LancetIraq
tlambert | October 26, 2005Les Roberts
comments on the shoddy reporting of his study:
I thought the press saw their job as reporting information. Most of the pieces discussing our report were written to control or influence society, not to relay what our report had documented. For example, the day after the article came out, Fred Kaplan, a defense correspondent for Slate magazine reported that, "Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We…
tlambert | October 20, 2005Seixon is no great shakes with statistics, but he sure can do things with a metaphor:
I swear, commenting on this blog is like a game of hide-and-seek with the elephant somewhere in the room. Lambert and his friends giggle every time I open up a cupboard and don't find the elephant, even though the elephant is somewhere to be found. In the process, they keep making false statements to distract me and make me look places where the elephant can't be found
tlambert | October 2, 2005In an earlier post I
observed that "Seixon does not understand sampling". Seixon removed
any doubt about this with his comments on that post and
two
more
posts.
Despite superhuman efforts to explain sampling to him by several qualified people
in comments, Seixon
has continued to claim that the sample was biased and therefore "that the
study is so fatally flawed that there's no reason to believe it."
I'm going to show, without numbers, just pictures, that the sampling
was not biased and what the effect of the clustering of the governorates was.
Let's look at a simplified example. Suppose we…
tlambert | September 21, 2005Daniel Davies has a new post on Lancet denial, with some particularly egregious examples. The worst example is by Harry of Harry's Place whose "discussion" of the study is to make a statement that he must surely know to be false:
Dsquared is a serial bullshitter who has never given a straight answer to any question.
Davies also links to a transcript by Seixon of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, where Seixon touts his own debunking of the Lancet study. Seixon's debunking fails because he makes basic errors in his statistics, but at least they are original, so let's look at where he goes wrong…
tlambert | September 15, 2005In his debate with George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens said:
If you really believe the crazed fabrication of the figures of 100,00 deaths in Iraq ...
you can simply go to my colleague Fred Kaplan's space on slate.com.
He's a very stern and strong critic of the war, a great opponent of mine.
We've had quite a quarrel about it.
He's a great writer about science and other matters.
It's a simple matter to show this is politicized hackwork of the worst kind.
The statistics in that case have been conclusively and absolutely shown to be false
and I invite anyone to check it. Everything I say has…
tlambert | September 9, 2005MediaLens has a two part article (part 1 part 2) on the shoddy press coverage of the Lancet study. They describe how Mary Dejevsky, senior leader writer on foreign affairs for the Independent dismissed the study because:
personally, i think there was a problem with the extrapolation technique, because - while the sample may have been standard for that sort of thing - it seemed small from a lay perspective (i remember at the time) for the conclusions being drawn and there seemed too little account taken of the different levels of unrest in different regions. my main point, though, was less…
tlambert | September 7, 2005One of the few things that Andrew Bolt got correct in his original criticism of the Lancet study was the sample size, 988 households:
Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.
In a later article, Bolt got the number wrong:
Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households.
Since the two numbers differ in just a single digit Bolt's erroneous 788 number looks like a simple typo, but when the mistake was pointed out to him,…
tlambert | June 4, 2005 One of the many factual errors in Parkinson's piece on deaths in Iraq was the claim that the Lancet study only surveyed 788 households (actually it was 988 households). I did a Google search to see who else had made the same error, and what do you know, it first appeared in a error-filled May 25 article by Andrew Bolt:
Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. The UN surveyed 21,668 -- or almost 30 times more. You figure which is more accurate.
Parkinson's column was drafted just two days after Bolt's, and like Bolt he failed to mention that the ILCS only covered the first year of the…
tlambert | May 30, 2005 As my readers know, the reason why the Lancet study and the ILCS give different numbers for deaths in Iraq is because the studies measured different things over a different time periods. Of course, that fact isn't going to stop pro-war columnists from claiming that the ILCS refutes the Lancet study. Here is Tony Parkinson writing in The Age.
How many people, for example, still swear blind that 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war in Iraq? For some, it has become an article of faith that this is the cost of an illegal war of aggression waged by a ruthless imperial power.
For this…
tlambert | May 15, 2005 Jim Lindgren agrees with me that the ILCS supports the Lancet study. He also raises some concerns about some of the numbers in Lancet study:
I find it somewhat odd that heart attack and stroke deaths are up 64% in the later period, and accidental deaths are up more than 3-fold. And live births are up 33% in the later (War & Post-War) period, even though post-War pregnancies would not lead to live births until 9 months had passed, so the rate of having children would likely have to have jumped substantially more than 33% in the last half of the later period. Further, household size…
tlambert | May 14, 2005 The results of the Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004 have been published. (Earlier discussion of the study is here.) As Iraqi Minister of Planning Barham Salih said, "This survey shows a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq." The study shows that living condition have deteriorated following the war with, for example, chronic malnutrition increasing from 4% to 8% and access to safe water falling from 95% to 60% in urban areas.
