Tim Worstall

More on That Lancet Report

Tim Lambert reports that (some) of the background work and calculations on the second Lancet report about excess mortality in Iraq are being released. There are, however, some conditions:

The data will be provided to organizations or groups without publicly
stated views that would cause doubt about their objectivity in
analyzing the data.

Err, you can check what we’ve done but only if you don’t already disagree with us?

Apologies, but isn’t this rather the antithesis of the scientific method? The release of such data is, I think, intended so that those who do disagree can have a look and check what you’ve done, isn’t it?

In

2 responses

  1. Kit Avatar
    Kit

    They are learning from the Global Warming advocates. Have a look at climateaudit.org on how difficult it to get access to data.
    As Tony Blair would say “if you have nothing to hide…”

    Reply
  2. dsquared Avatar
    dsquared

    As far as I can tell, this is specifically targeted at Prof. Michael Spagat, who has made a bit of an ass of himself and whose behaviour over the “main street bias” critique does IMO fairly raise suspicions about whether he should be trusted with the data. I agree that this policy is a really silly way of going about it, but they’re operating on a pretty loose standard – David Kane at Harvard has got a copy of the data, and he’s certainly accused the JHU team of having posted fraudulent results.

    Reply

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