Crusader War College

One of the methods used by Leftists to gain and keep power and influence is to exploit webs of implicit trust. This post shows an example of this.

There was a study published by the British Medical Journal Lancet that stated that there were 100,000 more deaths in Iraq than normal as a consequence of the Second Gulf War. The paper has been critiqued before, but the most devastating one is reproduced at Michelle Malkin's blog at the link above. In it, David Kane uses statistical analysis on the data cited in the original paper to show that the "confidence interval" was incorrect. The confidence interval is a measure of how different the given value is from the "norm", and thus a measure of how significant the difference is.

While I am no statistics wizard, I perused the paper at the link above, and noted that Kane correctly uses a Bayesian analysis, because nobody really knew ahead of time what the baseline risk of dying in Iraq was before the war. After some analysis, Kane notes that the confidence interval that was published is obtainable if the authors left out the statistics they gathered in Fallujah. However, because the authors of the Lancet paper have not released the raw data or the detailed analysis methodology, one cannot really review their methodology or double check the data or the results.

That bolded part is all that you really need to know about the validity of the study. Forget about the complexity of the math: One of the core requirements of science is replication and verification, so a refusal to reveal the data or the methodology after the paper is published, so that it can be double checked, is a gross violation of those requirements. While there are people who do not think that this should be enough to disqualify the paper or its authors, and reject as unproven its conclusions, that merely shows that they are ignorant of how real science works.

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