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

To: tejek who wrote (348698)	8/30/2007 8:58:23 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574004

Whenever there is a statistic that the right doesn't want to acknowledge, they come up with some alternative interpretation or they manipulate the numbers until they get the result they want. Such adjustments can of course be done in a partisan way, only considering the adjustments that help your case. The proper answer to that is to point out other adjustements that need to be made, or to point our the weaknesses in the adjustments you don't like, not to just say "well those are the arguments of a bunch of conservatives, so we don't have to pay any attention to them". Reasonably you can try to make the best adjustments you can for factors other than the one's your trying to measure. Alternatively you can conclude that the factors are too complex and/or numerous to adjust for, and recognize that your data might have some weight for your case but only a very limited weight. What's not reasonable is just to go out and find the raw data that supports your case, don't adjust it for other issues other than the one your trying to measure, and don't consider other data that acts against your ideas, but that's exactly what you are doing here. You (and others) act as if infant mortality rates where measured the same way, when they are not. Then you act as if infant mortality rates and life expectancy figures are all about the different medical insurance systems, even though they are not. Then you ignore data like cancer survival rates that argue in the other direction. Not only are you cherry picking your data points, your also failing to recognize weaknesses in your favorite data points after you pick them. You can make arguments for single payer health care insurance systems based on other things besides statistics, but if your going to use statistics, its not reasonable to act as if your favorite stats are the only ones that need to be considered, and can't ever be adjusted for other factors. As for Iraq and Schiavo, they aren't even vaguely similar to the issue. If statistical adjustments plaid any role at all in those issues it was a really tiny and unimportant one.