
USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? - leephillips
http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
======
thejteam
Not enough packages to make a real claim. The variance on package delivery
times in the USPS is high. As an example, I recently had two identical
packages shipped to me. They both left the same facility at the same time.
They were identical weight(heavy) and dimensions. They were wrapped the same.
They were shipped from in the same state as me. One arrived in 2 days. One
arrived in 10.

Also, they mentioned that one of the packages in Michigan took 37 extra days.
With that sample size it explains about 10 percent of the average right there.

~~~
pflats
n = 85 and p < 0.01. What's inherently wrong with that? (I have my own
personal crusade against the 5% p-value, but this is under 1%.)

I agree that the sample size is far too small to criticize individual states,
but 85 seems plenty large for the hypothesis of "Atheist-branded packages sent
by the USPS are being delayed more than normal packages."

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AtheistBerlin
In fact n= 178, which is more than enough for a study with only 2 conditions.

~~~
pflats
I misread your post when I re-skimmed it, and ignored the 2 shoes thing.
Whoops. Thanks!

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trotsky
All of these are international packages going through Jamaica Bay in New York
which is notorious for delays. A significant percentage of packages are
selected for extra screening here, but no where near 100%. Those go into a set
of queues that always mean randomized and often lengthy delays. Most of the
packages chosen for the screening are picked by humans that I would almost
guarantee are more likely to pick the packages that catch their eye for any
reason.

Also, if you send through a package that weighs just north of a kilogram it is
almost guaranteed to be subjected to extra screening. This is by no means a
secret among international shippers, and would make it pretty easy to stack
the deck if you wanted to. I bet a lot of shoes weigh around that much, no?

~~~
AtheistBerlin
Just to confirm, not all of the packages pass through Jamacia Bay and we were
careful to ensure the packages were as similarly eye-catching as possible...
but those selecting humans would be wiser than to only choose the most eye-
catching packages. I'm not gonna put a flag on a package containing drugs, for
example. And as the other commenter says, we only sent tote bags, not shoes.

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smarx
What did the two kinds of packages actually look like?

If the illustration is accurate, the "atheism" tape is white with black text,
while the other tape is perhaps standard brown packing tape.

Could it be that the standard packing tape is just better tape?

Could it be that black text on white tape confuses a scanner somewhere?

A better control might be identical tape but with a different word (something
neutral like "shoes").

~~~
glyphobet
These guys share an office with us, so I saw the packages. The Atheist tape is
standard packing tape, there's no difference in quality of the tape.

~~~
smarx
Great, so can you tell us what the tape looked like? Is the illustration
accurate?

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AtheistBerlin
the illustration is accurate. you're right about the better control, we may do
that if we replicate the study... but really I don't think the absence of
writing on the neutral tape can explain the findings.

~~~
smarx
> ... but really I don't think the absence of writing on the neutral tape can
> explain the findings.

To me, it seems like a far more likely explanation than a USPS bias against
packages affiliated with atheism.

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NateDad
For those that say this is just USPS sucking in general.... my wife runs a
small business that sends thousands of packages per year both in the US and
international. The number of packages that have been truly lost numbers in the
single digits. Delays happen, but rarely (most delays are the individual post
offices holding on to the package until the recipient comes to the post office
to pick it up... we still don't know why they do that).

If she suffered 10% loss of deliveries, she'd go out of business. Luckily,
that doesn't happen... though she also doesn't label her boxes with atheist
tape.

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mich41
_some of our customers asked us not to use ATHEIST-branded packing tape on
their shipments_

 _We sent 178 packages to 89 people_

 _4 participants didn't get back to us with their dates and so were not
included in the analysis_

So they used easily-spoofable data submitted by people who knew about the
study and _a priori_ believed to be discriminated against.

It may easily be just trolling by atheist jihadists from the US.

~~~
AtheistBerlin
if only that were the truth. sadly not, no data spoofing involved.

~~~
mich41
That's very sad, indeed.

Anyway, thank you for your explanation. It really increased my confidence in
reliability of your sources.

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marknutter
I bet if you put "Allahu Akbar" tape on a package it'd fair much worse.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I'd legitimately be interested to see that tested.

~~~
Argorak
I'd like to see it AB-tested against some gibberish non-sense written in
arabic.

~~~
claudius
Now you’re just being picky.

