Statistics and the Scale of Societies

Yes but Kieran, these studies (plural) threaten the nuttosphere in so many different ways. First, the wingers are ideologically and intellectually opposed to the values of objective science (not technology, especially not that wonderful weapons technology, but science) and are opposed to putting any political or economic question in a sound empirical framework (see point 3, below).

2nd: the wingnuts (and the Keyboard Kommandos of the Euston Manifesto are no different in this respect) are convinced that for absolutely no reason whatsoever, the ‘big media’ are in the hands of the ‘liberals’ who are ‘covering up’ all the ‘good news’ about Iraq and Afghanistan. This study, on the contrary, demonstrates that the ‘big media’ are not covering half of the bad stuff, let alone ignoring the good stuff. This shatters the ‘biased BBC’ (etc.) thesis: hence, it must be the statisticians who are wrong.

3: A pet idea of mine: you don’t have to look too far into the history of imperialism to see that it was about much more than simply theft and fraud. It was bound up in religion, in philosophy, in symbol, in culture. Imperialism and Empire, in other words, constitute a guide for action, a philosophy of life, a moral framework. Which is just a high falutin’ way of saying that (self evidently for God’s sake) the real commitment of the pro-invasion party to invading Iraq is not intellectual (and never was) but emotional. And once you have bound up any idea such as ‘we must invade Iraq’ with your own sense of self, then nothing, literally nothing, will change your mind.

In other words, the key argument of these people against the Lancet studies is ‘I don’t want it to be true. Therefore it isn’t’. All the rest is just rhetoric and the statistical misunderstandings of arts graduates.

Speaking of pet ideas, this neatly highlights the speed at which people dispense with their intellectual commitments when something does not suit them. Stats are a classic of course – as soon as a calculation of statisical probability goes against any group’s perceived self-interest all we hear about is how the whole science is really just voodoo etc. etc. As it happens, I have had formal stats & probability training to a reasonable degree and the methods used in the paper seem pretty fair to me, though I am far (very far)from expert on this. It is, of course, only an estimation which allows it to be dismissed out of hand as, of course, it could be totally wrong. Taking their low ball of 425k though, what those who dismiss it should be invited – indeed forced – to do is suggest their estimation of deaths and the basis for calculation. I’m going with “around 23, maybe as high as 112, based on my gut instinct and because God told me.”

My personal favourite visible desertion of principles is whenever supposed champions of capitalism and the free market are confronted with genuine free market principles and promptly desert their god in droves because the market will be no longer regulated in their favour – see any number of myriad examples such as steel tariffs, the CAP, immigration, online gambling, massive barriers to entry in hihgly lucrative businesses (see: finance) – you name it.

typo:

“for our five”
s/b
“four or five”

The firebombing of every major Japanese city in Japan for 3 years during WWII was ~320 deaths per day (excluding the two nuclear bombs, the death rate was ~125 deaths per day).

In WWII, Germany sustained ~1,100 deaths per day, China sustained ~3,500 deaths per day.

The holocaust was ~4,000 deaths per day.

Vietnam, over 15 years of brutal modern civil war of the Total type, averaged ~547 deaths per day.

Sure, but the study says that most of the deaths are gun-related. All I’m saying is that these are not necessarily immediate fatalities.

Kieran hinted at this in the introductory paragraph in his blog post, but I think the way to convince people (if you care; and as lemuel pitkin wrote (comment 7), it’s not obvious that we should care what people (like W) who discount the study think), is (1) don’t necessarily call them nutters (to their face) for doubting; and (2) point out that the very same statistical tools used to estimate car crash deaths, etc. were used in the Lancet study. Consequently, you must either (a) discount all your previous statistical knowledge in order to discount the Lancet study; (b) accept the Lancet study and your prior statistical knowledge; or (c) point out what is different about the Lancet study from other studies. Those who doubt the study will of course want (c), but then the burden is on them to point out the significant differences in Lancet methodology and the other methodologies that estimated car crash fatalities, etc.

