As to the lawyer-NPOS study, it's a textbook case of spurious analysis. People who hire lawyers for neck injuries enter the legal system, which is slow-moving. In order to sustain a neck claim with significant value, you either have to have a real, serious neck injury, or you have to malinger and play the part.
I work in a personal injury law firm that takes cases from both plaintiffs and defendants in car wrecks. 95 percent of the real neck injuries get paid by insurance within 3-6 months, and, so, never enter the legal system. Of the cases that do enter into our filing cabinets, 25 percent are legit, and 75 percent are malingerers. The latter fact is explained by class and gender frustrations, plus one-too-many episodes of TV court shows and/or "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."
Statistics are useful in all this only after you know the real qualitative story, and then only as a way of further proving the already obvious. Most people who hire lawyers for neck pain are exaggerating or outright lying about their neck pain. Stone cold fact.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Miles Jackson
> Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 8:52 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Not scientifically proven - Lawyers pose health
> risk
>
>
>
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>
> > At 11:53 AM -0500 23/2/05, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> >> That means that there is a one-in-twenty chance that the alleged
> >> association between "consulting a lawyer" and "less improvement in
> NPOS"
> >> was wholly accidental.
> >
> > So, a nineteen in 20 chance that it was deliberate? I prefer short odds
> > myself. To be honest though, I'm not a gambling man, don't see the
> point.
> > Don't have much faith in statistics either, frankly I distrust the
> motives of
> > most statistical analysis. I always want to know what the agenda of the
> > people behind them are. "Lies, damn lies and statistics," as the saying
> goes.
>
> As somebody who regularly teaches stats, I think the biggest problem
> is not willful manipulation of statistics; it's misunderstanding stats.
> If you understand the principles of inferential stats--and you can,
> it's not that tricky!--people will have a hard time using stats to
> lie to you.
>
> (In passing, Bill's way off base on his interpretation of the statistics
> Yoshie reported. Many probably already see the flaw, so I won't waste
> bandwidth.)
>
> Miles
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