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<font size=3>Wojtek:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
But, as I also said, if you're into battling body counts maybe you've
already conceded too much anyway.<br><br>
regards,<br><br>
Cliff<br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
At 11:36 AM 9/13/02 -0400, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>At 03:35 PM 9/12/2002 -0500, you
wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>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...</blockquote><br><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Muravchik sounds like a Russian name. His journalism is a
prima-facie Stalinist style propaganda assault.
Coincidence?<br><br>
wojtek<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
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