Act I: Inherited Decisions
Step 3Live-room allocation: 5:00
Open in Colab — 01_act1.ipynb, opens in a new tab
The people in the room inherit the equation. None of them wrote it. Illustration: Brian Stauffer.
One patient crossing one line is an anecdote. The question is how many patients, and at which lines.
Every threshold below is one a clinician acts on. Run the same two equations across all 14,788 adults in the cohort and count who lands on a different side.
Who changes category
Section titled “Who changes category”| Threshold | What it gates | Black adults | Non-Black adults |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | CKD (eGFR<60) | 2.41% | 0.00% |
| 45 | G3b | 0.79% | 0.00% |
| 20 | Transplant referral proxy | 0.03% | 0.00% |
2.41% of Black adults in this cohort are newly classified as having chronic kidney disease once the race coefficient comes out. Not because anything about them changed — the blood draw is the same blood draw. The equation changed.
The same shift moves 0.79% across the G3b boundary, where dosing guidance tightens, and 0.03% across the threshold used as a transplant-referral proxy. The numbers get smaller as the thresholds get more consequential. They do not reach zero.
The column that reads as good news
Section titled “The column that reads as good news”The right-hand column is 0.00% at every threshold, and it is the most misread number on this page.
It does not mean nothing happened to Non-Black adults. It means nothing happened in this direction. This table counts people moving into a diagnosis. It does not count people moving out of one.
The next step counts both.