail-carrier-charged-n...
there were times where the bins she brought to the PO were left on the loading docks. Once an entire bin was waterlogged so the PO just tossed it. Let alone no guarantee what state the magazines arrive in, hence its why you find some plastic wrapped or with a brown paper wrapper.
even your local distribution centers and individual post offices can affect the timeliness of deliveries. even most two day mail is not really a guarantee. You are more likely to get an Amazon package delivered by the PO on a Sunday than two day priority or similar.
I have a related anecdote. I live in Chicago, which has the slowest mail delivery in the country. I've lived in a number of zip codes, and I've never found the mail to get lost, merely delayed. However, I recently moved to a new place, and I've started losing mail. I've generally liked my mail people, but I'm convinced that the mail people at my new place are lazy. I've had issues with mail getting rained on because they never shut the top of the mailbox, I've had mail go missing. They have "signed" for certified mail for me. They'll leave a package on my steps, but they won't close the gate on the way out. They ignore the name printed on the mailbox and deliver mail for old tenants, despite mail regulations forbidding them to do so. Plus, I've tried talking to my mailperson, and she is always on the phone and refuses to talk to me. I know delivering mail isn't the most glamorous job, but have some pride.
As much as we like to try to fix problems systemically, and place blame or praise on organizations as a whole, an awful lot comes down to the bottom of the pyramid/the top of the tree. I would blame most of those complaints on the one person who actually brings the mail to your house when the giant machine spits it all out.
I am fortunate to have a great relationship with our mail carrier. If you're reading this, Patricia, thank you!
In all fairness, this is the first time I've had problems with my mail carrier. Normally I've found my mail carriers friendly, helpful and conscientious. I appreciate how hard the job can be, especially in Chicago, where the weather is all over the place, and the traffic is a nightmare.
I don't know if there's a good system in place to deal with it. So far, complaining, either directly to the supervisor over the phone and in person, or filing complaints on the USPS website, have resulted in no improvement. I think it's because they have a shortage of applicants for those jobs, and so are very reluctant to fire anyone; and reprimands just aren't working.
I recently had out mailman do exactly this (while I was home and only a few feet from the door). I had to chase him down and he told me flat out that he had knocked, waited and I wasn't home.
I showed him the camera footage and I've never had a problem since (and I'd have weekly problems with this beforehand ).
However a few weeks ago they marked a package "delivered" when it wasn't (I got a text saying it was delivered which was nice). It came a 2 days later marked 3 minutes after the delivery was due. I figured it was stolen but the shipper indicated that this happens frequently and they wouldn't consider it missing for a couple days.
A relative works for the postal service, its a good gig, good benefits etc.. but they have to realize that for packages at least, the competition is formidable.
Just as an FYI, USPS closed and consulted a bunch of distribution centers from 2011 through early 2013. These closures were (according to postal employees I spoke with) the cause of lots of delivery problems. At that time, my business was shipping many hundreds of packages annually domestically and internationally and we would have problems with maybe 2 or 3 every year (which were promptly resolved by the USPS claims process). During the period of around 2012-2013, we were dealing with 3 or 4 delivery problems per month. Things have subsequently improved dramatically.
There may very well have been a discrimination problem (it certainly doesn't seem random and I can imagine a scenario where consolidating a distribution center might allow an employee to have a greater affect at disrupting traffic) but I just want to point out that was an especially problematic time for USPS so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a symptom of another problem.
But as a godless guy, I don't get it. Why would I care about the theological stance of the people who make my shoes? Why would a shoemaker want to advertise its religion, or lack thereof, on its shipping boxes? We can't leave tribal politics out of shoes now, even?
Let's say you're gay. You shoe maker belongs to the Mormon Church. When you purchase shoes from her, 10% of her income typically goes to the church[1]. The Mormon Church then uses that money to lobby the government to deny your civil rights, and succeeds[2]. It's not rational to contribute to your own oppression. That's why some people don't want to "leave tribal politics out of shoes". You're asking someone to leave politics out of politics.
[1] https://www.mormon.org/faq/church-tithing
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.htm...
Like movies? Ethical companies? Give them money.
Dislike what a corporation is doing or donates to? Don't give them money.
I'm just about to attempt switching my soap supply to Dr. Bronners. Family owned business with a 5X earning cap from the lowest paid employee to the CEO. They do some neat stuff: http://www.triplepundit.com/2016/09/dr-bronners-says-bye-bye...
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1497254033/atheist-shoe...
eat those stinky shoes, you atheist scums, none can escape the lord's wrath.
Your control experiment was "we put labels and we did not put labels". That is a very weak one.
People in customs anywhere are going to stop and look at anything out of the ordinary. That is their job because drugs, diamonds and so on use to be in out of the ordinary packages.
We send 3d printer pieces around the world. We are part of an engineering NGO that promotes education using new technologies, specially in poor countries.
At first almost anything we sent was stopped, opened and inspected(and delayed). Now everything goes smooth.
Difference? We asked customs or people in other countries the actual reasons for being delivered late and the reasons made a lot of sense. Reasons like terrorism in Colombia for example.
They also teach us ways to improve our packaging so next time we send it much better. Around the world there are different conventions for putting serializing address for example. You put it in wrong order and the postman will have serious problems.
There is also people there(in customs or in the companies), when they know you it is way easier. Not because you are atheist or not, but because you can be a drug dealer and they could lose their job if they don't detect it.
Seriously, you are not that important. They have bigger problems to worry about.
Why would you call atheists "sad individuals" for doing the same?
[0] https://twitter.com/jonathan_blow/status/273582094448476161
I think that sacrilege is something that takes two to tango, if I don't care that you think my soles are sacred, that's your problem, if you want to treat them specially buy you're own, mine are none of your business, all I can say is "meh"