If you haven't looked at the new section 4 in Lindgren's report, you should.
In his latest response Lott asks:
"There is also a question as to why people have waited so long to ask for this additional information when people have known about the lost data for years."
A few people have known about the lost data since the Sep/Oct 2000 edition of The Criminologist came out. I only heard about it when Duncan contacted me in August last year. Most people probably only heard about the problem when this story broke.
In the summer of 2002 Duncan asked for more information about the survey because he discovered that Lott had continued to put forward the 98% figure over and over and over again.
It is, I suppose, conceivable that Lott might have forgotten that his 98% figure was not properly supported, but a responsible scientist would have withdrawn the figure as soon as was reminded of this. Of course, a responsible scientist would have also mentioned the other surveys that contradicted his in the first place. And a responsible scientist would not have advanced the figure in the first place, since the the sample size it was based on was too small for a meaningful estimate. Instead, even after his admission that he had no proper support for the 98% figure, Lott continued on his merry way, citing the 98% figure again and again and again. His only concession seems to have been occasionally adding the qualifier "up to". (Reading this page will make you up to 98% smarter!)
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