[Scape]

Psudo wrote:

This study cannot be considered "science" of any caliber until Lafta's data can be verified without relying upon his word.

Quote:

The 2006 study, known as Lancet II, was somewhat larger, involving 47 clusters and using similar survey techniques. In all, 302 violent deaths reported in those 1,849 households became the basis for estimating that 601,000 Iraqis had died violently from the start of the war through June 2006.

So you’re saying 302 deaths is an absurd figure for that sample? Every day for the last two weeks there has been a major casualty inducing car bomb. We are talking dozens dead every time at a bare minimum. It sounds reasonable enough to me.

[Psudo]

Xerxes, even Lancet's low-end estimate (426,369) is about 9 times any other estimate without being verifiably more valid. It's still a radical outlier.

Scape, Even if 50 Iraqis died every day for the last two weeks, that's 700 out of a total population of around 27.5 million, or a rate of about 0.066% per year. They're suggesting 302 deaths from 1,849 households of 6.6 persons per average household over 4 years of war. That's a rate of 0.61% per year, or about 10 times the rate you suggested. Yes, I think that's an absurd comparison.

Need me to go over those calculations in more detail?

We know how many deaths the media reports because that's what Iraqi Body Count reports, and their numbers are about 1/10th of Lancet's estimate. Lancet is suggesting that in the most media covered war in history, 90% of causalities were not noticed by the media.

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

This study cannot be considered "science" of any caliber until Lafta's data can be verified without relying upon his word. Science is observational, and none but Lafta observed his data collection. If it is valid, he has failed to offer any evidence of that. No amount of scientifically rigorous statistical analysis can validate invalid data, and we have no reason to believe Lafta's data is valid except his own word; the word of an utter stranger who refuses oversight and offers no proof.

That's why repeatability is so important. Unfortunately--and this is no fault of the researchers--no one else has ever bothered to repeat the study. So we have one peer-reviewed study.

It appears that John Hopkins has indicated that they are ready to release the data, albeit under specified conditions (John Hopkins). Perhaps they've already released the data; it's not clear. Regardless, the conservative pundits would just then move on to the next perceived "fatal flaw" in the study and harp on that in their blogs.

[Scape]

Psudo wrote:

Scape, Even if 50 Iraqis died every day for the last two weeks, that's 700 out of a total population of around 27.5 million, or a rate of about 0.066% per year. They're suggesting 302 deaths from 1,849 households of 6.6 persons per average household over 4 years of war. That's a rate of 0.61% per year, or about 10 times the rate you suggested. Yes, I think that's an absurd comparison.

Touche' I concede the point and leave you with the conclusion from IBC.

Quote:

Do the American people need to believe that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they can turn to their leaders and say "enough is enough"? The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by "passive surveillance methods" surely already provides all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels.

On 9/11 3,000 people were violently killed in attacks on the USA. Those events etched themselves into the soul of every American, and reverberated around the world. In December 2005 President George Bush acknowledged 30,000 known Iraqi violent deaths in a country one tenth the size of the USA. That is already a death toll 100 times greater in its impact on the Iraqi nation than 9/11 was on the USA. That there are more deaths that have not yet come to light is certain, but if a change in policy is needed, the catastrophic roll-call of the already known dead is more than ample justification for that change.

The Lancet researchers documented 300 violent deaths. Iraq has reached such a sorry state that IBC records 300 deaths every few days.

[Psudo]

Zipperfish: The "Data Bomb" article that started this thread said that "some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place." The release you linked to is not itself dated, so I don't know whether the release occurred before the Data Bomb article or is to occur sometime in the future (an ambiguity you pointed out yourself, to your credit). If the data yet to be released is complete and verifiable, that will indeed lend great credence to the report and greatly reduce the credibility of the National Journal in my eyes.

