Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study.
In 2004, Lancet falsely claimed that there have been 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq, and then in 2006, the number had climbed to 650,000…Today, Michelle has posted Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study.
Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.
An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.
July 26, 2007 - 01:28 PM on July 26th, 2007
Imagine that.
The debate is over, just like global warming!
July 26, 2007 - 01:47 PM on July 26th, 2007
Ted,
Was it Tofu or Eben arguing how many Iraqis were killed? I know Mattias eats up the negative propaganda to bolster his lack of critical thinking skills.
July 26, 2007 - 02:00 PM on July 26th, 2007
“Was it Tofu or Eben arguing how many Iraqis were killed?”
God PCD- I don’t know. I get all the gay anti-war pro illegal immigrant talking head liberals on this site confused. They chatter the exact same talking points, so it is impossible to keep them sorted.