tlambert | December 15, 2003Kevin Drum links to the latest installments in my exposure of Lott's sock puppetry and generously nominates me for Best Single Issue Blog in the Koufax awards. In a clarification of the rules, John Lott's blog was ruled ineligible for "Best Group Blog" because "A group blog requires more than one actual person."
tlambert | December 11, 2003 Some commentators have not been persuaded that the reviews by "A reader from Swarthmore, PA USA" were really by Lott. Fine. I rummaged around in Google's cache and found older versions of the reviews of the books by Kevin Hassett, Robert Ehrlich and Cook and Ludwig. In those versions the location of the reviewer is not Swarthmore (Lott's home), but Washington, DC (Lott's workplace). Why did it change?
I experimented by reviewing the nearest book to my computer (Game Programming Gems 2) and changing my location from Maroubra to Sydney. Not only was my location given as…
tlambert | December 10, 2003 Links from Chris Mooney, Atrios and Buzzflash. Ted Barlow wonders what John Lott has to do to get fired from the AEI. "Sadly, No!" helpfully suggests that with two more personalities Lott can start a boy band. John Quiggin asks "why so few individual conservatives and libertarians have dumped Lott". Kevin Drum says that Lott was stupid for continuing with the sock puppetry after he got caught once.
In fact, Lott didn't even pause. On Jan 22 he confessed to using the Mary Rosh sock and wrote "I shouldn't have used it". On Jan 23 his other sock was back posting…
tlambert | December 9, 2003These are extracts from stories about homicides in England found by searching Factiva for "self-defence and (burglar or robber)".
No Charge Over Death Of Burglar.
By Duncan Campbell Crime Correspondent. 23 January 1996 The Guardian A businessman will not be prosecuted over the death of a burglar he tackled at his home, the Crown Prosecution Service announced yesterday.
The service said there was insufficient evidence to bring any charge against Hungarian-born Niklos "Nick" Baungartner, from the village of Ockbrook in Derbyshire.
Mr Baungartner confronted Robert Ingham,…
tlambert | December 5, 2003Congratulations to John Lott for making number 16 on Jesse Taylor's list of the Twenty Most Annoying Conservatives of 2003. Well done!
tlambert | December 4, 2003Mark Kleiman has some apposite words from Master K'ung for Lott, while Chris Mooney calls me a "super sleuth". I'm just in it for the scooby snacks.
tlambert | November 24, 2003 Bob Somerby nails Bernard Goldberg's repetition of Lott's false claim that the media deliberately concealed defensive gun use in the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law.
tlambert | November 22, 2003 In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott's number and the only paper out of step was the Wall Street Journal. So, in Lott's 11/19/03 entry on his blog he draws the obvious conclusion: every other newspaper got it wrong, and in amazing display of chutzpah, he demands that the New York Times correct its "error": A recent article in the New York Times got some of it's facts completely wrong about murder rates in Iraq. The…
tlambert | November 12, 2003 I was reading the normally sensible Steve Bainbridge when I came across this post that seems to have come from the planet Zebulon in the galaxy Warblogger. Bainbridge offers his interpretation of an intelligence memo in parallel with Kevin Drum's. I was struck by the complete disconnect between Bainbridge's interpretation and the actual words of the memo.
I emailed Bainbridge to see if I could get an explanation. With his permission, I post our correspondence:
TL:
Your interpretation of: "Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to…
tlambert | November 9, 2003 Lott is at it again. In a Tech Central Station column he claims: Over 90 percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon stops an attack.
I suppose we should be glad that rather than his 98% estimate based on a fictional survey, or his 95% estimate based on a survey that gives a different number, Lott is now advancing a number that actually comes from a survey that was really carried out. Unfortunately, his 90% number is based on a sample size of just seven gun users. This sample size is too small to produce any meaningful estimate, and it is…
tlambert | October 29, 2003 Kevin Connors admits that he has been "quite remiss in following the efforts to debunk Prof. Lott's work", but unfamiliarity with the case isn't going to stop him from having an opinion on the matter. Connors takes issue with Brian Linse's description of Lott's work as fraudulent:simply because a theory is flawed, that constitutes no grounds for labeling it fraudulent.
