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Comment by distant_hat | Hacker News Reader

Its a clickbait headline. Not saying that there isn't an issue with female foeticide in India but this study isn't it.

There are nearly 700 villages in the district, and most of them are small enough to have <2 births in the given time frame.

Out of all those villages they just picked the ones which happened to have had no females. It is no coincidence, whoever did the study clearly knew what they were doing and cherry picked the data to sensationalize. You could do the same to any other similar sized district and get the same results.

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Have you read the study? Are you qualified to evaluate the statistical methodology and have you done such an analysis? If so fine, but otherwise neither you nor I are qualified to make a statement like that.

There does seem to be something going on. According to Wikipedia only 43% of the population of the region are female.

If 63 million women are statistically missing from the Indian population, I think it's pretty clear possible outliers like this need investigating, not denigrating.

Anybody can and should feel free to offer their analysis regardless of their level of qualification. Otherwise we all just sit around waiting for the experts to chime in. And if it's wrong enough, it will prompt one to correct it.

Are you saying this as a Ph.D. in nonsensical internet debates or as a layman?

As someone interested in improving the community by being inclusive.

> Otherwise we all just sit around waiting for the experts to chime in.

That's something we should be doing more.

Even non-expert should read the study and not comment on news articles.

This type of elitism has no place in intellectual pursuits.

Think about it. If there is no expert in the room, then nothing is lost by openly trying to reason out the truth of the matter and seeing what sticks to the fly paper of reality. This is how new experts form.

If there is an expert in the room, they will be more than happy to point out issues, and attempt to offer points to guide the intellectual endeavor within the bounds of their expertise. This is also how new experts take shape.

The knowledge wielded by an expert is what makes them an expert. We call it expertise.

It is not the fact they are an expert that makes their knowledge expertise. The knowledge needs no particular person to prove itself useful.

An appeal to personal credentials as the primary determined as to the veracity of an argument is known as an appeal to authority, which is a very common fallacy.

My point is it's not analysis. It's a completely unsubstantiated assertion of fact based on what's actually a wild guess.

The info in the article isn't a study, it barely even summarises a study, and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the commenter hasn't read the actual study. If so saying "this study isn't it" isn't simply an opinion, it's misrepresentation.

You're more than entitled to your opinion. You're not entitled to tell someone to shut up because of it.

Let’s not put propaganda and informed opinion on the same pedestal.

I'm not telling anyone to shut up. i'm perfectly willing to read any reasoned counter-point to the article. I'm also completely willing to accept the information in the article, by itself, isn't clear evidence of anything.

However it quotes local officials who did do the study and have the detailed analysis saying there's a serious problem that warrants further investigation. They may be right or they may be wrong. Saying on the basis of what's here that the study is definitively bad or good isn't warranted though. That's all I'm saying.

> Anybody can and should feel free to offer their analysis regardless of their level of qualification

IAAS (Ignorance As A Service).

No thanks.

The entire comment section is full of Indian bros reflexively inventing reasons why something like this is a put on in order to make India bad. Every comment section of any article that might put India in a bad light is. It's a particular brand of motivated reasoning, and I get it.

But yeah India is not a great place for girls and women. That's changing bit by bit in the more advanced places but it's such a vast country with so many backward regions that the laggards will come along very slowly.

Time for me to link here:

https://caravanmagazine.in/science-technology/what-genetics-...

"People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population"

and

"The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations"

(There is incredibly little marrying outside ones own group.)

Comments are swarming with misdirection from Indians right now.

Even if you cherry pick data, what even is probability of getting consecutive 216 heads on a coin toss? It is amazing that Indians here are acting as if female infanticide/foeticide is not a big menace in India.

You could probably work out on pen and paper how much foeticide would be necessary before these male birth numbers become probable.

> Even if you cherry pick data, what even is probability of getting consecutive 216 heads on a coin toss?

I think the accusation here is that what happened is someone asked a couple hundred people to do two coin tosses, then grouped together those who got both heads and called it a statistical anomaly.

An accusation invented out of whole cloth.

I agree with your statement in general (including the distinction between backwards regions and more advanced places), but I do think that India is doing much better than other countries in the region in this regard. It's only notable because India tries, unlike other countries that don't.

This is a fantastic point. Let's be real, Pakistan is hardly a paragon of virtue but you're not going to get any real reporting out of that country. The openness of Indian society relative to much of the rest of Asia is pretty amazing and doesn't often get credited well enough.

> According to Wikipedia only 43% of the population of the region are female.

That is very different from the distribution of the sex of babies. Regions end up with skewed demographics for various reasons like distant factories, war, etc.

Haven't actually read the study but not sure I understand your comment. Even if every village has only one birth, the probability of having no girls at random is 1/(2700) which seems practically impossible. Perhaps there is something else that made you response critically of their methods?

Over 700 villages, all with a birth rate of about two births per 3 months, there might very well be 132 villages with no girls born, 140 villages with no boys born, and 428 villages with one boy and one girl born. It wouldn't be alarming at all.

But if these villages represent a contiguous area, then it is alarming. The article doesn't really give enough information to say anything about this really.

Data is from a single district, and then blocks. So blocks are contiguous. Analogous to say New York metro area, and then Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens etc.

He was saying that 132 villages out of 700 villages had no female babies.

> The 132 villages where no girls were born over three months have all been marked as part of a “red zone”, which means local data will be scrutinised more closely and health workers have been asked to be vigilant.

The "red zone" is not a single area, it's a black list.

There's just not enough information in the article for any of us to know. If every village had one birth, you'd expect half of them to have had 'only girls'. It's hard to believe it's that simple a case though. Some of the villages may have had a dozen or more births, we just don't know.

Well the thing is that doesn't neccessarily disprove it either - if the only births allowed are male then that may be why it is <2 - if the practice is widespread enough it won't even stand out statistically - the ones that don't would and even then there are many other confounding variables like wealth level and density.

Honestly, it doesn't matter how sensationalist it is. It should not take major funding to have an informational campaign to let them know adoption is a real and viable option.

In India? Have you ever been there?

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