Man behind Iraq Lancet Study is Discredited.

[unozero]

n a highly unusual rebuke, the American Association for Public Opinion Research today said the author of a widely debated survey on "excess deaths" in Iraq had violated its code of professional ethics by refusing to disclose details of his work. The author's institution later disclosed to ABC News that it, too, is investigating the study.

SOURCE

 

[Tagaziel]

Hardly discredited.

 

[unozero]

don't you stare at my Hamster like that you sick ****.





(I kid)

 

[Absinthe]

Although I don't find it difficult to believe the number of deaths claimed by the report, its accuracy is completely suspect if the methodology is not divulged.

 

[Laivasse]

This doesn't mean he's been 'discredited' in the slightest. What it means is that the AAPOR have claimed that someone who is not a member of their organisation has violated their own ethics code - quite why this ethics code should apply to Burnham is not made clear. What's also not made clear is why an 'Association for Public Opinion Research' are suddenly so interested in the way a non-member conducted a mortality survey, which should have little to do with their area of expertise.

The media mangling of the facts in this one is wearisome. The ABC article was written by someone who is a member of the AAPOR, and so allows such suggestive terms to creep in as 'highly unusual rebuke' (unusual how?) and one-sided treatment of facts. The BBC article on the same issue reports that the Iraq Ministry of Health estimated 150,000 deaths by 2006, when the number was actually 400,000 (including 150,000 violent deaths). And yet the usual suspects are swarming over the comment sections of these, claiming that the Lancet survey was 'extreme-left media fraud!!' - pretty hilarious tbh. Does the tinfoil hat go on over the stetson/stars&stripes bandana, or underneath it?

If you're really frothing at the mouth for something to report on, wait until the John Hopkins school concludes its own review, which I strongly suspect with completely vindicate Burnham. You never know though, there might emerge some evidence of the vast radical-left-wing scientific conspiracy which includes the chief advisor to the British MoD...!

Although I don't find it difficult to believe the number of deaths claimed by the report, its accuracy is completely suspect if the methodology is not divulged.

The methodology has largely been divulged, to my understanding, not least in a lecture made by Burnham at MIT about how it was done. The AAPOR has not been specific about what has not been divulged to it.

 

[Solaris]

I think the report is nothing more than a crazed fabrication:

Here's an article explaining why by IraqBodyCount

And a very interesting commentary on it by Christopher Hitchens

 

[Laivasse]

I think the report is nothing more than a crazed fabrication:
...
And a very interesting commentary on it by Christopher Hitchens

Your hero, Hitchens, doesn't seem to agree.

But I see no reason in principle why anyone who endorsed the liberation of Iraq, and who opposes the death squads of the Baathist/jihadist "insurgency," should want or need to argue that the casualty figures are any lower.

Indeed, the most his criticism of the Lancet report amounts to is weak fallacious fluff. He questions the very idea that non-violent or non-coalition-attributable deaths could be said to have happened 'because of the war'. That this is tripe should be self-evident to anyone.

No, Hitchens doesn't have anything meaningful to say about the Lancet report and he more or less admits it. His main point seems to be the usual 'any amount of deaths would be worth it because we are mighty moral heroes' mixed in with a little of 'if we didn't pull the trigger then we didn't kill them'. He says that the Lancet numbers are 'almost certainly inflated' (couldn't even convince himself to drop the 'almost'...), yet seems incapable of giving evidence for that almost-certainty. 'Very interesting'...? Only if it validates pre-conceived notions that the reader wishes to maintain.

Here's an article explaining why by IraqBodyCount

As for the IBC assessment, maybe you should take note of what they say about themselves as a caveat before they even start to comment on the Lancet report:

Substantially more deaths have occurred than have been recorded so far, but their number still remains highly uncertain.

'Than have been recorded so far' - worth noting here is that the IBC count is limited not only by being a count of deaths that 'have been recorded so far' but by the fact that they have to have been double-sourced...!

The rest of their article consists of slight variations on a similar theme: 'if this is true, why doesn't passive surveillance note that [whatever]'. The fact is that passive surveillance (waiting for a death to be reported and noting it down) isn't the best practise for areas such as Iraq. Similar methods to the one used by Burnham&co also give figures of millions of dead in Congo, yet I don't see the queue of people desperate to poke holes in that survey - could it be that's because there's less of a political stake involved...? The IBC also draws a comparison to the ILCS survey figure which was much lower than the Hopkins team's figure - however there are compelling explanations for that, including the fact that the ILCS was not explicitly concerned with the mortality rate in its survey, and that it is likely to have overestimated the pre-war mortality rate (both the 2004 and 2006 Lancet surveys found a consistent value for the pre-war mortality rate which was much lower than the older rate used by the ILCS).

The Lancet figure is, nevertheless, an estimate, and so when you bowdlerise it into further averages - that is, to say that 'if it were true, you'd be seeing x dead on average per day!' - it's not surprising that it produces figures which seem to jar with our own pre-conceived notions of what should and shouldn't be right. It is, nevertheless, THE best and most scientific assessment so far of the toll that the war has taken, plus it gels with the later survey by the ORB (who revised their own findings and still came up with a a figure of 1million+).

 

[Tagaziel]

Watching Laivasse tear Solaris apart tickles pleasure centers in my brain.