Bobcat, the main difference is that car crash fatalities are taken by doctors right then, not four years later, and reported in developed countries that aren’t war zones, and create records that can be checked. If you gave me a figure on car crash fatalities in Iraq that used the same methodology as the lancet survey, I’d assume it wasnt much better than saying “who knows?” Not because I doubt that people are dying in car crashes, but because the difficulties of gathering data in an unstable country make me extremely sceptical that you could know how many people had died in car crashes with any reasonable degree of precision.

I care less about the people who dismiss the study than the people who decided it’s not big news. Nobody is calling them nutters, but they’re the ones taking the really effective strategy if the goal is to keep the deaths coming.

Suicide is a major cause of death in the US. Some 85 people kill themselves every day. There is none apparent in Iraq. I guess I am interested in a morbidity study of present day Iraq.

If there’s anywhere that reporting bias will be found, it’s likely to be in suicide. But that extends even to official death records in peaceful developed nations, let alone societies where the taboo is much greater.

once again we must ask why Jane Galt is so emotionally invested in minimizing evidence of what is obviously a massive humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq.

She hasn’t yet found a friend who heard an anecdote from a random Iraqi that she feels comfortable with?

The point is not that you can’t ask people about things; the point is that a) the longer ago the event happened, the less likely they are to remember it correctly (quick: what year did Uncle Nate die? Was it 1998 or 1999?) and b) in an unstable country, there are (possibly insurmountable) difficulties in collecting a representative sample. Surveys are notoriously problematic even when they are well designed and administered in a stable environment; people lie, they forget, they don’t show up because they’ve got something better to do, they say what they think the researcher wants to hear, and so forth. That’s why market research is so frequently a massive cluster fuck: think Pepsi Clear or New Coke, both of which had comparitively large and well designed surveys telling the companies to go ahead. This survey had much bigger problems than that; the researchers themselves apparently say, for example, that they didn’t ask certain questions because they were afraid to. That’s a big warning flag.

I don’t doubt that there have been excess civilian deaths. I just don’t think that there is any very good estimate of how many there have been, and given that these estimates are larger than, for example, the entire death toll of the American Civil War (which took place in a much larger population, which much worse supply problems and basically no medical care) I am fairly sceptical of the results of this survey. I’m also troubled by the fact that Lancet surveys on this topic all seem to come out less than a momth before American elections; this points to a certain . . .directedness . . . of the research. That doesn’t invalidate it, but I haven’t been exactly wowed by the methodology either, which is not surprising because the public health field is fairly notorious in that department.

According to the New York Times, the morgue/hospital counts put the upper bound at 200 deaths a day, currently, which is a lot, but much more reasonable than 800+ deaths a day. The study authors claim that their research was validated by death certificates for 80% of the claimed deaths; if we assume that that number reflects the percentage of deaths granted certificates nationwide (a rather heroic assumption, but hey, you’re the one who trusts the study) that gives us, by passive count, a very-very-upper bound of 250 deaths a day, with a bottom bound of about 115 deaths a day by violence. If the death certificates can’t be relied on, then neither can the survey.

When there’s no census or regular household survey, the type of ad hoc surveys done by the JHU team is the best data that there is — and therefore the main source of evidence from countries like Afghanistan, DRC, Sudan, Rwanda etc. If we’re now tossing out estimates based on surveys in conflict or post-conflict countries, a lot of numbers with a lot of zeroes that have been circulated for the last few years are going to have to be revisited. And yet the Central Limit Theorems are amazing things. The sample doesn’t have to be that large to get something that looks like a normal distribution, centered on the population mean. And that’s the case even for questions like “What if someone in the sample didn’t answer question X properly?” If sample size=1, that might be a problem. If sample size =1500, it’s less likely to be.

Spencer . . . where to start? My current personal favourite is the studies showing that banning public smoking reduces heart attack admissions/deaths by more than most studies show first-hand smoking increasing them. Of course, this is based on very small towns, where random variation in admissions swamps every other effect. Cancer clusters are another perennial crowd pleaser; various studies of obesity which neglect to control for latent illness; survey studies which don’t control for the fact that people lie/forget/etc . . .

Jane,

This was not based exclusively on memory. Researchers asked about 90% of those that claimed someone died for death certificates and got them in about 90% of the time. The researchers checked and found no major differences between those that provided certificates and those that did not.

gt–read my comment above. If that’s true, the survey is definitely off, because the death certificate figures are much, much lower than the Lancet study’s.

