Dawn Of The Davies
Remember the David Kane paper we mentioned that supposedly refuted the Lancet study? The one that Malkin published and did that little dance about, and that Glenn Reynolds linked to, and so forth?
If you hit control-F9 on any of our computers, it pops up a list of phrases meaning ‘Malkin has egg on her face.’ F-9 is one of those keys with a shiny center and a dirty ring around the outside, like ‘S’ or ‘R’ or F-12 (which sends a bot to Bartleby.com and pops up title puns on Mark Noonan’s name). It saves us time that can be spent on life’s worthy pursuits, such as gourmet cooking, Frisbee-catch at the dog park, and GTA: Scarface, not to mention making fun of Glenn Reynolds.
Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies lacks our technical resources and has had to respond to the Kane paper by hand.
Shorter Daniel Davies
Alice in Wonderland and the Lancet study
Above: Normally quite civil
- Holy God, I have had it with this cargo-cult nonsense. Among other problems, this extremely bad paper literally assumes a negative Fallujah where everyone is immortal and the dead can come back to life.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
In comments there, we’re treated to the spectacle of Malkin’s anointed statistical debunker, one Shannon Love of the blog, Chicago Boyz, displaying that he’s bone ignorant of any difference between the notion of ‘a drop in the rate’ (e.g., of deaths) and that of ‘a negative rate’ (e.g., of deaths), and then pratfalling into the argument that people who are dead can totally come back to life in a lot of different ways without actually, you know, so-called “returning” from the dead:
You appear to be arguing that the failure to observe mass resurrection in Iraq invalidates the [Lancet] study
No, I am arguing that study as outlined in the paper could have detected whether the mortality rate improved, stayed the same or worsened. If the study could not do this, then it could never detect whether mortality had improved.
If you think real hard, I am sure you can think of way that people come to be alive beyond return from the dead. Les Robert et al were in fact smart enough to structure their study to capture this somewhat less than mystical effect.
Posted by Shannon Love · July 27th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
The next commenter suggests that it might be zombies, although we’re not well-versed in stats and haven’t read Les Roberts‘s epidemiological work on zombie infestation.
But see, here’s what we were saying before. Ever on cue, Michael Fumento dons his wicker headphones:
Above: The Basil Fawlty of right-wing junk science
So much for the Lancet’s “massive Iraqi civilian death” study
By Michael FumentoRemember the Lancet study in 2004 claiming that “about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” and that “Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths?”
I wrote on this as soon as it appeared, observing that several indicators showed it was a piece of crock.
Not to interfere with the flow here, but are guys like Fumento and Thomas Friedman getting so many of their quotes from foreign cab drivers that they’ve started to curse in amusing malapropisms?
“So Friedman say, ‘Aah, is no good. This is a fuck!’ And I say to him: ‘You are bullshit! Is not a fuck. We go see my friend.’ And he say, ‘Piece of crock. Your friend is a bunch of assholes.'”
Sorry; let’s continue.
But others did much more in-depth analyses, including Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz. He has now found out via Michelle Malkin and Instapundit that a forthcoming study by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, shows just how wrong the original study was. Love notes among other things that that “if the Falluja cluster is included in the statistical calculations, the confidence interval dips below zero” meaning that it loses statistical significance. Without statistical significance, the findings mean nothing,
There are two possibilities here.
1) Fumento has an odd notion that an ‘in-depth analysis’ means a paragraph summarizing a paper’s claims and saying ‘booyah!’ while making basic statistical whoopsies.
2) Fumento doesn’t understand the Lancet study, the Kane paper, the Love response, or anything else about the issue, but saw something that flattered his prejudices at Michelle Malkin’s site and decided to blow some pompous gas around, confident that no one would notice the worthlessness of his opinion.
Number Two starts off looking pretty good. And indeed, we soon find out that the issue of Iraqi civilian deaths is really not about Iraqi civilians being dead, but all about Michael Fumento — because the Kane paper (which Fumento can’t even read) shows that he was right all along:
I claimed at the time the “100,000 death study” was pure politics (It came out right before the presidential election) and intentional deception on the part of the authors and the Lancet editor himself and there’s no reason to think otherwise now.
Perhaps Mr. Fumento can explain about the zombies. We yield the floor expectantly to Mr. Fumento.
