PJ Media

To Sam –

Yep, you cite two lines out of 28 that I wrote as if that were my statement in its entirety. It seems that you’re intimidated by references to things like academic credentials and intelligence, which, I’m guessing, probably has something to do with your own insecurities about your appalling lack of such things.

I wonder, did you also read 1/14 of the Lancet study before coming to your conclusions about it? Did you even get that far? Sam, I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you have not yet read this study, and I’ll bet you another hundred dollars that you haven’t read ANY firsthand scientific study ever in your life. The problem is, scientific papers tend to be rather dry and complicated, and dumb people like you would rather be off watching the ol’ TV, being told what to think.

Sam, in one of your earlier posts, you bet a quarter that the authors would avoid, at all costs, publishing supplementary data in non-summarized form, and you didn’t understand why the scientific community was not clamoring for this. As a member of the scientific community, I’ll answer this question: I have absolutely no interest in reviewing huge spreadsheets of someone else’s data that hasn’t been analyzed or summarized. No one else in the scientific community is, either. The file exists someplace as a spreadsheet on the authors’ computers, and they are 100% obligated to share that file with members of the scientific community who are interested in seeing it. The fact that you don’t know this shows how little you know about how the scientific method works. In reality, it would add nothing whatsoever to the findings of the study to look at all the raw data. This is why scientists aren’t banging down the doors to have a looksie at it. There’s a reason why people invented statistics computer programs: things like descriptive statistical outputs and tables and graphs are useful for doing such crazy things as summarizing your data using means and confidence intervals. As a reader, I’m perfectly content to let the statistics programs analyze the data, let the authors assemble that data into charts and graphs, and read a concise, detailed description of what methodology, exactly, the authors used to gather their data. The Lancet study was truly outstanding in this regard.

If the authors of this study made up their data, wouldn’t it be just as easy for them to report that made-up data as a spreadsheet with thousands of entries? If you think their data is made up, come up with a substantive argument that’s based on something. Don’t come up with a conclusion first that’s based only upon what your emotions wish were true and then invent facts to support that conclusion. When I see a person display such constipated thought processes, I come to the only rational conclusion there is: “That person’s got poopsies for brainsies!”

To anyone who would like to actually read the Lancet study, it is available for free download as a PDF here:

http://radio.indymedia.org/uploads/thelancet12oct2006iraqsince2003.pdf