For those people who smell something fishy about the report coming up a month before the elections: you know, if I were a traitorous librul with an agenda I won’t be throwing out this report at this moment. Especially when everyone’s attention is already fixated on Mike Foley’s groin.

Jane Galt, which part of GT’s comment on the correlation between certified deaths and non-certified deaths do you not understand?

The fact that Iraq is not merely a war zone, but a war zone where the front line is everywhere and where there are more than two sides, seems more likely to produce undercounts than overcounts. There are stories of people burying people next to the house rather than having a funeral, for example.’

I’ve also read stories from towns where reporters almost never go, saying that many areas outside Baghdad are at least as bad per capita as Baghdad.

By now I suspect that a lot of the reports of good news from Iraq are fraud pure and simple, on a par with the babies torn from incubators in Kuwait.

I hesitate to enter this debate given my cock up last time.

However, I think Jane’s got a point with this:

‘a) the longer ago the event happened, the less likely they are to remember it correctly’

There will be, over time, an inevitable under-reporting of the death rate, that under-reporting getting larger the further away in time the period in question is.

Obviously, Remembering the number who died on Monday will be remembered just about as clearly as those on Tuesday, But those who died 30 years ago will not be remembered as clearly as those who died on Tuesday.

I’ve no idea how much this would affect these particular figures, the pre and post invasion timescales not being that too far apart. If, indeed, it would affect it at all.

What I would be interested to know though is whether any weighting at all is given in the calculations for the fallibility of memory over time? Any statisticians?

GT, yes, obviously it does. The civilian deaths are the cost of the war. If they’re 50,000, then probably, over time, that saves lives, since there’s no ugly totalitarian regime around. If it’s 2 million, then that’s a different story. Does it matter to you whether the deadweight loss of taxation is 10% or 90%, or can I just claim the higher number because it sounds good to me?

Jane’s #35 is an example of what I’m talking about. A hip contemporary example too.

The study tried under very adverse conditions to estimate the excess civilian deaths. They gave a number with a very broad range, which was a sign of carefulness but was immediately used against them. Then the opponents started pointing out quite correctly that it’s hard to collect data in the midst of utter chaos, though why utter chaos would lead to the presumption that the death count is too high escapes me.

Theoretically I wish that the lower bound only had been reported, with indications of how it could easily be much higher, but in reality the “skeptics” would then forget that it was a lower bound and pretend that it was an extreme upper bound.

And back to what I said — it’s not about the number. Everything we know tells us that the Iraqis are much worse off than before the war started, and nothing tells us that things are getting better or that we can reasonably hope for them to get better.

But our methodological purists have a job to do.

If it’s 200k or 600K does it make a difference?

Sorry, but there is a huge difference between 200K dead and 655K dead. Why should we give a totally artificial bogus benefit of the doubt to Bush but not, say, Saddam?

Then the opponents started pointing out quite correctly that it’s hard to collect data in the midst of utter chaos, though why utter chaos would lead to the presumption that the death count is too high escapes me.

Good point.

G. Bush has been widely quoted as saying that [he does] “not consider the report credible, and that the methodology used is ‘pretty well discredited.'” I’ve been searching without success for reports of any statistical justification cited by him or White House spokesmen for discrediting the methodology. Did they give none, or has it not been reported?

All wasted breath albeit in a good cause. The “lizard brains”, to use one of my favorite Atrios putdowns, will never acknowledge reality.

He who doubts from what he sees
Will neer Believe do what you Please.
-Blake

I don’t know anything about statistics (as people could probably tell by more earlier posts), although I’m inclined to accept the Lancet study’s figures. From what I know, they are a very reputable journal. Of course, if it’s true that by denying the Lancet study we have to ignore only other war zone statistics–Sudan, etc.–then I think a lot of people will find it much easier to dismiss the Lancet study along with Darfur figures, etc.

