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Originally Posted by uke_master
One sec I am still confused by dates, are you sure you and him are referencing the same thing? Heck, he may well not even have been quoting from a primary source, but from some other news source that referenced the 1.6 he rounded from and the report.
I'm fairly confident that the paper I linked is the source of his claim, given the structure of the sentence quoted from the paper, and Harris' phrasing in his article.
The paper cited refers to a 2002 WHO report, and Harris reported this as a 2000 WHO report, which is an error on his part.
The 2002 WHO report does not count up lost lives by rather DALYs.
WHO report:
http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2002/en/whr02_ch4.pdf
Definition of DALY:
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global...trics_daly/en/
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One DALY can be thought of as one lost year of "healthy" life. The sum of these DALYs across the population, or the burden of disease, can be thought of as a measurement of the gap between current health status and an ideal health situation where the entire population lives to an advanced age, free of disease and disability.
I presume (without doing any further research) that the linked article (not the original report) has some means of calculating the number of deaths, which is why the error on the estimate of lives is so large.
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I am super glad you put rounded up on your list since you hypocritically did the exact same thing.
Context is key. He's fine with rounding up if they had only given him the 1.6 million figure. But they gave him a range. If we assume that the range given is a +-2-sigma range with a normal distribution, that would mean he's saying that the actual value is nearly the 84th percentile*. That's a bad use of statistics.
*68% of the data falls within 1 sigma of the mean.
I stated earlier that I believe Harris is prone to overstating positions. I think this provides a clear example.
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Keep in mind the key issue here: he is not doing science here. He is making a rhetorical point and makes this quick scientific argument as an exemplar of that larger rhetorical point.
Right. He's making a rhetorical point. As you note, there's no value in him exaggerating. So why would he round up 1.6 million to 2 million and emphasize it with "nearly"? Is he being charged by the character by his web-host? I claim it's because he's overstating his position. I think he's so accustomed to doing that sort of thing that he doesn't even try to be careful.
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So the standard of accuracy should be incrediably low and, especially since it doesn't change his argument one iota, whether he says 1.6 or nearly 2 or puts the full range or anything else is just silly nitpicking. Ya I deduct marks if my students do that, but I don't give a crap here.
I don't care if you give a crap or not. You didn't have to respond. And I've already stated that I'm aware that this has no bearing on the point he's making.
My point with this is that I believe this exaggeration fits a pattern of Harris' rhetorical style. This is also a contributing factor as to why I don't think he's much of a thinker. If he's really all for evidence and careful thinking and all that stuff, then why isn't it reflected in his rhetoric? Again, I think he's more of a hack.
Last edited by Aaron W.; 07-10-2012 at 12:47 AM.
Reason: Stupid errors