tlambert | February 25, 2004 Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I've put all of his reviews together on this page. It's an impressive body of work, with eighteen five-star reviews of his own books and ten anonymous pans of rival's books.
Two of the newly discovered reviews aren't very interesting---they just repeat stuff about how wonderful Lott's book is, but this one is almost poignant:Powerful book that sets the…
tlambert | February 23, 2004 After finding some clues on Amazon's Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott's reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was because this review was posted anonymously from Mary Rosh's Amazon account (it's from Philadelphia, just like Mary's one). and when Amazon deleted all of Mary Rosh's reviews they also deleted the anonymous ones. Very well written, solid researched book, 30. Januar 2000 Rezensentin/…
tlambert | February 22, 2004 When I saw the story about the Amazon.ca unmasking anonymous reviewers, I took myself over there to see what I could find. Well, they had fixed the glitch, but I noticed that for some reviews, the location given for the reviewer was different on the Canadian site. This difference lets me more more certain that Lott has reviewed his own books, and also helped me find three more Lott self-reviews.
Amazon's Canadian and US sites treat the location of the reviewer differently. On the US site, all the reviews by a reviewer have the same location---the one given for the most…
tlambert | February 22, 2004 A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it "baloney". One interesting thing I've noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the conclusion that he is full of it. In this post modisch details how dreadful Milloy's arguments are. While in this post Myria, who seems generally sympathetic to Milloy, concludes:Frankly FOX should be embarrassed to have this poorly thought out criticism on their site.
tlambert | February 19, 2004 There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.
Michael Peckham writes "Milloy's criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. "
John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with…
tlambert | February 19, 2004 Seems like everybody is trying out the Gender Genie, which analyses a piece of text and guesses the gender of the writer.
So I gave it Mary Rosh's writings to analyse. The verdict? Male. Well done, Gender Genie!
tlambert | February 17, 2004 When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn't sure that this review was written by Lott: If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of years. When the second edition came out I finally gave in and got it (for $9.60 I couldn't argue that the price was too high). Anyway, I am only sorry that I didn't read this book earlier. As an academic and a person who has been somewhat anti-gun, I had two reactions to the book...
The only reason…
tlambert | February 15, 2004 Apparently, authors have been using reviews at Amazon.com to anonymously praise their own books and pan rival books. Who knew? It seems a glitch at Amazon's Canadian site revealed the names of all the anonymous reviewers. And yes, I checked and it's fixed now. I also checked Google's cache and archive.org. If you have looked at Lott's book at Amazon's Canadian site in the past week, then check your browser's disk cache---it might contain something interesting. I was actually looking at the reviews at Amazon's main site last week, because Greg Kopp had posted in…
tlambert | February 13, 2004 Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I've also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk "junk science".
Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy's site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he "debunks" you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is "junk science" is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might…
tlambert | February 10, 2004 A while ago I wrote how Lott had seriously misrepresented NCVS data and given dangerous advice when he claimed that in robberies and assaults passive behaviour "is by far the most likely to result in injury". Lott has now posted a response where he falsifies a table in an attempt to prove his point.
Here's the table Lott posted to support his claim:
Percent Injured after Self Protection Action
Robbery
Assault
Any SP with gun
7.7%
3.6%
Chased, tried to catch O
9.6%
9.0%
Ran/drove away; tried to
4.9%
5.4%
Screamed from pain, fear
22.0%
12.6%
Threatened O without weapon
5.8%
13…
tlambert | February 9, 2004 I wrote earlier about ozone depletion deniers John Ray and Sylvain Galineau. I've found another such denier and his name is John Lott. Lott wrote a positive review\* of Environmental Overkill, a book written by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. In his review, Lott calls ozone depletion an "environmental myth" and a "scare story".