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PaulHoule
I don't know if it is just USPS. Mail between Germany and the U.S. has never
been reliable in my opinion. My experience was that one of of two packages I
sent to my Mom back in the states would disappear somehow.

I've had TSA people wrinkle my shirts and leave behind an apologetic yellow
tag, but only in Germany have I had them carefully take apart everything in my
cases, find something they didn't want me to have, remove it, put everything
carefully back the way it was, and never say a word.

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bluedino
Out of 89 packages (half of the 179), 9 went missing? That's 10%.

That is __insane __for the US Postal Service to be allowed that, but it
follows my personal experience with them. I don't think I've ever had them
lose a _letter_ in my life, but when it comes to packages I don't know how
they lose so many. I shudder when I get a USPS tracking email from an online
seller because I know there's fair chance I will never see the damn thing.

~~~
IgorPartola
Where do you live? In MA, CT, and NC I have had a USPS package go missing
exactly twice. In the first case I'm pretty sure the mailperson just left it
on the wrong porch and the neighbor never admitted it. In the second, they had
confirmed delivery, but the package was not there, so Amazon sent another
item.

~~~
jmj42
I live in IL, and have had exactly 0 USPS packages go missing. In fact, I take
the opposite stance. I prefer USPS, both when receiving and when sending.

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oellegaard
Wow, didn't expect this in a developed country :-(

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carlyle4545
Perhaps its God Himself intervening..

~~~
rdl
God also apparently intervened against their webserver, perhaps by creating
ten thousand bored hackers 15-50 years ago, who hit it from Hacker News today.

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edwinjm
This makes the migh moral standards claim of believers staggering.

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cema
Well, this is almost certainly illegal. (What is described by the article.) I
wonder if any kind of investigation is going to follow. Perhaps not criminal,
but journalistic. Freedom of speech is paramount to a broad spectrum of
Americans, as far as I can tell, and I expect many would be interested.

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Strilanc
The actual statistics are in teeny tiny print near the bottom. They don't give
the raw data, unfortunately.

I'd copy-paste the text here, but everything is embedded in images. (Which is
absurd.)

Also, one of the four comments I can see is not like the others. (It might be
removed before you see it.)

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dictum
Remember when televangelists raised funds and sold trinkets by telling people
that "they" (the non-religious, secular institutions, other religions...) were
plotting against them in nefarious ways?

You still can't gaze into the abyss without it gazing into you.

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daleknauss
It seems to me that their control packages should have had tape with 'less
offensive' text on them. This would ensure that it's not just a matter of the
atheist packages being more eye-catching or out of the ordinary.

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claudius
They should make similar experiments with Saudi-Arabia and maybe a few other
countries :-)

~~~
mooism2
Because discrimination is perfectly fine so long as you're not discriminating
as much as somebody more extreme?

Of course not.

And don't try to wiggle out of it by saying you were only joking. You are
still perpetuating the viewpoint.

~~~
ethomson
What view point is being perpetuated? I read that pretty literally - that they
should, indeed, try this with addresses in Saudi Arabia. Because, you know, it
would be interesting.

Even if that's not true, I don't think that this is a scientific enough study
to suggest that there's serious discrimination problem at the USPS, or where
the problem even lies. Does the sender name trigger delays in customs? Does
the sender's activity trigger delays in customs and has been flagged for
further scrutiny but the name is coincidental?

~~~
DanBC
They sent a mix of parcels, some with "ATHEIST" branding and some without it.

They claim that the parcels with Atheist tape were delayed. If the problem
wasn't with the tape we'd expect to see delays spread across all parcels.

> I don't think that this is a scientific enough study

I agree. It'd be interesting to see a bigger study with better numbers.

140 parcels is a _tiny_ number compared to what USPS handles per day.

~~~
aurelianito
They did some statistical tests on the data (look at the bottom of the
article) which, AFAIK show that the number of boxes sent is big enough to show
a significant difference between packages with atheist branding and those
without them.

What is the methodological objection to the article claims?

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DanBC
Oh, yes, sorry. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think that a sample size of 85 (89 marked parcels; 89 unmarked parcels; with
4 removed because of late response) is too small to really know much.

And I think I'm a bit worried about the conclusions being drawn in this
thread.

~~~
aurelianito
But the t-test says otherwise. Why is it that you find the t-test is wrong?

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VMG
Maybe they discriminate against public display of private belief in general.

~~~
codezero
I'm pretty sure most people would not be OK with any kind of editorial
discrimination by the handlers of mail.

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noonespecial
They sent packages from _Berlin_ to the US and found a bunch of variance in
delivery times and their first thought was "its the tape"?

They have more faith than I do.

