Book TV Schedule. C-SPAN 1 schedule. Topics from After Words and Q&A follow.
Note: At this point all the links seem to work but the sites themselves are intermittently down.
Month: March 2005
Compare and Contrast
(From the comments on this post.)
This is, of course, untrue, though I doubt any neutral observers were fooled. If Shannon decides to declare victory on this account he/she is a bigger fool than I thought, which is quite some fool.
[. . .]
By the way, can we get the charge clear; Shannon is still saying (falsely) that the authors made “sweeping claims of mass murder”, but appears to have dropped the accusation that they did so specifically in order to provide propaganda for Iraqi fascists? I only ask for the benefit of the libel lawyers who I still hope will take an interest in this series.
One of the disturbing things about the sociology of this study is the degree to which many have embraced its findings as revealed truth even though, just as any other scientific study, it must be verified through replication before we can confirm its accuracy. (Our arguments over methodology are so vociferous because we don’t have any other means of evaluating the accuracy of the study. Solid science ends arguments, it doesn’t start them.)
If we use a single, unverified study to direct our policy we are not actually basing our decisions on good science.
Free Will
Last year, Ohio passed a law which allowed people to apply for licenses to carry concealed firearms in public.
It’s not easy, though. The applicant has to pass a minimum level of training, submit their fingerprints, allow the sheriff to conduct a background check, and pay a fee.
Even after all that, the CCW license holder has many restrictions as to where they can go while armed. For example, they can’t enter a school building or loiter on a campus. (And we all know how effective restricting legal firearms is when it comes to reducing school violence.)
One of the provisions in the law is that private citizens can bar CCW license holders from entering their property while armed, even if the property is a business open to the public. This is particularly distressing to me, a fully qualified self defense instructor, since it means that I probably won’t be able to protect anyone from violent attack even if the crime should happen right in front of me. Even so, I can’t say that I object to the owner of a private business barring me from their establishment. It’s their property, after all, and they have the right to make such decisions. I just go somewhere else.
It’s Nice to Have Outside Verification
There’s been some discussion here about China’s continuing hostility, mainly because they want to gain control of Taiwan while Western states are reluctant to abandon a fellow democracy, however flawed, to a Communist regime. If you’re interested, you can check out the previous discussions here, here, here and here.
My position is that the Chinese military isn’t in any shape to take on the US Navy, and it won’t be for at least another twenty years. Even one carrier group in the area would devastate an invasion force moving towards Taiwan, and the Chinese really don’t have anything that has a good chance of countering that. Instead I saw all of this bluster and aggression as a way to gauge the reaction that the West would have to military action. If we indicate that we’re not interested in fighting for Taiwan then the landing craft would launch, otherwise not.
A Challenge to Lancet Defenders
A lot of people have taken me to task for calling the Lancet Iraqi Mortality Survey [PDF] an example of scientific corruption. I still stand by this claim.
Many seem to equate scientific corruption with falsification of data but there are many ways to create a false impression even if the underlying data is sound. (I will expand on this in a subsequent post).
One easily graspable example in the Lancet study’s dishonesty is the key sentence in the Summary, the one repeated in the media world wide, that pegs the “conservative” estimate at 100,000 excess deaths. The actual given estimate is 98,000. What pure scientific purpose is served by rounding the number up to 100,000? There is no technical reason for doing so. They chose that number because a big, round numbers stick in people’s minds. Its a number chosen only for its marketing value.
More damning is the utter practical uselessness of the study’s findings. The cover-story for the study is that it is a medical epidemology study intended to provide decision makers with information they can use to reduce the mortality rate in Iraq from all causes.
When one looks at the study as actually published, however, it provides no solid information on which a decision maker could act in Oct 2004 or later. Indeed, the study obscures such data as the age, gender, combat status and means of death of those reported killed. It doesn’t report any kind of detailed time series that would let decision makers determine whether the people reported killed died in the major combat phase or not and it produces widely different scales and causes of death dependent on whether the outlier Falluja cluster is included or not.
But I could be wrong, so let me issue this challenge:
Can anybody point out information contained in the study, as published in Oct 2004, that would let a real world decision maker make changes to policy, strategy or tactics that would have or will save lives in Iraq?
Please be as specific as possible.
I think the answer is “No.” I think this proves this study was designed, conducted, written up and published purely for its hoped for political impact in America and the rest of the Western world. Trying to save Iraqi lives was never a major consideration.
To me that is scientifically dishonest and represents corruption of our scientific institutions.
(Update:) let me rephrase the question slightly