[extropy-chat] IRAQ: Weapons pipeline to Syria

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 1 13:22:07 UTC 2004


--- Alfio Puglisi <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:

> On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> >
> >--- Stephen Van_Sickle <sjvans at ameritech.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> I am not a statistician, so I would be very interested
> >> in the opinions of anyone on this list with a more
> >> extensive background than I have.  In particular, if I
> >> am reading it correctly, they are extrapolating the
> >> 100,000 figure from 21 violent deaths.  This does not
> >> fill me with a great deal of confidence, but I'm
> >> willing to be set straight.
> >
> >Well, as I warned, they are apparently cherry picking data (just
> like
> >they've done in the past with gun crime stats) and extrapolating
> >completely unrealistic conclusions to fit their political agenda.
> 
> Except that they are cherry picking the data to lower the total
> amount, the way someone trying to make the war look better would
> do. So if this is to fit some political agenda, this agenda would
> be fairly aligned with Bush.

On the contrary, their rationale is that they can reliably avoid the
most violent areas where they would be at risk of kidnapping and avoid
all the areas where nothing is going wrong and just pick the low
intensity conflict 'middle' areas, but they are screwing up because
they are making that selection based on no prior data about what the
'middle' really is, or whether areas of medium violence actually
reflect the mean for the whole population.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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