If Connors had been following the case against Lott he would know that it isn't just that his work is flawed (that was shown long ago) but that it is dishonest. After correcting his coding…
tlambert | October 25, 2003 Michael Maltz has sent me some comments on the severe problems data Lott used for his "More Guns, Less Crime" thesis. Note that this is a different set of problems to the coding errors that Lott has been dodging recently.
Also of interest is Lott's response to the severe problems---he ignored them and accused Maltz of fraud.
tlambert | October 24, 2003
by Michael Maltz
Anyone who has looked closely at the data used by John Lott in coming up with his “findings” in More Guns, Less Crime (MGLC) would come to the same conclusion, MGLC = GIGO. First, the data are so full of holes as to be unusable for the analyses he conducted. Second, Lott badly miscalculated the crime rates. Third, he ignored a major discontinuity in the data. [And fourth, as Ayres and Donohue have shown, even if the first three points were not valid (which they are), he did it wrong.] It’s a bit technical, so bear with me.
1. Gaps in the FBI Crime Data.
Lott used the FBI-…
tlambert | October 16, 2003 On August 18, in his interview with Chris Mooney, when he was asked if there were coding errors, Lott replied:There are a couple minor errors, the data is on, the data is available for anybody to look at, anybody can go and download the data, I've made it so that people can go and easily replicate the results, if you went to the website...
Two days later Lott admitted that there were "a few hundred data entries that contained mistakes". Now when Lott talked to Mooney, he must have known how many errors there were, since he had corrected them…
tlambert | October 15, 2003[Note: This was an attachement to a Nov 17 posting to firearmsregprof on Nov 17. My comments are in italics like this. TL]by David B. Mustard
I take issue with two points of Jim Lindgren?s representation of my statements about John Lott?s 1997 survey, as posted on instapundit.com.
Claim that I backed off my comments about what I knew about Lott's survey during a previous conversation with Frank Zimring
I did not back off my comments that I made to Frank in our first conversation (which I believe was about July 1, 2002) when he called me to ask some very specific questions about my…
tlambert | October 15, 2003 Chris Mooney has a couple of comments on Lott's response to his article.
You can also read comments from Nick Confessore on Tapped and Atrios.
Update: And Randy Barnett repeats his call for an independent panel to assess the merits of this controversy.
tlambert | October 14, 2003 Lott has posted some criticism of Chris Mooney's article.
Let's see how many errors he has successfully identified: 1) Paraphrasing claim from the Chronicle of Higher Education stating that the "coding errors had not been reviewed by a third party." I was never asked by the Mother Jones reporter about this reference. In fact, after the Chronicle piece was published I immediately e-mailed David Glenn at the Chronicle to point out that two different points had been merged together in his piece.
It's hard to see what Lott's beef is here. The…
tlambert | October 14, 2003 Mark Kleiman writes:
What seems to me even more striking, though Mooney doesn't mention it, is the difference in the way the two are treated in the mainstream press: while no news article about Bellesiles could fail to mention the controversy about Arming America, Lott---who made up an on-line persona who praised him to the skies and claimed on his behalf academic appointments the real John Lott never received, and who still claims to have done a survey with 2000 respondents which reached an utterly implausible finding and of which no evidentiary trace can be found---still gets treated as…
tlambert | October 13, 2003 Mother Jones has posted Chris Mooney's interview with Lott. Definitely worth reading. First read Mooney's commentry and follow the links to the transcripts.
tlambert | October 13, 2003Chris Mooney has published an article on Lott in Mother Jones. The whole article is well worth reading, but the way that Lott kept changing his story about the coding errors is particularly interesting:
In the face of this evidence, how can Lott continue to claim the coding errors don't matter? In an interview conducted on August 18, Lott told me that he had posted "corrected" tables on his website for all to see. But when I downloaded Lott's "corrected" version of the contested table, it showed the same numerical values as that of Donohue and Ayres---…