Now, people who dispute the Lancet study will often question it out of epistemologically questionable motives–they like W, or they originally sided with the war and don’t want to lose face (even to themselves), or they have so many beliefs tied up with this war’s being in principle a good thing that they aren’t amenable to changing their minds. However, it appears that the Lancet people don’t care for W or the Iraq war. For example, Les Roberts, who I gather helped write the original Lancet study, wrote,

“This impression that the United States is beyond the law arises from several factors: indifference or hostility to international environmental treaties and the International Criminal Court; invading Iraq under unsupportable, and probably illegal, pretenses; and repeated opinions expressed by high officials in Washington that the Geneva Conventions should not constrain our activities in Iraq or in our prisons.”

(See http://www.alternet.org/story/31508/). This might give people good grounds to question the subconscious motives, or sensitivity to evidence, or the Lancet authors. (Of course, no one should care for W or the Iraq war; he is entirely temperamentally unsuited to be in a position of any power, and the post-war has been botched beyond all belief. So, one could quite convincingly argue that, insofar as Roberts is a rational, emotionally well-adjusted individual, he should feel the feelings he does).

I should also add that one person, who is cited as an “expert”, Anthony Cordesman, disputes this new study: “An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group [Iraqi Body Count, which the article notes itself admits that its own methodology is flawed] puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert [Cordesman] was skeptical of the new findings.” See http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2552585.
I have no idea, however, whether Cordesman knows anything about statistics. Here’s bio from CSIS:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2552585.

I should note that I found these links through reading NRO’s The Corner, so you should probably discount them.

Apologies if someone already responded to Jane Galt @22; I only skimmed some of the comments here. Jane asks, “quick: what year did Uncle Nate die? Was it 1998 or 1999?” as if that was the sort of question asked in this survey in Iraq. A much better approximation would be “quick, in Uncle Nate die before or after September 11?” Or probably more likely, “quick, did you father died before or after September 11?” The point is that it’s hardly as if the American invasion of Iraq was just a random date on a calendar, as 1998 or 1999 are. Putting personal events before or after major public events is relatively easy.

“Brendan, I’ve ranted plenty about the Lancet’s brilliant MMR/Autism piece, which has resulted in undervaccination around the developed world, weakening herd immunity and putting adults whose vaccinations have attenuated in serious danger. Is that good enough?”

It certainly does, and that was indeed a terrible piece of work. However, we can look at this slightly more intensely. We can ask, for example, what was the general reaction to the Andrew Wakefield paper amongst doctors, immediately on the publication of this paper? We can also chart the history of the paper from the initial incredulity amongst doctors and statisticians (incredulity amongst statistical illiteroids emotionally committed to the British/US invasion of Iraq doesn’t count)) to the lack of replication data, the conflict of interest stories, and, finally, the retraction of the paper.

Now for this comparison to have force, the implication is that you think that something similiar to this might actually happen, and that, in a few years time, you think it is likely (or at least possible) that the Lancet will actually retract the two studies it has now done, and that their conclusions will become widely ridiculed and rejected by the scientific community (a community, which, to repeat, excludes Glenn “Trust me I’m a lawyer” Reynolds and George “Intelligent Design” Bush).

I just want to note something which may undercut my earlier argument. The reported death rate of Mexico is all over the place, but as I look further more of the reports seem to be in the 5-7 range.

Tim Worstall, it seems unlikely that someone would completely forget a death in the family from four years ago. Mistakes in memory will likely lead to overcounts of deaths in the prewar period because people tend to remember things as being more recent than they really are. Studies have looked at this for crime victimization surveys and found overcounts of 30% or more. For the Lancet study they could check the date on the death certificate, so it would have a smaller effect.

… continued: ok, I looked it up, and my surmise was correct for the middle east.

The numbers I found give death/1000 for

US 8.25
UK 10.18
Canada 7.73
Germanin 10.55

Brazil 6.15
Iran 5.55
UAE 4.26
Kuwait 2.42
Saudi Arabia 2.62

Of course, the highest rates are where you would expect: Botswana 29.36

All I suggest you do now is have your research peer-reviewed and published in a major medical journal, at which point I will consider it worth my time to give some thought to whether it casts doubt on the findings of the John Hopkins team.

‘Published scientific papers with novel findings can sometimes be wrong by a factor of two’ is such a trivially obvious point that it would rejected as banal.

Remember: a factor of two is all it needs to make the headline figure negative.