The survey also had a question on war-related deaths that provides more support for the Lancet study on excess mortality. Question HM01 (…
tlambert | April 24, 2005 Socialist Worker has an interview with Les Roberts about his Lancet survey. There are comments on the interview on Crooked Timber and Shot by Both Sides. Roberts makes the point that a NEJM study that surveyed US soldiers on whether they had killed a non-combatant in Iraq tends to support the findings of his study.
This story also seems to support the Lancet study:
A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.
Tommy Franks, the former head of US…
tlambert | April 11, 2005 Australia's own version of Baghdad Bob offers the following comments on the Lancet study (slightly paraphrased):
"The Lancet, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies."
The Lancet is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"
Update: After dismissing the Lancet study because it was based on a "Survey of a Thousand Households", Blair declares a Conservative victory in Canada based on a survey of 1,125 Canadians. Odd.
tlambert | April 6, 2005 Via William Sjostrom I find that Mike Adams has distilled Lancet denialism down to its essence. He quotes from the New Scientist's description of the Lancet study:
"The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by coalition forces has lead to the death of at least 100,000 civilians, reveals the first scientific study...of almost 1000 households scattered across Iraq."
You read that correctly. A scientific study "of almost 1000 households" determined that we killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq before the November election.
Believe it or not, Adams is a criminology professor and he can't conceive how…
tlambert | April 2, 2005 Via commenter JoT we have an interview with Les Roberts about his study. Roberts mentions how surprised he was that was a such a large increase in violent deaths. From his previous studies in other war situations he expected that there would be an increase in deaths, but mainly from indirect causes like disease.
The interview was prompted by a report to the UN Human Rights Commission by Jean Ziegler about the increase in malnutrition in Iraq after the invasion. (It seems to based on last year's UNDP study discussed here.) Needless to say, any report that the invasion might have made…
tlambert | March 31, 2005The Lancet has published two letters on the Iraqi Mortality Study. In the first letter, Stephen Apfelroth claims that cluster sampling is an invalid methodology. This criticism was dealt with way back in November. Apfelroth is wrong. Cluster sampling is a widely used methodology and all the experts in the area consulted agreed that Lancet study used it appropriately. Apfelroth also raises some other objections that are mostly just speculations that the sampling was not done correctly. Roberts et al sort him out in their reply. One thing in their reply that is worth noting is that they…
tlambert | March 30, 2005 Alastair Mackay (AMac in comments) has posted his criticism of the Lancet study at Winds of Change. Unlike many of the critics, Mackay actually knows some statistics, so he cannot find fault with the methodology. All he can do is try to make a mountain of a molehill by criticising the way the study was written up, claiming that the report is "misleading" in the description of the results with and without Falluja. Now, as I have noted before, there was one sentence that was unclear about the treatment of Falluja, but this is nowhere near sufficient to support Mackay's claim that a correctly…
tlambert | March 28, 2005 After accusing the researchers and the Lancet of fraud and treason, Shannon Love is back with another accusation. The latest crime he accuses them of is rounding things off:
One easily graspable example in the Lancet study's dishonesty is the key sentence in the Summary, the one repeated in the media world wide, that pegs the "conservative" estimate at 100,000 excess deaths. The actual given estimate is 98,000. What pure scientific purpose is served by rounding the number up to 100,000? There is no technical reason for doing so. They chose that number because a big, round numbers stick in…
tlambert | March 24, 2005 Daniel Davies comments on the current outbreak of Lancet denialism, including Shannon Love's latest effort which Love describes as a "Fisking". ("Fisking" is a term bloggers use for especially lame posts.) Love gets taken to bits in the comments to his post; I don't need to add anything.
From Glenn Reynolds
Reader Peter Malloy emails: "The inability to sense of irony among the anti-war left never ceases to amaze me. The way this group clings to the 100,000 deaths figure makes clear that they WANT it, desperately, to be true. This group of people, ostensibly against the killing involved…
tlambert | March 23, 2005 Lila Guterman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about the dismal reporting of the Lancet study:
Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press's near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate. ...
Reporters' unease about the wide range…