Now, Lott's false statements about ozone depletion might have been forgivable if Ray had made a good case against ozone depletion, but the quality of the science and scholarship in her work is appalling. Robert Parson has written a…
tlambert | February 7, 2004 The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by Kimberley Strassel who writes about Bellesiles: Mr. Bellesiles, when asked to explain, provided ever-more outlandish excuses: that his notes had been lost in a flood, that his Web site had been hacked, that he couldn't remember where he'd found certain documents.
which lambasts Bellesiles for his latest defence, a pamphlet entitled "Weighed in an Even Balance" and which is critical of Soft Skull Press for publishing the pamphlet and reissuing Bellesiles' discredited book. I don't think Bellesiles' pamphlet successfully…
tlambert | February 6, 2004 Kevin Drum is rather annoyed than the LA Times has published an op-ed by Lott. Lott's argument is that if someone doesn't answer a question he can attribute to them whatever answer is most damaging to them. If we applied the same standard to Lott, then since he never answered my question as to why he removed the clustering correction from his model, we could assume that the answer was "I was trying to cook the results".
tlambert | February 5, 2004 I while ago I wrote on John Ray's claims that environmentalists were wrong about ozone depletion. I think it is quite clear that subsequent research has vindicated the concerns of scientists about ozone depletion. The refusal of Ray to admit that the environmentalists could possibly be right about ozone depletion despite overwhelming evidence is telling---he believes that environmentalists are wrong, irrespective of the facts in any case.
I've found another ozone hole denier. In this post, Sylvain Galineau dismisses the ozone hole as "propaganda". I tried…
tlambert | February 4, 2004 Helland and Tabarrok's paper 'Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime"' has been published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy. Their objective was to correct for serial correlations in the crime data. I explained earlier how, if crimes rates in adjacent counties tend to behave in the same way, results could wrongly appear to be statistically significant. There is a similar problem with crime rates in the same county in two successive years tending to be the same. Helland and Tabarrok use a technique (placebo laws) that deals with serial…
tlambert | January 30, 2004 Lott has on op-ed on gun carrying by professional athletes. As usual, he gets his facts about guns and crime wrong. Lott claims that NCVS data shows that guns are the safest means of self-protection: Take robbery or assault. The Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey has shown for decades that providing no self-protection is by far the most likely to result in injury. Even actions other than carrying a weapon, such as screaming or trying to attract attention, are safer than passive behavior.
Let's look at what the National Crime Victimization Survey really shows.…
tlambert | January 26, 2004 Kevin Drum is dismayed that the Economist has printed a letter from Lott:
Contrary to your claims of the Americanisation of armed robbery in Britain, one could only hope that robbery in England and Wales was truly becoming Americanised ("You're history", January 3rd). The International Crime Victimisation Survey shows that for 2000, the latest year available, the robbery rate in England and Wales was twice America's rate.
Equally tellingly, your figure shows that armed robberies stopped falling in England and Wales in 1997 and started rising…
tlambert | January 26, 2004 Glenn Reynolds approvingly links to another poll that he claims providesMore evidence that the British public is taking a tougher line on crime than the British government.
Of course, Reynolds yet again fails to take notice of the fact that it is yet another meaningless on-line poll which tells nothing useful about what the British public thinks.
Also, Michael Peckham has some more comments on the infamous BBC phone-in poll.
tlambert | January 23, 2004 Yet another columnist has demonstrated profound ignorance of opinion polling. Scott Norvell writes about the meaningless BBC phone-in poll (discussed earlier here and here): Britain's chattering classes sure can get their knickers in a knot with the will of the people offends their liberal sensibilities.
A phone-in poll does not represent the will of the people in any way, shape or form. Norvell compounds his error by leaving out important details about the shooting by Martin, like the fact that the burglar was shot in the back while fleeing…
tlambert | January 22, 2004The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a site that provides journalists with a list of "credible, articulate scholars" to consult about gun policy questions. It used to contain a listing for John R. Lott Jr, who was available to give his special insight into "Women and Gun Issues" as well as other gun issues. The site's maintainer, Eugene Volokh, invites visitors to tell him "how this guide can be made more useful". I don't think anyone should be recommending Lott to journalists, so I wrote to Volokh suggesting…