A study on maritime disasters and "W&C First". Thoughts?

LacklustreFriend · 2019-12-29T15:20:26+00:00

Hey! I wrote a comment on that article a month ago. I don't think it's perfect but I did put some effort into it so I'll repost here.

What a very strange paper. There's a lot of things I want to discuss about this article but there's too much, I'll just write as I go at the risk of rambling and being disorganised.

Firstly, I always find it's a red flag when an article does not include its raw/original data. Nowhere, not even in the appendixes, can you actually look at the data of each of the shipwrecks and look at the percentage of survivors by gender (or other factors), all data presented is altered in someway, mostly from statistical regression. Additionally, the study only looked 18 maritime disasters, a very small number. The reason I find this particularly egregious is that the article makes a point of saying that Titanic may be an outlier, but then proceeds to have a very small sample size themselves. The selection of those 18 (outlined in an appendix) also is subjected to bias - the authors admit to an over reliance of American and British ships. But other potentially severe (inherent) bias is of only having ships with well kept records. A small sample size matters here particularly due to the huge number of variables a maritime disaster can have - for example, the presence of rescue vessels. Presence of rescue vessels could mean that passengers are less concerned with helping each other.

Next, the article has some questionable assumptions, and it's not exactly clear what exactly the article is investigating (hypothesis). For example, the opening sentence of the article is:

Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of “women and children first” (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers.

Is that the belief people really have? My opinion is that people have a implicit belief that WCF should be followed, not that people hold any belief on its effectiveness.

Also later on, about WCF:

Evidence of people helping each other is not necessarily evidence of other-regarding preferences, or social norms, governing behavior.

They're claiming that WCF is not an implicit social norm, and is only in effect when the captain orders it so. But isn't the captain ordering WCF evidence in itself that WCF exists as a social norm? It's not like captains ever order men and children first. Assuming WCF is an implicit social norm, how would you even control it or adjust for it, if it's practiced in all examples? Perhaps the difference of the captain ordering WCF instead of WCF implicit social norm is one only of organisation and effectiveness. Also in the discussion the paper concludes in the discussion that:

We interpret this as evidence that compliance with the WCF norm is exceptional in maritime disasters.

I see no evidence of this in the paper. All the evidence shows is that the captain ordering WCF explicitly is relatively rare (5/18). I see no evidence that WCF as a implicit social norm doesn't exist.

To go back a step, it's not exactly clear what the article is trying to prove. Two questions seems to be conflated with each other:

Whether women are more likely to die than men in a maritime disaster
Whether WCF increases the survival chance of women

Theses two questions seem to be merged into one misleading question:

Whether WCF causes women to have a higher survival rate than men

This leads them to drawing some strange and arguably misleading conclusions, I'll talk about that at the end.

I've spent a good deal of time (probably more than I should have bothered) looking at how the authors did created their models for each of their hypotheses (in the appendix), and wondering what to say about it. I'll just say that I consider myself reasonably statistically literate, and I found their methodology very obtuse. There seems to be a lot of estimations on the authors' part. "We test the hypotheses (H1–H8) by estimating linear probability models" How did they estimate them though? It's one of those things where I can't tell if I'm an idiot or modelling/explanation is bad. Maybe someone else can make better sense of it.

To go back to conclusions, the two major conclusions of the authors highlight seem to be:

We show that the survival rate of women is, on average, only about half that of men.

Most notably, it seems as if it is the policy of the captain, rather than the moral sentiments of men, that determines whether women are given preferential treatment in shipwrecks

The first one is just an observation. I agree their data does show this. But it says nothing about the causes. Looking at the data in context, the reason to me seems to be women are just less likely to survive to do biology/physical differences between men and women.

The second point I find incredibly misleading and I don't support their conclusion. Their data supports a positive correlation between the captain ordering WCF and women surviving, at a moderate expense to men (Explicit WCF helps women). There is no measurement, or reason extrapolation from the data of the "moral sentiments" of men. As I said earlier, the ordering of WCF could just demonstrate an increased level of organisation by the captain, not a significant difference of moral sentiment between the captain and the passengers. As far as we know, implicit WCF still benefits women - it is possible (I would say probable) that if implicit WCF did not exist, the survival rates of women would be even worse.

So the only real significant conclusions I can draw from this article is that women are more likely to die than men, and that the captain ordering WCF increases women's survival rates at the moderate expense of men. This says nothing on the morality of either explicit or implicit WCF first, the effect of implicit WCF, or the scale of or whether implicit WCF even exists.

It does raise an important moral question though. Should men sacrifice themselves for women, just because women have a lower survival rate? Or to phrase it a better way, should someone increase their own risk order to alleviates someone who has a higher risk?

Strikester101 · 2019-12-29T10:50:07+00:00

The study concludes that the norms imposed by the leadership during the disaster has a larger influence than social norms in general. That makes sense.

The Titanic probably was an exception

Title	A study on maritime disasters and "W&C First". Thoughts?
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	4
Comments	3
Date	December 29, 2019 8:25 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/eh3myl/a_study_on_maritime_disasters_and_wc_first/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/a-study-on-maritime-disasters-and-wc-first.1064236 https://theredarchive.com/post/1064236

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