About that claim that police are less likely to shoot blacks than whitesI just wanted to comment on “the most surprising result of my career” thing. We should all have the capacity for being surprised. Science would go nowhere if we did nothing but confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Buuuuut . . . I feel like I see this reasoning a lot in media presentations of social science: “I came into this study expecting X, and then I found not-X, and the fact that I was surprised is an additional reason to trust my result.” The argument isn’t quite stated that way, but I think it’s implicit, that the surprise factor represents some sort of additional evidence. In general I’m with Miller that when a finding is surprising, we should look at it carefully as this could be an indication that something is missing in the analysis.