~~~
leephillips
If they were relying on "faith" they wouldn't have bothered to test their
guess, would they have? Isn't that the very opposite of "faith"?

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PaulHoule
A/B testing may be safe in the hands of Athiests, but would you want it in the
hands of terrorists?

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bhauer
I read this and was left wanting control tests using other couriers such as
UPS and Fedex.

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gngeal
I'm just wondering...will France ban pupils from wearing these shoes in
schools? ;)

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harrel
This is unbelievable, somebody gotto do something about it.

~~~
pc86
Like what? What would you suggest somebody "gotto" do?

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youngerdryas
We must fight the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism
at home.

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Buzaga
I've bought two artofmanliness.com shirts online that were to be delivered by
USPS, they never arrived... all I know this service is shit.

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mason240
I would like to see a similar experiment where boxes, some randomly labled
with "Christian" tape, are handled by atheists.

We all know the results would be the same.

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_ak
How do you come to the conclusion that the "Atheist" parcels must have been
handled by Christians? Why are you apologizing unprofessional conduct of USPS
employees?

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utopkara
I believe with all my heart that evangelist goblins with fear of god are
interfering with the sorting process to delay those evil packages. Sure, it is
possible that a foreign vendor might forget to put the full zip code on the
address label; but where is the morality in that explanation.

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DrinkWater
Honestly, this concept of building a product around such a sensitive issue
like religion/spirituality is kind of "dumb".

Wasn't it clear to them that such problems will arise, sooner or later? People
get offended if you brand your product with something "christian" or
"islamic", so why should people not be offended by atheism? I dont get this
whining.

Keep religion to yourself, in all endeavors.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Are you seriously saying a private business has no right to conduct uhh
private business with their customers because it might offend someone?

Essentially you're just playing the classic victim blaming card.

Someone was mean to you because of your religion/sexual preference/etc? You
should have hidden it better, quit this whining! It is your fault for being
different!

Atheism also isn't a religion.

~~~
mason240
Not believing in god is not a religion.

Atheism itself though has grown into a full blown region. There is a point
where your "not-golfing" becomes hobby, and it seems that atheism, at least
for some, crossed that line long ago.

I grew up in a very religious environment, but I have been an atheist for 10
years (I'm 30 now). I don't see much of a difference between "loud atheists"
and "loud Christians." The intolerance is the same, the language is the same,
and even the "I'm a better X than you" and "You're not a real X" are the same.

~~~
Jach
[Ed: I see you edited your original comment to be less general. To address
that, I'd say you're seeing similarities that aren't characteristic of
religions, but of humans rooting for their team. Your last sentence applies
just as well to "loud fans".]

This is as wrong as calling the technological singularity idea a "rapture of
the nerds."[1] It's important to separate religious-minded-thinking, which is
more generally irrational (or if you prefer a less general statement for the
sake of argument, non-scientific) thinking, from an actual religion. Do
atheists suffer from the same cognitive biases religious people do? Of course.
Do some of them (I'd guess a minority) make errors in probabilistic reasoning
by assigning p(a god exists|observations) = 0, actual 0, rather than the
technical 0+epsilon that permits Bayesian updating in case a god ever decides
to show itself? Sure. None of this makes atheism a religion. Where's the
promise of salvation, but only for atheists? Where's the Holy Book? Where's
the rituals and traditions? Are you called an "inactive atheist" if you don't
go to chu^H^H^H weekly meetups and thus get shunned by your fellow atheists?
Where's the singular code of morality? Where are the articles of faith? If you
spend five minutes thinking about it, can you think of other ways atheism
differs, categorically, from a religion like Mormonism?

[1]<http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21>

~~~
rimantas
And to add pretty much every believer is an atheist regarding the gazzilion of
gods he does not believe, but others do.

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001sky
This is a bullshit premise. A policy of "non-branding" packages, is not
discriminatory. In particular, one that is actually enforced on politically
sensitive/provocative topics. If the "brand" were white supremacy (a-chromatic
or KKK...) or perhaps anti-semetic (NAZI brand !) packing tape, I don't think
the PO should feel bad about not putting these types of "billboards" //
"targets" on people's door steps. The USPS, is strictly not in the business of
delivering Hate Mail.

But...Nice try!

