Lott
tlambert | March 25, 2011John Lott is at it again. This time he accuses Chris Brown of misquoting him when in fact Lott's post had been quietly corrected after Brown pointed out that is was wrong.
This seems to be the same behaviour that got him into trouble over his mystery survey. Rather than concede that he had made an error when he wrote:
"If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."
Lott invented a survey of his own that he claimed produced the 98% number, even though that was mathematically impossible.
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 | September 22, 2003 Paul Cella writes about Lott:
My amateur and incomplete (and, if you insist, predisposed) sense is that Mr. Lott has roundly disarmed his often-strident critics with the scrupulousness of his research.
Fortunately, Wes Little sorts him out in comments and Cella ends up conceding:
Alright, Wes: you win. I had altogether forgotten about Lott's shadiness when I posted the link. If I had remembered the scandal, I surely would have looked for someone else to adduce on guns. It is also unfortunate that the reviewer I link to failed to mention it.…