You may want to update your post, Gavin. dsqaured has embraced his inner winger.
(Looks at Fumento pic) Man, what is it with these nutters and facial hair anyway? I mean how many of these guys have those seventies mustaches or those dorky little beards? Seems like an awfully high percentage compared to the general populace.
Michael Fumento: I can has Brainz?!!1one!!
All right! Michael Fumento! It’s great to see that guy bubbling up to the surface of whatever lava flow he lives under. Still, I’m a bit disappointed that he wrote four entire paragraphs without saying ‘fuck you, you stupid doodoohead dummy jerkfaces’ even once. Maybe his rabies is starting to ease up.
It’s pretty simple, and sadly predictable.
Wingnuts hate science.
And science doesn’t particularly want to hang out with wingnuts.
So they each call their friends and make up nasty things about each other.
Wingnuts say science is a big liar, and thinks she’s all that ’cause she’s smart.
Science says wingnuts don’t care about clothes, or hair styles, or methodology or rigorous peer review or anything!
Pretty soon their moms are going to take away their cell phones…
mikey
Michael Fumento? Michael Fumento?!?! Man, I thought he went out of style after it was discovered that heterosexuals did in fact get AIDS, back in, what, the 80’s? This is like finding out that Yaz is having a comeback tour.
I am sure you can think of way that people come to be alive beyond return from the dead
Mein parser ist jetzt geborken.
How is this pic NOT of Omar Sharif circa 1977?
“That is such a piece of crock!”
You don’t know how fast that is going to enter the lexicon at my house. Trying to express outrage without giving the first grader interesting new words to use at school is always such a trial. Thank you, Michael Fumento, for showing us the way.
ROFL: Basil Fawlty of right-wing junk science?!!? That is full of win.
And BTW, does Glenn Reynolds do anything but link to shit? “Heh” doesn’t count, but it does make me want to slap him sometimes.
Now, come on, they’re not saying that there are Zombies, only that Jesus came and brought the dead back to life.
Be sensible, now.
Shannon Love is possibly the most annoying commenter on the internet (I exclude Hall of Shamers seixon, xlrq, and Per). Seriously- it is like trying to determine the relative risk for death in Allied bombing in WWII by sampling, but claiming the variance introduced by including Dresden means you can’t figure anything out.
Sorry El Cid, I’m sure the wingnuts would never think that Jesus would bring Muslims back to life. We are left with zombies or Horcruxes. But since Horcruxes require a death to create, I guess all those brought back by that means wouldn’t count anyway.
Zombie Reagan came back from the dead, in the form of Mitt Romney. (Or Fred Thompson. Or Sam Brownback. Or …)
So I don’t see why thousands of Iraqi civilians couldn’t come back from the dead.
Liberals. Hmf.
That’s just it! The MSM just isn’t reporting how many Iraqi Christians there are and how they’ve all been coming back to life recently!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3526386.stm
And if a covert Jesus resurrection team has been bringing back all these Iraqi Christians (“Chaldeans” and “Assyrians”), that’s so important that you’ve got to count each resurrected Iraqi Christian for, like, two or three deaths, so the Lancet is wrong!
“Piece of crock,” there’s a dude from New York at work who says that. Sometimes with great heat, trying, I think, to hold back from busting out one or two of the seven filthies in our office environment. Which is more self-restraint than I can muster. But anyway I suspect it may be a regional thing.
The funny thing is, as Kane says in the comments at Deltoid, his paper doesn’t really dispute that 100,000 died violently. In response to the question from one of the commenters: “Given all of your hand waving, David, I just wonder how many Iraqi civilians you think have died in what was an is an illegal, catastrophic war conducted on the basis of lies and deceit.” Kane writes:
“As to Jeff Harvey’s charming question, the more that I study this topics, the more convinced I am too trust Jon Pedersen’s judgment: 100,000 excess violent deaths.”
As has been pointed out by others, Kane should, really, emphasize that over at Michelle Malkin’s site. If he wants to keep his scienctific cred.
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
Good heavens! What shall I do with my piece of crock?
Pinko: If you like Shannon Love on Iraq, you’ll love Shannon Love on global warming, the latest liberal science scam.
Now that is a lovely piece of crock…
it was a piece of crock.
Hmmmm…..This is making me wonder about something.
