All points well taken. But I've been a sociologist for 20 years and I know all about the trouble of counting things (someday I'll tell you the story about the energy audit survey I was involved in where several homes in our study had fewer fireplaces in them then they did a year earlier), and the political construction of statistics, official and otherwise. My point is that if you put numbers out there without taking care to give people a reasonable way of figuring out how you came up with them you leave yourself even more open to the sort of hackwork you so ably critiqued.
But, as I also said, if you're into battling body counts maybe you've already conceded too much anyway.
regards,
Cliff
At 11:36 AM 9/13/02 -0400, you wrote:
>At 03:35 PM 9/12/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>
>>Anyway, even if this Muravchik is half right somebody needs to have a
>>talk with Professor Herold. People should be able to see clearly how he
>>came up with these numbers, whatever they might turn out to be. One can,
>>of course, make the point that the whole business of tit for tat body
>>counts is sickening, but if you're gonna put a number out there...
>
>
>There is a popular perception, not limited to ideologues and journalistic
>hacks, that reality comes with numbers attached to them - all you need to
>do is to read the them and voila! you have an accurate account. Anyone
>who came near an actual data collection process knows that such a
>perception is plainly false. Even in countries with very advanced
>statistical data collection systems, such as Canada, Australia, the US and
>most OECD countries, the official statistics are based on a fair amount of
>guestimates and are constantly revised. The situation deteriorates
>rapidly when we move outside OECD. In most countries of Africa (with the
>exception of South Africa) there are no reliable statistics of any sort -
>most of the published data are guestimates.
>
>Counting the war dead is exponentially more difficult than compiling
>"pece-time" statistics, because inadequate infrastructure allowing
>systematic data collection and verification, weak as it was in the peace
>time, is usually the first casualty of war. At the very best we can come
>with very broad estimates. The fact that year after 9-11 the officials
>still do not have an exact number of people who died in the WTC speaks
>volumes to this.
>
>During my 10 year involvement in international data collection at Johns
>Hopkins I received numerous requests from journalistic hacks for
>"impossible statistics" - figures that either cannot be estimated with any
>reasonable accuracy or are simply too vague to have any meaning (my
>favorite: "what is the total number of voluntary organizations in the
>world?"). I came to the realization that journalism is modern docta
>ignorantia - folks who think they know what they are talking about but
>have neither time nor patience for caveats and methodological footnotes -
>and I learned that it comes with the territory. Journalists generally are
>not stalwarts of analytical thinking.
>
>But what this Muravchik hack does goes beyond the ordinary journalistic
>docta ignorantia. This is pure propaganda Stalinist- or tobacco-industry
>style. First, he undermines the person he attacks through guilt by
>association - by linking him to the "enemy" ideology. Stalinists and
>Maoists used to label people they assaulted with such colorful epithets as
>"spit-soiled midget of black reactionism" or "paper tiger of western
>imperialism." Muravchik's invectives are not as colorful but represent
>the same line of ad hominem assault nonetheless. Then, he concentrates on
>one detail among many and discredits it by holding it to unrealistic
>standrads. Tobacco-industry propaganda claims that the connection between
>smoking and cancer is less then certain (i.e. probabilistic) and therefore
>"unscientific". The fact of the matter is that all modern science is
>probabilistic - the only things that give you certainty are religion and
>ideology. Muravchik follows the same line of assault - he points out to
>bona fide discrepancies and claims them as proofs of insufficient factual
>evidence. Then he proceeds with a pars pro toto fallacy by extending his
>claim on the entire argument he attacks.
>
>Muravchik sounds like a Russian name. His journalism is a prima-facie
>Stalinist style propaganda assault. Coincidence?
>
>wojtek
>
>
>
>
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