Until then, consider this: how likely is it that 90% of the deaths in the country have hidden themselves from the view even of investigative reporters and human rights activists inside Iraq itself, looking for bodies to blame on the Bush Administration and to stop the war they understandably hate?

On a trivial note, are you really in Estonia?

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

Zipperfish: The "Data Bomb" article that started this thread said that "some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place." The release you linked to is not itself dated, so I don't know whether the release occurred before the Data Bomb article or is to occur sometime in the future (an ambiguity you pointed out yourself, to your credit). If the data yet to be released is complete and verifiable, that will indeed lend great credence to the report and greatly reduce the credibility of the National Journal in my eyes.

Until then, consider this: how likely is it that 90% of the deaths in the country have hidden themselves from the view even of investigative reporters and human rights activists inside Iraq itself, looking for bodies to blame on the Bush Administration and to stop the war they understandably hate?

On a trivial note, are you really in Estonia?

Well, Toro seems to have found a more recent study here:

WHO Estimates 151,000 Iraqis Dead

that m,ay be a superior study ot the Lancet, given methodology was similar but sample sizes were larger.

I don't think vastly underestimating deaths is that unusual. The wikipedia articel on the Lancet study cites:

Quote:

The authors described the fact that their estimate is over ten times higher than other estimates, such as the Iraq Body Count project (IBC) estimate and U.S. Department of Defence estimates, as "not unexpected", stating that this is a common occurrence in conflict situations. They stated, "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."

No, I have an affinity for Estonia for some reason. I've known some great people from there. Always struck me as a ballsy little country.

[romanP]

Psudo wrote:

I cannot prove Lancet is wrong, but I can prove it's possible it's wrong and there is motivation to bias it inherent to it's release. You can't prove Lancet is right, only claim it's possible that it's the first accurate study of civilian causalities ever. That possibility, that overturning of a hundred years of mathematics and history for a mishmash of experimental math and unverified claims, is not sufficient to gain my trust. I assert that it should not be sufficient to gain the trust of any reasonable mind, and that only wishful thinking is capable of extracting trust for this fundamentally untrustworthy study.

I think it would be most accurate to say that the Lancet report is out of date. So much has happened since it was written that the numbers in it have little to do with the present.

[Xort]

xerxes wrote:

Half the problem with the original study was that people looked at the high-end estimate (~900,000) and automatically dismiss it. Yet no one looked at the range of estimates which weren't so alarmingly high with the low end being around 400,000 estimated deaths.

Do you believe that 400,000 is an accurate number? Not one about 320,000 high?

[Psudo]

Zipperfish: I find 151,000 today to be far more reasonable than 600,000 or even 400,000 in Sept 2006, and agree with you about it's methodology's apparent validity. I'm inclined to trust the WHO study.

I don't have any personal connection to Estonia, but I can't help but respect their quick turn-around from Soviet satellite to profoundly free country.

romanP: I'm questioning whether Lancet was accurate when it was released. Scape used to have a signature image that took the Lancet numbers and extrapolated the deaths to a more recent date; it read 1,1 million and change. I find WHO's estimate of 151,000 to be a more likely modern figure than that. But if the death rate is 151,000 today, how could it possibly have been 400,000 to 900,000 in Sept '06? Lancet still looks ridiculous in any time frame.

[xerxes]

Xort wrote:

xerxes wrote:

Half the problem with the original study was that people looked at the high-end estimate (~900,000) and automatically dismiss it. Yet no one looked at the range of estimates which weren't so alarmingly high with the low end being around 400,000 estimated deaths.

Do you believe that 400,000 is an accurate number? Not one about 320,000 high?

For the most part, yes. I remember when the original Lancet study came out and all the ruckus the numbers started. But among all the articles I read about it, I was convinced that their methodology was sound.

[Psudo]

xerxes wrote:

For the most part, yes. I remember when the original Lancet study came out and all the ruckus the numbers started. But among all the articles I read about it, I was convinced that their methodology was sound.