I’m fond of reading mystery novels, and there’s a series that is one of my favorites, a police/legal procedural with great characters and funny, witty dialogye. They were written by a famous accomplished lawyer….only it was revealed after 14 or so books that they were actually ghost-written by his cousin. So the 15th, 16th, and 17th books have come out and they are the most god-awful crap you’ve ever read this side of Kaye Grogan; sophomoric, formulaic, with a black vs, white good vs. evil morality, with a decidedly right-wing point of view, rants against Political Correctness and the biased media, and hostile depictions of women, people of color and Muslims.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, in one poorly-edited sequence (he changed publishers, too, they seem to have a lack of editors in the office), the author “it [the legal case] was a load of crock.”
Can it be a coincidence? What else does Fumento make a living doing? And why are wing-nuts such shitty writers? Is Scaife or the Heritage Foundation running a writer’s colony somewhere?
Whhops, I think I left out the part where the ghost-writer BROKE with the author of name, and now the books are being written by someone else. Does that make more sense?
I think it’s outrageous that one would get taxpayer rewards from the NEA for putting the Bible in a toilet, and felony charges for putting a Koran in a toilet.
Where’s the ACLU here? Where’s the supposedly pro-“free speech” left?
They’re either useful idiots for those who want Sharia in America, or they support it.
I got no clue what Ruppertor the Robot is beeping about.
There are all kinds of statistical analyses, any model that posits a possible negative value (zombism) for a characteristic that must be a positive integer (death), is inappropriate. The good news for Mr/Dr Kane is that he can probably rerun his dataset with new specifications. The bad news for the wingtards is that its likely to show what anecdotal evidence shows, that shitloads of people are dying in Iraq, most by violence, but also from a degraded/chaotic social structure. A social structure we(USA) promised to repair four years ago. off-topic, but how does o’reilly get away with saying the left is hate-filled, when Chad Castegna’s bestest girlfriend is sitting next to Bill O? Why doesn’t Olbermann use it?
Right on, Gary!
But could you do me a favor? I might get into a discussion with a real, live “liberal” and I’d have to get to “Sharia in America” from “Bible in a toilet” in a logical and rational manner. You seem to have left out a few steps, and I just hate it when those smug lefties point out “non-sequiturs,” as they call them. So help out another typical Republican here. Do it again with enough of the steps included that it would make sense to rational people.
Yeah Gary, teh left’s complete lack of interest in some jerk vandalizing school property is tantamount to our hatred of free speech and our love of sharia law.
Although to be fair, this post at hot air did give me some handy advice:
Godspeed my friends. Godspeed.
Typical Republican. Do we have to draw you a map?
McGovern, 1972: “I want to pull out of Vietnam in order to encourage the fall of the world to communist control. And as an addendum, wouldn’t shari’a be neat?
Carter, 1978: Also, included in my budget is a proposal to throw out the constitution and substitute rule by Shari’a. This shouldn’t really be controversial. I expect bipartisan support on this.
Gloria Steinem, 1980. Feminism is great, but, in the end, Shar’ia is greater. It’s the real thing. I’m gettin’ my burqua today!
Jesse Jackson, 1984. When my family is on the road, we always buy Shari’a flakes. Good and tasty, and full of prohibitions of usury. Mm mm good!
Susan Sarandon, 1989, at an anti capital punishment rally. Of course, I am only against capital punishment the American way. What I really really support is stoning to death adulterers!
Hillary Clinton, 1994: My socialized health care proposal, which would entail torturing doctors and lowering standards of health care drastically while millions have to queue up for tonsillectomies and flu shots, is only the first step. The second step, of course, is instituting al Sijastani’s interpretation of shari’a as the law of the land. And don’t get me started about ta’wll’! Bill and I have always believed that it is best to behead heretics.
Given this evidence, isn’t it funny that the MSM has not made more of this virulent strain in the American equivalent of the Communist party? But no, cover up, cover up. Luckily, brave reporters like Michael Totten of Pyjamas media are uncovering these and other facts which the so called liberals can’t deny. Is it any wonder they are in a panic, and making up polls showing 75 percent of the American people oppose our war against shari’a in Iraq – when actually it is 75 pecent for! Luckily, the landslide victories that gave the GOP an overwhelming majority in congress in 2006 (again, covered up by the media, but brilliantly brought to light by Michael Yon, embedded with the Weekly Standard, division 10) are driving Shari’a back into the bottomless pit of hell from whence it came.
