Comments on: A MOST GHOULISH DEBATE

By: George Sorof

George Sorof — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:49:12 +0000

As an aside: It bothers me that people are willing to accept a concrete â€œlesser evilâ€ like killing Iraqis over a completely imaginary â€œgreater evilâ€ like the WMD bogeyman, and that somehow this gets passed off as â€œlogicâ€. Doesnâ€™t matter how logical and rational you are: Garbage-in, garbage-out. Seems considering uncertainty in decision making is too.

good!

By: adam smith

adam smith — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 11:30:35 +0000

while the investigators were able to verify most death reports by examining death certificates, they have no independent way of confirming the accuracy of third party reports as to the cause of death, and a lot of the respondents probably donâ€™t have direct knowledge of what happened. So the cause of death statistics are probably more useful for telling us what the Iraqi people are blaming for the loss in life than for telling us what is actually the case.
info

By: Bent Notes » Blog Archive » The problem with the Lancet’s figures

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 22:51:22 +0000

[...] A BN bud - not of the same ideological bent as BN, but an interesting cat nonetheless - has cited that Lancet Iraqi-civilian-death figure of 650,000 in a few places in some recent comment threads.Â Here’s where that assertion starts to unravel. [...]

By: John A. Broussard

John A. Broussard — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:53:52 +0000

Not only are American scientists wildly exaggerating the number of deaths in Iraq despite our peace-keeping efforts there, but the Iraqi government is making things look bad when actually everything there is fine and getting better.

According to the Iraqi Health Ministry, the rate of deaths attributable to the insurgency in August was essentially the same as in July–somewhere around 50 corpses delivered to the city morgue each day.

But U.S. military spokesman, Major William B. Caldwell, (CNN, September 11) reported that there had actually been a 52 percent drop in violent deaths in August as compared to the previous month.

As he pointed out, the Iraqis were erroneously including people killed by explosions and bombings. According to Major Caldwell such deaths are not due to violence and should not be so counted.

Let us hope that the American administration will take immediate steps forcing the Iraqi Health Ministry to correctly report the rapidly decreasing number of truly violent deaths in their capital.

As for those scientists, our new law signed by President Bush allows them to be jailed indefinitely since they are obviously aiding and abetting terrorism.

By: Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:44:31 +0000

Terrye wrote:
“For instance, they say that 14% of the 655,000 people who died were killed by suicide bombers. That is over 91,000 people. That is their claim. Not mine. Now have any of the defenders of this survey ever seen anything that would back that up? I would say those victims were buried in Iraq and there would be death certificates for them and they would have families, so where are they? Who are they? Where and when were they killed? The survey offers no such eveidence. This is not science, this is propaganda.”

What idiocy. The survey is their evidence! They checked death certificates. All the above amounts to is the demand they do more — well, of course we would have more confidence in the results if they did even more research, but they did the research they could, and these are the results. Terrye certainly has no better research to point to — he simply doesn’t want to believe these results because they are troubling to his conscience.

Terrye, when someone tells you that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, do you demand the person digs them up and shows you the remains?

By: Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:39:24 +0000

Dr. Steve wrote:
“The rationale is that types of deaths are not spatially independentâ€”finding one increases the probability of finding another next door.”

Just as not finding a death decreases the chance of finding one next door. Unless they deliberately started out with a home they knew someone had died in, there is every bit as much chance of this giving too low a result as too high.

By: Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:32:52 +0000

Terrye wrote:
“I am simply pointing out that there are morgues in Iraq, there are doctors in Iraq, there are communities in Iraq and no one has come up with any numbers that are even near this. . . I am simply pointing out that if they are going to claim all these people died then it should follow there would be some evidence beyond their pissy little survey. Like dead people. And graves.”

This is idiotic. They went over and searched as much as they could in a war zone, used totally sound sampling methods and statistical practice and got these numbers. At this point the crucial thing is not that it would be possible (with more resources) to be more accurate — of course it would! — but that this is the best estimate existing, far better than anything the Iraqi government has.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

By: DrSteve

DrSteve — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:32:03 +0000

I sent Dr. Burnham a very polite request for his study data, protocols, stat programs and log files. He wrote me back within 2 hours but demurred citing a busy schedule and the desire to protect both his surveyors and the sampled neighborhoods. Both are totally understandable points but really don’t extend to everything I asked for — he could have an RA e-mail me his .do files in 5 minutes. I’ll ask him again in six months.

By: dave

dave — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:44:21 +0000

“The fact that those three percentages totalled up equal 101%…”

EricT is correct. This is one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever heard. One of the other most idiotic things is EricT’s explanation. The real explanation (as any baseline literate math student could tell you) is called ROUNDING ERROR.

Your actual percentages are always equal to 100%. In this case, the actual percentages might have been as follows:
55.5 percent gunshot,
13.9 percent explosion
30.6 percent aistrike
(Note that these percentages add up to be 100%)

But when you ROUND those numbers for a news report, you write “56 percent gunshot, 14 percent explosions, 31 percent airstrikes”. Seriously, this happens very frequently with every type of statistical survey. It is complete illiteracy to imply this makes the study less credible.

By: My Own Thoughts » 600,000 is so wrong

My Own Thoughts » 600,000 is so wrong — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 01:01:13 +0000

[...] Right Wing Nut House discusses the study, including quoting the people who are supporting it as saying “there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq.â€ [...]