Wanted: statistically literate journalists

Matthew Yglesias slams Gregg Easterbrook for this asinine commentary on the recent cluster sampling estimate of deaths in Iraq:

The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It's gibberish.

As Yglesias points out, Easterbrook seems to have no understanding of statistics:

The authors used a statistical method that, as they perfectly well knew, doesn't generate especially precise results. That's why when they calculated the confidence interval for their estimate it turned out to be rather wide. The 654,965 number is the middle point of the confidence interval. The true number could very easily be thousands higher or lower than that, but the true number is extremely likely to fall somewhere within the band they laid out. This isn't hard stuff and it certainly isn't gibberish.

So how does Easterbrook have a resume like this?

In addition to writing Tuesday Morning Quarterback, Gregg Easterbrook is the author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" and other books. He is also a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Comments

[Bryan Clifford]

Hi,

I read Lancet, Nature and, occasionally now, Scientific American, and may share their publisher's contempt for statistics as a method by which, as they say, "figures lie and liars figure".

Perhaps Lancet was making fun of "statistically literate journalists" who, when logic and reason suggest, for example, that The Invasion of Iraq is perhaps an imperialist/terrorist act of a Fascist Government, revert to, say, accurate "body counts" of interest to psychotics, by their own definitions, who're suffering from various "world visions" and, they claim, think globally?: Obviously paranoid schizophrenics with delusions of grandeur as with adult aged children in public (funded) office in The USA today?

Literate human journalists, I was taught, (Oxford) attempt tell/write the truth?

Perhaps you should anal-eyes where you live in that regard? Or, as I suspect, no "Sane Publisher" will hire you, so, instead, you haunt the internet with drivel?

Cheers,

Bryan Clifford Bs D (Oxford)
-Publisher of The CBC Press
-Founder of SSWIGS, The Sane Seniors World Institute for Global Studies.

who has to get ready for work now. . . in the "real world"