Where’s the ACLU here?
July is the month that all card-carrying ACLU members are obliged to report to a hollowed-out mountain in Uzbekistan for their annual Stalinist mind-control sessions. They’re almost done.
That’s what they want you to think…
Thanks Gary. That brings to mind a question for all you republican mouthbreather trolls and tools. I understand you get the daily talking points faxed from RNC headquarters, and then you go out and repeat them everywhere you can think to do so. But here’s the question. Do you actually READ them? I mean, if they don’t make sense do you say to yourself “hmm, maybe I’ll just tank this one, it’s kind of stupid”? Or if you are going to post them on a lefty blog thread, do you consider that perhaps it would be more effective if the topic of the thread was at least remotely connected to that given talking point?
Or, more likely, is it just some kind of reflexive ideological diarrhea where you spew a point, wipe yourself off and move on? I’m actually curious about how this works, because, so often, you look like an idiot with tourettes, and I’m interested in how the magic happens…
mikey
What is the mystery series you were reading? It sounds good.
How is this pic NOT of Omar Sharif circa 1977?
It’s not. It’s a pic of his nephew Mamdouh, y’know, the one with the used car lot in Heliopolis.
Ok, heh. Er, um. I don’t get it. Someone please explain the methodology and statistical analysis regarding this new study and the Lancet study.
Please use baseball references.
Actually, Pinko Punko, it is much, much worse. It is like looking at a study of the risk of bombing by the Allies, pointing out that Dresden, being an outlier, has been excluded, and saying HAH! If Dresden HAD been included, it might say anything! It might even say that you were LESS likely to get bombed and more likely to get ice cream!
Basically, they admit that they don’t understand statistics, but are willing to call it a draw.
—Master wingnut watcher John Emerson
July is the month that all card-carrying ACLU members are obliged to report to a hollowed-out mountain in Uzbekistan for their annual Stalinist mind-control sessions. They’re almost done.
Actually, the ACLU hired University of Phoenix to develop an online version of the mind control course, so now most of us ACLU just do our sessions via the Wifi while sipping our lattes.
Sorry, Fair Trade lattes.
And while Shannon Love can be annoying, I’ve seen far worse. I dare not name them, lest they appear.
I dare not name them, lest they appear.
Come now, thoreau, at least give us some clues as to where to look.
Oh, now, J — surely you already know where to look.
BTW, I’m with the Notorious P.A.T. — I want to know whose shamystery novels g’s been reading. I’ve a feeling, based on the way g presented the story, that I should already know about this literary scandal. Sadly, I do not.
I only comment at a few blogs and forums. Hit and Run has had some pretty annoying commenters.
Is Sharia in America anything like Wig in a Box?
Emerson is right.
The best explanation of what Kane is doing wrong is the bus one.
You are judging the average number of occupiers of cars on the freeway. So you sit and count. One in this one, two in that. And you come up with a mean occupancy.
Suddenly, a bus goes by.
Kane is saying that the bus’s having so many people in it makes it possible that even though your sample has shown you that the average number of occupants is, like, two, you have to consider that the true rate of occupancy might be as many as twenty or as few as, erm, minus twenty.
And Love is saying that excluding the bus is dishonest because, erm, Saddam might have killed just as many people in that quiet backwater the day before the invasion without the liberal media reporting it.
Actually, Love is just saying absolutely anything to try to muddy the waters. What’s very enjoyable is the skewering he’s getting from Cyrus Pinkerton.
Oh, now, J — surely you already know where to look.
Yes and no. Yes for the far-out wingnut sites frequently pilloried here. No for other sites that don’t get much attention from left-leaning comedy blogs.
Now J— the amateur troll ethnographer is off to go lurking at Hit & Run. Thanks, thoreau.
The worst Hit and Run commenters haven’t been around much lately, so I don’t know if you’ll find very much there, J.
God willing, you’ll find very little. It’s better that way.
What is the mystery series you were reading? It sounds good.
The author is named Robert K. Tanenbaum. The first 13 or so books are great. The last 3 suck.
Kane is trying to use the NFL’s quarterback rating metric to evaluate Barry Bond’s Home Run ERA, and then uses the result to claim that Barry’s batting average might be BELOW zero.