Including their black-box data collection methodology? And the fact that similar analysis methodology with a greater sample size by the World Health Organization returned a much smaller number (151,000)?

[Calbeck]

Zipperfish wrote:

The researchers in the Lancet study actually went door-to-door in a war zone and conducted a statitsical analysis to extrapolate the number of deaths

Said extrapolation being primarily reliant on counting the number of people who produced a death certificate. And if those figures are to be believed, the approximately 1,000 households interviewed managed to come up with a bit more than 1% of the total number of known issued death certificates.

Which can be likewise extrapolated to mean Iraq has a total of 100,000 households. If each household has 10 members, that's a total Iraqi population of right around 1,000,000. Otherwise, we would have to assume that the Lancet managed to stumble over an inordinately large percentage of death-certificate-holders, which would readjust their estimates severely downwards, and we can't have THAT, can we?

But if we do take these figures using the Lancet's methodology, then according to some estimates being tossed out by folks on this very forum, EVERY IRAQI IS ALREADY DEAD.

That's assuming of course, that none of the produced death certificates were forgeries created for the purpose of cadging government relief, which of course NO ONE in a war-afflicted region beset with poverty would ever do. -:roll:

Quote:

(as opposed to, say, Iraq Body Count folks who sit in their office and read newspaper articles)

And morgue reports, and hospital reports, and pretty much any reports that actually give a record to work from, as opposed to sitting in their offices and extrapolating limited polling data into a somehow-missing half-million dead bodies. Even the Hussein regime wasn't effective at hiding THAT many bodies.

Quote:

Until another study uses a similarly direct method

You mean like actually counting dead bodies? Like the reports that IBC counts do?

[Zipperfish]

Calbeck wrote:

Zipperfish wrote:

The researchers in the Lancet study actually went door-to-door in a war zone and conducted a statitsical analysis to extrapolate the number of deaths

Said extrapolation being primarily reliant on counting the number of people who produced a death certificate. And if those figures are to be believed, the approximately 1,000 households interviewed managed to come up with a bit more than 1% of the total number of known issued death certificates.

Which can be likewise extrapolated to mean Iraq has a total of 100,000 households. If each household has 10 members, that's a total Iraqi population of right around 1,000,000. Otherwise, we would have to assume that the Lancet managed to stumble over an inordinately large percentage of death-certificate-holders, which would readjust their estimates severely downwards, and we can't have THAT, can we?

But if we do take these figures using the Lancet's methodology, then according to some estimates being tossed out by folks on this very forum, EVERY IRAQI IS ALREADY DEAD.

Well I suppose others argue that Iraq is living in an age of peace and enlightenment.

Quote:

And morgue reports, and hospital reports, and pretty much any reports that actually give a record to work from, as opposed to sitting in their offices and extrapolating limited polling data into a somehow-missing half-million dead bodies. Even the Hussein regime wasn't effective at hiding THAT many bodies.
...

You mean like actually counting dead bodies? Like the reports that IBC counts do?

The IRC readily admits their numbers are low, so defending their methodology resutls in an underestimate of casualties, so defending their numbers as gospel truth is a little silly.

regardless, the numbers (155,000) from the new study referenced above seem more defensible.

[Calbeck]

Zipperfish wrote:

Calbeck wrote:

But if we do take these figures using the Lancet's methodology, then according to some estimates being tossed out by folks on this very forum, EVERY IRAQI IS ALREADY DEAD.

Well I suppose others argue that Iraq is living in an age of peace and enlightenment.

And some believe that at least a few Iraqis yet live in the wild hinterlands of Baghdad. -:D

Quote:

The IRC readily admits their numbers are low, so defending their methodology resutls in an underestimate of casualties, so defending their numbers as gospel truth is a little silly.

There's 'gospel truth', 'what's confirmed so far', and 'utter bollocks'. I prefer what's confirmed so far to utter bollocks, and I treat neither as gospel truth.