A question perhaps worth answering is what percentage of novel medical research is more accurate than that.

Re #50: Soru, you really need to read the study. The 600K violent deaths claim in a 40 month period in Iraq is independent of any pre-war death rate evaluation.

Re #40: Tim, the only question relevant to the study’s accuracy claim is whether most people in Iraq could remember whether someone died before or after that war thing they had three years ago. That doesn’t seem too hard: I think I’d remember that kind of event in my life. For 80% of the reported deaths, the certificate would confirm the date in any case.

Re #32 and #24: Jane Galt, your death certificate equation makes no sense. The claim in the New York Times is that an anonymous official said the nationwide violent death count may be up to 200 per day: that would equate to 240,000 over the entire Lancet survey period, btw. This has exactly zero to do with the Lancet’s finding that in an apparently random sample of 12,800 Iraqis, they found 235 death certificates indicating a violent death, and 65 undocumented violent death claims in the same 40-month period.

Given the current estimate of 15K fatal Iraqi casualties (military and civilian) in the actual 2003 war, roughly 15K civilian fatalities caused by coalition forces since according to Iraqi sources, 10K Iraqi security forces killed, 40K dead insurgents, and approximately 40K more a year due to Sunni-Shia strife, assassination, murder, traffic accident, etc., those of us who were actually paying attention were already up in the 200K+ range in our thumbnail estimates before the Lancet study. We’re talking a factor of two or three, not an order of magnitude.

John emerson, I don’t know if it is a bug or a feature, but the current method of warfare makes for longer, less-intense wars than were found in and around WWII.

Fine, Sebastian, so it’s openended.

Actually I already knew that. This is the eternal war against an abstract entity which can never be defeated and can never surrender.

And of course, under wartime conditions we should all support the President and give him a free hand. And under wartime conditions, certain steps will have to be taken which would be regarded as unconstitutional in peacetime.

Gotcha.

We might be causing more deaths in the short run to save deaths in the long run.

…which brings to mind Kevin’s favourite Orwell quotation

If you admonish a revolutionary for the bloodshed he is causing, he will tell you that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Ask where’s the omelet and he will tell you Rome wasn’t built in a day

Eudoxis, re your #70, I suggest you go back and look at the study’s breaking out of non-violent death by cohort.

Among children, the non-violent death rate was exactly the same post-war and in 2002: 0.94 per thousand. Among women and the elderly, the non-violent death rate substantially increased post-war.

Only adult males saw a decrease in their nonviolent death rate: from 1.27 per 1000 per year in the prewar period to 0.87 per thousand postwar.

Even if one assumed adult male non-violent death rates actually rose after war in this group at the same rate as adult women’s deaths did, meaning about two-thirds of non-violent deaths in this cohort have been misattributed as violent, you could still only discount at most about one quarter of that 600K deaths claim on this basis by itself.

Sigh. I’m not trying to argue that things aren’t worse in at least many parts of Iraq than they were before the war. I’m just arguing that this study is unlikely to be correct.

Brucer, the NYT says: “The most recent United Nations figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, was compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue, and from hospitals and morgues countrywide. It assumes a daily rate of about 97”. That seems to be saying that the figures collected from the people who issue the death certificates show about 100 a day dying. Presuming that they are undercounting by some factor, perhaps 20% if the Lancet study is representative, and you get a current rate of about 36K a year, or about 100K dead since the war . . . although since the death tolls have gone up considerably since 2003, that’s probably too high. Michael O’Hanlon, who runs Brookings’ count, is very sceptical because the study is more than 10x the passive counts. While he has no doubt the passive counts are missing people, he finds it unlikely that they are missing more than 90% of the casualties. I find his argumetn pretty convincing, especially since he spends pretty much all his time thinking about this stuff.

Jane, I think people have been asking whether you applied, or would ever have applied, the same keen analytical skills to the death counts from Darfur, Iraq under Saddam, the North Korean famine, the Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Aghanistan under the Taliban, etc. These questions need not be regarded as rhetorical.

