Secret changes to major U.S. health datasets raise alarms | Hacker News Reader

Secret changes to major U.S. health datasets raise alarms

psypost.org

27 pointsDocFeind13 comments

Again, as with all things involving this administration:

The behavior will continue until real consequences are applied.

And there will be no real consequences because all of the Republicans support this, or accept it as a cost of doing business to get tax cuts for the rich.

Until they're all eaten by the face eating leopards or switch.

Now the Republicans are switching too?

That is confusing.

The title implies that the data was manipulated. What happened was column headers were renamed without an official entry in the changelog.

Most of these changes were the column heading “Gender” renamed to “Sex.”

I would imagine that the modern definition of gender is less important for healthcare then the biological sex of the patient.

I feel it is one of the unfortunate consequences of "sex" being a noun and a verb, as well as a somewhat prudish desinclination to asking "has external genitalia" and use "gender" instead that lead us to the logomachy we have today.

(Of course the label should not have been gender or sex in either case because all one can determine at birth is whether they see a penis or not, and for less than 1% of humans that's not sufficient to determine their genetic makeup)

Reminds me of this: https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/sport-olympics/london-2012-...

See also the HN submission for the direct link to the study this article is a topic of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44571705

I want to yell at the progressives who helped Kamala Harris lose: "Do you still think there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats???"

But I think I'll just eat a bonbon instead. Better for my blood pressure.

Seems like fixes after shift from destructive ideology. It never should appear in the first place.

I don’t see the changes as the real issue - the real issue is that these sorts of changes should have been in the changelog.

It’s like claiming to follow semver and then releasing a bugfix with breaking changes.

It is like deleting a tag or release assets and substituting in something different.

If a survey asked people what gender they identified as, you think it constitutes "fixes" to go back and label that data as "Sex"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com