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Originally Posted by uke_master
So I assume if the 2000 study came out as 1.6 million you would be totally happy with him rounding up to 2 million right?
Sure. I would still wonder why he would use a 2000 study when there's a more recent and presumably more accurate study, but I would at least grant him rounding up abilities if it turned out to be that.
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Regardless, since none of us are going to be able to do better than an order of magnitude guess on this naively, whether the number is 1 or 1.3 or 2 makes precisely zero difference.
Pretty much.
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It is just you nitting it up because you don't like the guy and can't even find his source to see if he did anything bad.
Well, after contemplating a little while, I tried a new tactic, and I win at the hunt the reference game.
http://www.fire.uni-freiburg.de/vfe/...eview-2007.pdf
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At 1.6 (0.8–2.4) million deaths and 2.6% of the global burden of disease (as measured in lost life-years), IAQ ranks second only to poor water/sanitation/hygiene among environmental health risk factors.
*The summary results of the CRA were released in theWorld Health Report (WHO, 2002; Ezzati et al., 2002) and were published in detail in Smith et al. (2004).
So what do we learn?
Here's what he said:
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In 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that it caused nearly 2 million premature deaths each year—considerably more than were caused by traffic accidents.
1) He cited the wrong year in his essay.
2) He definitely rounded up.
3) He was given a range of values and picked a number on the high end.
4) He claimed it was "nearly" this many, and I think that's a poor word choice given the data (which gave him an explicit range).
I think I'm justified in believing my original statement:
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It appears that Harris has grossly exaggerated the data.
If I was told that somewhere between 0.8 and 2.4 million people died in a certain manner, I think it's a gross exaggeration to claim that "nearly 2 million" people died in that manner.
This is very different from simply rounding up 1.6 million.