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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (348010)	8/22/2007 2:58:50 PM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 1573930

re: Other than that, you are doing you hair splitting, nuancing, nit picking fan dance. He has to. The data proves him wrong. And Tim is NEVER wrong.

To: combjelly who wrote (348010)	8/22/2007 3:46:45 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573930

We are clearly talking about two different things. LBW is defined as less than 2.5 kilos. No one is going to count a baby at 2 kilos as dead or a miscarriage. It doesn't have to be every baby defined as LBW in order for the effect to matter. If its 1 kilo, or .5 kilos, or whatever the point is some babies in the US get counted towards the infant mortality rate that don't get counted toward that rate in other countries. If someone wants to use the rates as an argument for sweeping change in our medical or medical insurance systems than it falls on them to present to show that this discrepancy isn't significant or that the US rates are still much worse even when it is taken in to account. Perhaps they don't because it destroys their argument. Perhaps they don't merely because they don't have the data. Perhaps they have shown it and I've never seen it, and apparently you haven't seen it either (if you have I'm sure you would have posted it). But if they have they haven't pushed the information and argument out very hard, while at the same time arguments based just on the offical rate continue to get pushed. In addition to the fact that the data measures different things, there is also the fact that differences in infant mortality (and life expectancy for that matter) are not solely due to differences in the medical care, and medical insurance systems. There are many other factors that have to be accounted for. Do I have a good accounting for those factors? No, so I'm not going to try to use "the US has lower infant mortality, and a higher life expectancy than Europe or Canada" as the basis for any argument. But other people who don't have a good way of accounting for those factors feel free to ignore the fact, or don't even realize it. When your basing your argument on comparing statistics the different statistics have to be measured the same way, and factors other than the one your trying to measure have to be accounted for. Otherwise your data is unconvincing or even useless. Pointing that out is not nitpicking, or if it is so labeled than "nitpicking" is a very useful and important thing in such discussions.