The Lancet report did not in any way change my opinion of the Iraq war, and if the number had been 100,000 instead of 600,000 that wouldn’t have changed anything either. It’s a country where no one is safe anywhere (except for Kurds in Kurdia), and where, as a reporter said recently, children being blown up in school is not necessarily news. In other words, the qualitative informations is persuasive enough. It’s the quantifiers who are getting bogged down in this.

In re the Lancet article on Andrew Wakefield’s research on MMR/autism:

It certainly does, and that was indeed a terrible piece of work.

No it wasn’t. It was a perfectly decent case study, it was well written and sourced and the Lancet was right to print it. Dr Andrew Wakefield then threw his own press conference without consulting the Lancet and starting making unsupportable claims. The Lancet should not be blamed for that one.

John Emerson, I’ve never quoted dead in Darfur, etc, AFAIK; and the Cambodian death statistics are, as I understand it, based on official records and counts of the remaining population, not surveys. Estimates of death under the Taliban and so forth would seem to me to be obviously garbage; not only did no one collect numbers, but I doubt anyone could, given the abject poverty of the country. My objection to life under the Taliban is the same objection I have to life under Saddam and in Darfur; the qualitative reports of a horrifyingly repressive regime, not the quantitative figures of deaths, which have been pretty conclusively, IMHO, proven to be garbage. (Not least because Saddam was apparently inflating the numbers to whip up sympathy for ending sanctions.) A lot of people died under Saddam’s regime. A lot of people are dying now. Undoubtedly Figure A is bigger over some time horizon, while Figure B is bigger over some other time horizon. But I have no idea what the numbers are, or what the relevant time horizon is.

Michael O’Hanlon, who runs Brookings’ count, is very sceptical because the study is more than 10x the passive counts.

Brookings relies upon IBC numbers until January 2006, after which it uses the UN numbers. The 2006 UN numbers are already twice those of the IBC for the same period.

John Emerson appears to be on the mark: for most critics, this is all about grasping for a number that intersects the boundaries of plausibility and comfort: “think of a number and double it, because it can’t be too close to the IBC undercount.” And then disregarding that number, because — shrug — no-one really knows, do they?

Thus it becomes a duel of ‘how much death are you prepared to accept?’ (Or ‘how much death are you prepared to admit?’) Haggling over individual consciences to see if you can prick them.

Saying ‘well, this number is unlikely to be correct’ is a neat way to avoid thinking about what number is likely to be correct. I don’t like those who desperately want a six-digit moral cudgel. But those who want it defined as a nice fuzzy ‘some’ are much more morally troubling.

Observers of “Jane Galt” know how systematically sloppy and misleading she is with statistics and facts, always in the direction of supporting current Republican policies. A few more random corrections:

1) U.S. population at the time of the Civil War was roughly similar to Iraq’s population today (perhaps 10% greater including slaves). U.S. civil war casualties were not 600,000, but several hundred thousand higher with civilians included.

2) her citations of “bad” public health research methodology were all studies done with completely different methods than the Lancet study at issue. The Lancet study is a population survey; these are not perfect but they are the standard and accepted source of statistical knowledge about society.

Re: 76, Brucer, you need to look at Table 3.

The non-violent death rate, estimated at 5.4 prewar, drops to 4.5 in the first year after the war, then to 5.0 in 2005. It only rises in 2006. In 2006 the non-violent death rate rises to 6.9%, much more in line with what one would suspect. If you’re only looking at average mortality rates, it’s easy to miss the dip in the first two post-war years.

There are a lot of people who won’t believe that water is wet unless they see it expressed quantitatively, but they’re loony.

If such people exist, then you may be assured that they have my deepest contempt. But from where I stand this debate does not appear to be a showdown between Emersonian humanists and quibbling numbers guys: the problem, I think, is not people raising technical objections to quantitative assertions, but when this is done highly selectively, or in bad faith, or is motivated solely by ideology.

Engels, by doingnow we’ve been talking about statistics, and not the war in Iraq.

I do not actually agree with Jane, I don’t think. She certainly didn’t respond to me.

There are a lot of people who believe that what you need to decide arguments is Facts, especially Statistical Facts. Sometimes it is, but not here.

I think that “Who cares, Jane. Go home!” would have been a reasonable response to her distraction.