Can’t get much more confused than that, can ya? 🙂
Oops, left this out of the blockquote:
Fuento grew the moustache thinking he might pass for Omar Sharif.
Michael Fumento?! Hell–what’s he been smoking?
[ rimshot! ]
I’ve already mentioned this in the original Sadly thread, but wotthehell, I’m gonna lay it on y’all again. A good whinge is worth repeating.
This Kane did his PhD in political economy, and his degree in philosophy and sturph. Statistician he ain’t.
Now despite being a mathematician, I am also not a statistician. However, the prudent non-statistician bloody well refrains from writing academic bloody articles on topics they’re only vaguely aquainted with.
I’d imagine that Kane is just as qualified to challenge the original authors’ epidemiological qualifications as their statistical ones.
Hmph.
Oh, and Herr Doktor: this cranky comment doesn’t mean you’re compelled to keep silent on matters on which you have no PhD. Merely that if you write an academic paper on matters on which you have no PhD, I’ll be compelled to laugh immoderately at you.
I’m sure I just saw a rodent whizz by. Excuse me all, time for chasin’ things.
A plethora of assholes got you down? Try sendahole.com.
this cranky comment doesn’t mean you’re compelled to keep silent on matters on which you have no PhD. Merely that if you write an academic paper on matters on which you have no PhD, I’ll be compelled to laugh immoderately at you.
I have to take issue with this, if only slightly.
It is possible, during the course of PhD studies into a given topic, to acquire a certain level of expertise in separate-but-related areas – certainly enough expertise to publish in that related area.
For example, I can totally see how one could acquire a high level of competence in statistics from studying economics, under certain circumstances (full disclosure: I myself have a master’s in the subject, and while I know economists who could probably pull it off, I personally would never dare consider myself qualified to even being writing a pure statistics paper. My PhD work has been in another field entirely).
However, that certainly doesn’t mean such intellectual cross-training is automatic. From what I do understand about Kane’s paper, it seems like this is an example of a far more common phenomenon – that of talking out of one’s own ass.
So ultimately, your laughter seems justified regardless.
This Kane person is teaching at Harvard? I’m smart enough to see the red gaping hole in his argument. So why am I not teaching at Harvard?
Geez, they’ll just give PhD’s out to anybody these days…
There, y’see? This is why I love it here. In my life, real highly educated people won’t let me join in any of their reindeer games. I get smarter just reading Sadly, No every day…
mikey
they’ll just give PhD’s out to anybody these days…
You’re talking about Thomas Sowell, aren’t you?
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
[…] been giggling about this for a couple of days. I intend to use each of these, frequently and with great gusto: Not to […]
It speaks volumes for this blog and its readers (And I find that insipid bloggers tend to have insipid readers) that most of the comments about my article, which I will be revisiting using the new data, is about . . . my former mustache. The Kane paper raised no bodies. It made two major salient point. First, once the Fallujah data are included the confidence interval drops to the point where the Lancet data is no longer statistically significant. Second, the Lancet authors refuse to release their dataset to outsiders. That’s just not done. What are they hiding, geniuses?
It speaks volumes about you that you don’t know the difference between a web site and an e-mail address.
But seriously, here’s a little education into the ways of Sadlynosians:
It speaks volumes for this blog and its readers (And I find that insipid bloggers tend to have insipid readers) that most of the comments about my article, which I will be revisiting using the new data, is about . . . my former mustache.
No, we just don’t think you’re worth engaging. You’ll find that people here are quite intelligent (many much more than I). They simply don’t take the likes of you seriously, and they realize the futility of trying to engage wingnuts like you in serious debate. So, they (to my great mirth) find it more satisfying to mock you—and for the rest of us reality-based folk, laughing and the catastrofuck created by the right wing gets us through the day.
What are they hiding, geniuses?
Obviously they’re hiding the fact that the Iraq war is going really really well in all areas and was a terrific idea in which all decisions were perfect.
It also speaks volumes that you chose to respond at the snark blog rather than at the one referenced. Go tell Davies how wrong he is and maybe next time we’ll comment on photos without moustaches just to make you happy.
Get that Fumento freak some universal mental health coverage stat!
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
[…] Fumento mockery has been outsourced to Gavin M at Sadly, No!. […]
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