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March 01, 2010

Comments

Vivian de St. Vrain

Dr. M. does not detect any "blind vitriol" in his post. He's read and re-read, but nope, it's not there.

Jonathan

You've got an interesting thing going on. Very witty and insightful. However, certainly not devoid of the type of fallacious thinking you attempt to denounce.

Your barb about Republicans in this little piece is highly ironic. People who identify as members of the GOP are more likely to have gone to college than their Democratic counterparts, at last according to the last political science course I took.

(Sure enough, a brief search backs this up. Please see: Fried, Joseph, Democrats and Republicans — Rhetoric and Reality (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 74–5.)

Your insinuation (that Republicans are uneducated and lack basic critical thinking skills)is based more on the anecdotal than on the empirical. You commit the same crime you spent the entire post decrying. Poetic justice, if there ever were such a thing.

A great blog overall, but try to write your next blog with "respect for logic and fact"...and preferably less blind vitriol directed at people with different political inclinations than you.

Lew Bryson

You think your "Republican" neighbors are ignorant, yet have you actually looked at the studies your epidemiologist friend presented? Because I have looked at studies of that type, closely, and at more than the abstracts of the studies. When you actually look deeper into these studies, you find that their construction is often -- not always, but more often than not -- designed to find the results desired. They are not good studies; they are poorly designed, they do not follow the basic scientific method (hypothesis first, conclusion last), they rely on changing definitions (like that of "binge drinking") to mold the data. In the end, they are hardly less anecdotal than your neighbors' stories.

As just one example -- because without a solid example, this is simply an anecdote -- the widely quoted study by Dr. Ralph Hingson of the NIAAA that "found that drinking-related accidental deaths among 18- to 24-year-old [college] students have been creeping upward -- from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005." Pretty scary, until you read the actual study and find that these numbers are pure guesses, extrapolation from very small data pools. The "guess" nature becomes evident when you realize that 1,440 and 1825 -- which sound like carefully researched numbers -- are exactly 120 deaths a month and 5 deaths a day, respectively. What are the odds?

Particularly when the only people I know of who have actually counted drinking-related deaths, real recorded deaths, not estimates, were some investigative reporters at USA Today. About five years ago, horrified by Hingson's research, they dug out college-age deaths over a five-year period...and found that the actual number was closer to 36 drinking-related college deaths a year. Still tragic, but hardly an epidemic. Think about it: if five college students were dying in booze-related accidents EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR...don't you think somebody would notice?

Be as careful of false precision as you are of anecdote.

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