John, I agree that many of the objections which have been offered have been frivolous and I also believe that not all arguments turn on facts. But I do not see this issue as a battle in an ongoing war between geeks and belle lettristes. Many of the geeks are on our side, and many of the belle lettristes are on the other. And I think, in the end, you do have to want to know, as exactly you reasonably can, the number of people who have died in Iraq.

Bigmacatack, what are your thresholds? To me the difference between 100,000 and 600,000 is insignificant.

Qubbling about these numbers is mostly done by defenders of the war, and there’s an implied belief that 600,000 is a terrible number, but that some lwoer number wouldn’t be. What is that lower number for you?

For me, it’s considerably lower than 100,000, especially given that there’s no sign of improvement and the war seems likely to drag on for a decade or more.

As I’ve noted somewhere ot another, some of the people pissing and moaning about the 600,000 figure, if scratched, might reveal that they’re in the “Kill em all” camp anyway. But what they mean is, “Kill em all and don’t admit that’s what you’re doing”.

Engels, you really can get sucked into discussions of facts which are not critical, and you really have to resist than. This is not a critical fact, unless it is claimed that the real number is under about 50,000, maybe 20,000. “Far too many” is sometimes as much detail as you need.

Oh wait. Never mind. I think I see it now. Duh!

I don’t like that labeling.

John – You are having this side discussion on two concurrent threads so I’ll let this be my final post on this one. We do not need even the approximate death toll to know that Iraq was a disaster. But the approximate death toll is still a “critical fact”.

r4d20 – I don’t think I understand your point. You’re not seriously claiming that an “unpalatable” result should, all by itself, raise the suspicion that the research was conducted in bad faith?

Let’s look on the bright side: if you’re a single Iraqi heterosexual male between 18 and 30, and get out of this war alive, your chance of getting a date has increased by a statistically significant proportion. I don’t see any gratitude expressed on the streets of Baghdad for that.

Yeah! I get to settle a dispute between Tim Burke and Jane Galt. (David Kane)

And next week: we call in Ghengis Khan to “settle” a dispute between Al Gore and Ayn Rand.

I messed up the blockquotes above. Sorry. The quoted passage should be:

What went wrong this time? Perhaps the rush by researchers and The Lancet to put the study in front of American voters before the election accomplished precisely the opposite result, drowning out a valuable study in the clamor of the presidential campaign.

…

Because he [Les Roberts] had found in many other wars that malnutrition and disease were the most frequent causes of civilian deaths, he was “shocked,” he says, that violence had been the primary cause of death since the invasion.

“On the 25th of September my focus was about how to get out of the country,” he recalls. “My second focus was to get this information out before the U.S. election.” In little more than 30 days, the paper was published in The Lancet.

Mr. Roberts and his colleagues now believe that the speedy publication of that data created much of the public skepticism toward the study. He sent the manuscript to the medical journal on October 1, requesting that it be published that month. Mr. Roberts says the editors agreed to do so without asking him why.

The rest is me.

You didn’t mess them up, David. There has been a problem with this site for some time which means that it’s only ever the first paragraph of any text within blockquote tags which is correctly displayed as a quotation.

Eudoxis, it very clearly does. It’s Table 2. On Page 3.

I’m equally baffled both that you could a) claim to have read a paper and not discern that; and b) that you think I would make that up myself for some incomprehensible reason.

ragout, that’s pure and simple trolling, because you know very well the answer to that question.

Oops, sorry, see that’s answered in the next thread.

Ragout is a smart guy. One has to assume his comment is sarcasm.

Tim W, I have a post on my blog on telescoping (dragging older events into the reference time frame):

Also, the NCVS interviews the same household every six months over a three year period. The first interview turns up about 50% more crime than subsequent ones. The NCVS believes this is caused by “telescoping” and discards the first interview.

Oh, unless daniel was playing along. Someone should explain that part of the joke to me.

Of course I was being sarcastic. In hindsight, I probably should have emphasized that Saddam was still in power in 2002, and used more exclamation points.

I decided that D^2 was probably playing along with the joke and saying that of course Ragout knows who would be naive enough to doubt that Iraq normally has 120,000 deaths a year: innumerate right-wing idiots. Or maybe he was calling me a jerk. That’s also pretty likely.