Mon 8 Nov 2004
One interesting feature of blogspace discussion of the Lancet study has been the comments from warbloggers, who, despite not even knowing what cluster sampling is, have been absolutely certain that the methodology of the study has been discredited. For instance, Arthur Chrenkoff admits:
I’m not a statisticianbut none the less concludes that Shannon Love had demolished the study. (Daniel Davies deals with that “demolition”).
Or Michael Totten at Instapundit, who is certain that the study uses very bad methodology. Bill Trippe sent him a correction:
Did you even read the paper before you decided Shannon Love’s argument was so brilliant? Probably not, because if you had, you would see that she clearly did not understand what she was reading. Case in point: she makes a grand pronouncement (even putting it in bold), about the inclusion of Fallujah in the conclusions. Guess what? Fallujah was excluded from the results as an outlier.Totten, of course, did not correct the erroneous post.
Or Cori Dauber. I corresponded with her last year because she bought Lott’s ridiculous claim that the murder rate in Baghdad was very low. and she admitted that she wasn’t good with numbers. But she is sure that the methodology is “garbage” and calls the study a “lie”.
Our last example, by Anthony Rickey, is like a Bizarro world version of this post. He takes issues with the folks who accepted the Lancet’s study, reckoning that their prejudices have blinded them to the obvious (to him) flaws. He even believes that the Lancet study will be another scandal like the affair of Dan Rather and the forged memos. Unfortunately it is Rickey’s prejudices that have blinded him to the flaws in the criticism of the study. (See Daniel Davies again.)
But what about all the people who accepted the study’s result who also didn’t know much about statistics? Well if you don’t know enough to evaluate the study yourself, you’d have to trust the experts on statistics, and I don’t think that it would be unreasonable for you to suppose that a journal with the prestigious reputation of the Lancet would have checked those statistics thoroughly. And you would have been right.
November 8th, 2004 at 6:40 am
When you hear that a study claims 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians slaughtered by US bombing, and that the journal publishing this allowed an avowed war opponent to demand that peer review be condensed down to a few weeks to make sure the study would be published right before the election,
you think the right response is to instinctively trust the Lancet that everything is all right?
You expect people to simply swallow this without asking any questions (when they’ve heard much, much lower estimates before from avowed war opponents)?
Now you think the authors cannot be held responsible for misquoting? Really? When they’ve phrased it in a way that virtually everybody “misunderstood” them?
“Most of my … readers will by now have heard about the research conducted by Les …estimating the number of civilians killed during the war against Iraq (so far).”
“About 100,000 Iraqi civilians — half of them women and children — have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.”
“The once-respectable British medical journal The Lancet has produced a report claiming we’re destroying Iraq to save it. It says that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by coalition forces since the invasion began, most from airstrikes.”
The UK Government will “examine with very great care” claims 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the US-led invasion, Jack Straw has said.
The people you are talking about saw a claim that “100,000 Iraqi civilians killed by coalition, most women and children” and believed it, because it’s in the Lancet. They didn’t read the study, and even of those who follow your own blog, I’d bet money that a majority heard it that way, and never heard you say it wasn’t so.
November 8th, 2004 at 10:01 am
So
Heiko, what you’re saying is that the Lancet papet is actually correct, but that some people have taken the number 100k as solid, rather than looking at the range as described in the article?
First, that isn’t a criticism of the study’s numbers; I presume that since you aren’t contesting the statistics you’re willing to admit that there aren’t any known problems with them.
Second- were you born yesterday? The news media always compress complex issues into simpler ones- teasers that can be blurted out before the commerical break. That certainly isn’t evidence of liberal bias or of any misconduct by the authors.
Third, no one is “instinctively” trusting the Lancet, nor are they “[not] asking any questions”. If you’ve been reading the blog, you’ve seen lots of questions asked and answered- and the Lancet’s study (and it’s reputation) haven’t been touched yet.
Wu
November 8th, 2004 at 11:11 am
Tim, you probably get this a lot, but thanks for doing the hard yards on the front line of fallibility with this one. As a student of old and new school science (and critic of the linguistic turn and some post-modernisms) I’m glad to see someone stand up for a Popperian world 3 reality outside partisan spin.
and Heiko, read d-squared’s posts at Crooked Timber again.
November 8th, 2004 at 12:30 pm
Heiko:
“When you hear that a study claims 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians slaughtered by US bombing.” The paper says no such thing. Maybe if you did not start your comments with a strawman people minght take you seriously.
November 12th, 2004 at 1:43 am
Heiko, like just about every other critic of the Lancet piece, misses the point entirely, WHICH IS THIS: why have the US and UK governments done almost everything in their power to ensure that an adequate census of civilians killed in Iraq was not officially undertaken? (even going so far to block the efforts of Iraq NGO’s). It should have been up to the aggressors and occupiers to ensure that the dead were counted, but in spite of repeated attempts by groups like “Iraq Body Count”, this was not done. But the answer should be obvious, as I have stated before. SO LONG AS NO COUNT WAS MADE THE UK-US GOVERNMENTS COULD DENY THAT GENOCIDE EVER TOOK PLACE. Tommy Franks famously remarked how the US “Counts every screwdriver” but that “We just don’t do body counts”. In Gulf War I, there is credible evidence that the destructuion of the civilian infrastructure of Iraq by allied bombs killed upwards of 100,000 civilians; the sanctions imposed on Iraq between 1991 and 2003, which resembled a medieval siege, certainly killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s especially children (this was never acknowledged at the time in the west except by Madeline Albright and was followed by her famous remark “That the price was worth it”). Casting our minds back further, the secret bombing of Cambodia under Nixon (with Kissinger’s support) between 1969 and 1973 led to more than half a million (or more) deaths. Mass murder of civilians has often been sanctioned in defense of western elite objectives. There are plenty of other examples; the Philippines (1901-02), Indonesia (1965-66), Nicaragua (1984-89) and so on. So why is it so vehemently denied by those on the politcal right that the latest agression has killed so many innocent people? There’s nothing exceptional at all about the Lancet study.