no third solution

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Category Archives: junk science

On Michigan Proposal 1

November 4th, 2008

Anonymous left a comment on Medical Marijuana in Michigan:

This article hurts the proposal more than helps it…while medicinal marijuana may prove beneficial, there are significant reasons why marijuana should not be legalized to the general public.

The crux of my post was, “Who cares if medicinal marijuana is on the ballot?” Medical marijuana may be a step in the right direction, but the real issue is “Why can’t (allegedly) free people be allowed to use it?”

I wonder why he didn’t list the “significant reasons”… Like the junk science that suggests marijuana is more harmful than tobacco? Nice try.

There may be a number of reasons why you’d prefer to abstain from the substance, but there is not a single, reasonable argument you can put forth to justify the violent interference with an adult’s peaceful and private decision.

Keep this in mind at all times: We’re not talking about you, trying to rationally convince people that they’re wrong. We’re talking about violence, perpetrated by agents of the State, against people who happen to have a habit that you simply don’t like.

That is, using all of the power and guns of the government, to force your opinions and beliefs upon those with whom you disagree.

Sorry, it’s never reasonable for a mature, rational adult to use violence in such a manner. Ever.

CoyoteBlog on Health Care

January 9th, 2008

The CoyoteBlog explodes the methodology of a recent study which appears to show that the health care system in the U.S. is significantly worse than other developed countries. One choice tidbit:

I have a very smart reader group, so my sense is that many of you already see the gaffe here. The author’s (sic) posit that 50% of heart disease may be due to lifestyle, though the number might be higher or lower. So to correct for this, they reduce every country’s heart disease number (IHD) by a fixed amount of 50%. WTF?? This corrects for NOTHING. All this does is reduce the weighting of IHD in the total measure.

LOL!

Of course, methodology is unique to each study, so you can’t go around saying that just because these authors don’t know how to perform basic data analysis or control for variables, nobody else can, either. But there are deeper truths that he repeats in his post, which I see time and time again in refutations of similar studies which claim that the U.S. system is totally flawed and that it’s time for us to join the rest of the developed world and implement universal health care (e.g., measures of infant mortality, government as an ideally “neutral” third party in the U.S., vs. as the provider and evaluator in some other countries, higher rates of surgery per capita, etc…)

Keep these nuggets of truth in mind whenever and wherever someone brings up these arguments in the future.

Junk Science: FBI Edition

December 4th, 2007

I haven’t heard or read much hullabaloo about last week’s news (or was it two weeks ago) about comparative bullet analysis, which has basically been revealed as pseudo-science, at best. Of note:

The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis…

Still, [one retired bullet examiner] said it was reasonable for jurors to conclude that matching bullets could have come from the same box [despite evidence that “matches” occurred for bullets manufactured as much as 15 months apart.] “I don’t think it’s misleading as long as it’s fully explained.”

As long as the possibility exists that matching bullets did not come from the same box, it is definitively not reasonable to conclude that two matching bullets did come from the same box. Concluding that they “could have” come from the same box is not the same as concluding that they did come from the same box. Concluding that they “could have” come from the same box is nearly synonymous with concluding that they “could have” come from different boxes.

A great many of the people convicted on this sort of evidence very well might be guilty. They might’ve been convicted without it. But they also might be innocent. We don’t really know, and I guess that’s the problem. Beyond a reasonable doubt requires a stricter degree of scrutiny than that.

no third solution

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