Just happened across your blog and I thought I needed to clear something up. The "95% degree of statistical certainty" is the pertinent phrase. Its a tad misleading here. It doesn't mean that there is a 95% certainty that there were 151K civilian deaths in Iraq. It means that if they were to repeat this exact study with the exact same methodology, there is a p5% chance that the mean value would fall within the given range. So it says next to nothing as to how accurate the study is. So without seeing their methodology and hard data(which, to my knowledge, hasn't been relased) its hard to say what it means. On a side note, I would question the validity of most any study that relies solely on interviews and surveys. Entire books have been written on this subject.
In addition, I don't find much of anything contrarian here. Nothing but links to news articles most likely supporting your particular views. Without commenting on their merits, I think theres a lot to be said for actual dialogue, but thats not really happening here
2 comments:
Just happened across your blog and I thought I needed to clear something up. The "95% degree of statistical certainty" is the pertinent phrase. Its a tad misleading here. It doesn't mean that there is a 95% certainty that there were 151K civilian deaths in Iraq. It means that if they were to repeat this exact study with the exact same methodology, there is a p5% chance that the mean value would fall within the given range. So it says next to nothing as to how accurate the study is. So without seeing their methodology and hard data(which, to my knowledge, hasn't been relased) its hard to say what it means.
On a side note, I would question the validity of most any study that relies solely on interviews and surveys. Entire books have been written on this subject.
In addition, I don't find much of anything contrarian here. Nothing but links to news articles most likely supporting your particular views. Without commenting on their merits, I think theres a lot to be said for actual dialogue, but thats not really happening here
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