Clearly you think that “disregard for existing research” should be taken to have a special meaning of sociology only – after all, you yourself have shown a flagrant disregard for existing research into relative risks and mortality rates, but it didn’t exactly stop you in the past did it?

This research is ignorant and mendacious, just like their last “research” (which also replicated existing work without proper recognition). Ignorant and mendacious research, David – what a surprise to find you supporting something like that!!

The classic finding I recall is that most soldiers don’t fire their weapons. Has that stood up to subsequent tests?

The canonical citation for this claim is SLA Marshall in Men Against Fire. See page 50 or search for “well-trained.” Marshall gives an estimate of 25%.

English in On Infantry provides a footnote on page 154 which, after citing Marshall, claims that “The figure may even be as low as 15%.” (Note that the link I provide is to the revised edition. Being an old Marine, I have the original, published in 1984.) I can’t find the same claim in this (1994) version.

Alas, I don’t know the literature but this seemed relevant.

Thus the evidence shows that the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be “conscientious objectors”—yet there seems to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject. In his book War on the Mind, Peter Watson observes that Marshall’s findings have been largely ignored by academia and the fields of psychiatry and psychology.

But they were very much taken to heart by the U.S. Army, and a number of training measures were instituted as a result of Marshall’s suggestions. According to studies by the U.S. military, these changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam. Some modern soldiers use the disparity between the firing rates of World War II and Vietnam to claim that S.L.A. Marshall had to be wrong, for the average military leader has a hard time believing that any significant body of his soldiers will not do its job in combat. But these doubters don’t give sufficient credit to the revolutionary corrective measures and training methods introduced over the past half century.

Then again, there is some evidence that Marshall is wrong, even about WW II. The Washington Post claims that “Since at least World War II, studies purporting to explore how readily troops pulled the trigger—S.L.A. Marshall’s “Men Against Fire,” for example—have aroused controversy and been scored as anecdotal.”

Perhaps there is a military historian in the CT community who can clear this up.

I don’t know where you got your quote from, but it isn’t in the paper linked to here. Time for you to break out some italics and start obfuscating, David.

Please read Kieran’s post.

This one has all the ingredients: a few economists, some physicists, a couple of papers on arxiv, power laws …

He links to two papers. I was quoting from the first one. The part of post #41 when I write, “the first paper Kieran links to” should have clued you in to this. Perhaps not. Would italics have helped?

And, again, if you read what Kieran wrote, you would understand that “disregard for existing research” has nothing to do with research on Iraq. Kieran is talking about research in political science, sociology and so on about the general topic, not about Iraq (or Columbia) in particular.

In the case of Iraq, they have excluded 13000 observations which support the death squad model. And these aren’t insignificant in the scheme of things – they themselves claim that there are 3333 events in the time period under consideration, but they admit that these 13000 excluded observations are from “low intensity” events (which the authors claim are criminal). So the 13000 excluded deaths correspond with anywhere between 3000 and 9000 events, all at the low-intensity, high frequency end of the spectrum.

Including the data would bollocks up the fit of their theoretical model, therefore bollocksing up their claim to be intelligent observers of conflict and infinitesimally reducing the seriousness of their thinktank.

And Abb1 was right on the money – their model is straight out of finance maths.

Also, the “quote” you give in your previous comment does not exist in the paper that Kieran links to. They don’t mention Richardson by name, the first sentence of the paper is about 9/11, and the references to Richardson et al are buried as superscripts “1-4” in this sentence on page 2:

Previous studies have shown that the distribution obtained from ‘old’ wars, 1816-1980, exhibits a power-law with α=1.809

I don’t know where you got your quote from, but it isn’t in the paper linked to here. Time for you to break out some italics and start obfuscating, David.

The point is not just to cite the beginning of a research program and then jump over everything else. So, I would have them engage with the subsequent literature, together with submission to a relevant peer-reviewed journal.

1) Who could be against engagement with the literature? Not I! This issue is one on constraints and priorities. Consider the first paper Kieran links to. It is 10 pages long, plus supplementary materials. But the first page is the abstract, the last page references and the figures take up around 3 pages. So, there are 5 pages left for everything else. How much space does Kieran expect them to devote to “engag[ing] with the subsequent literature?” By my count, they give it about 1/2 a page or 10% of the space. Isn’t that reasonable? They provide 10 references. Are there any that Kieran objects to? Any that he would remove and replace with something else?

2) Does Kieran not think that they will soon be submitting (or already have) to a peer-reviewed journal? They are academics! Of course this will be (or has been) submitted. Presumably Kieran insists on the right to determine what is a “relevant” journal. Perhaps some guidance is in order. It is the editors job to determine which articles are “relevant” to her journal, not Kieran’s. I suppose that if this article is published in some physics journal, Kieran will object while if the exact same article appeared in, say, American Political Science Review, that would be fine. But why? Isn’t the editor of the physics journal as qualified as Kieran to decide what is relevant for her journal?

I think that many/most of the points that Cosma makes on this topic are spot on in general and, perhaps, with regard to this article as well. I have not dived into the details. But neither, it seems, has Kieran! He just seems to assert that anytime anyone other than a political scientist or sociologist writes on war or writes in a way that is different from the style/procedures used in these fields, there is something wrong. There may be! But Kieran needs to make that case, not just assert it.

Kieran closes with:

What irks in these cases is the seeming disregard for existing research, the avoidance of a distribution channel where reviewers might make one aware of that research, and the presence of a decent PR division and journalists who like to write stories about how the boffins are discovering amazing, new, never-before-seen truths about society.

Kieran has no meaningful evidence that these authors demonstrate a “disregard for existing research” given the space constraints they face. Indeed, he seems to (mostly) agree with them on what the most important references are!

(And these are the same people who, though they have identified a 10-fold increase in murder in 1 town in Iraq, would have us believe that the lancet figures are wrong…)

The BMJ has an article this month pointing out the extent to which passive surveillance systems fail, but the CERAC mob are going to avoid this issue like the plague because they don’t want to use data they have to collect themselves. So they use their dodgy surveillance data here, and pretend they’ve found a power law in Iraq even though there is a differential bias against a multitude of small events being reported.

These people are cowboys.

by the 1950s, economists were working out theoretical models of stochastic processes that produced such distributions (for example, Simon and Bonini on firm size in 1958).

That would be Herbert Simon (Ph.D., University of Chicago Department of Political Science, 1943) I presume (I think that we are beginning to see a pattern ;) )

So what are the alternatives to a power-law distribution? And how strong are the tests for distinguishing them?

I’m glad you asked those questions. (Well, you did.)

There are very few economists these days who think their subject is physics-like. The high tide of that sort of modernism was in the 60s and 70s, and it wasn’t a very high tide even then. It’s mainly a meme put about by non-economists.