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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (11970)	11/29/2009 8:27:13 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

One, she wasn't talking longevity but cancer survival rates. You should take care to get things exactly right when you're calling someone dumb or stupid. OK, that wasn't quite as precise as it could have been. I recognized that when I wrote it. My excuse is that I was getting tired of using the same words over and over and over so I tried something different. However, it's not as far off as you suggest. Survival is typically defined as five year longevity after diagnosis, after all, so "longevity" is not an unreasonable proxy for "survival rate." Wasn't it you who made this logical error a couple posts back? Not me. The schedules for mammograms are different. European women are allotted fewer and for a shorter number of years. Presumably, then, European women actually get fewer mammograms. While American women can certainly find lumps, too, they don't have to rely on that technique as much and often don't because they get more frequent mammograms. Therefore it's reasonable to expect there to be some difference between the two groups being compared re lumps found via self exam vs mammogram. Now, since what was at issue was the role of mammograms of women in their forties in "survival rate," then to be a valid comparison you'd have to differentiate in your statistics between lumps found by mammogram vs some other mechanism. Thus, self-exam is one of the myriad factors that corrupt the comparison and would have to be factored out for the comparison to be valid. It's not the key factor, just one more thing I threw on the list to try to make the point that she was comparing apples and aircraft carriers. The salient factor, of course, the one that most clearly makes the whole comparison bogus is that American women get mammograms in their forties and European women don't. So there are no data anywhere that address the survival rate of European women whose cancer would have been diagnosed during their forties had they gotten mammograms. The survival rate from breast cancer for European women, the data offered for comparison, is utterly useless for comparison let alone for predicting some percentage of change, as claimed. Utterly bogus. We have no clue about the outcomes of 40 something women in Europe. Therefore, there is no way to defend her claim other than giving her a pass out of partisanship or being as dumb or deceitful as she demonstrated herself to be. Naturally. Most people do and why not? Why should I obsess about that? They do. And you shouldn't obsess about it, IMO. I was merely trying to shed light on a critical difference in the way you and I approach such things in an attempt to explain why I criticize poor arguments on both sides and you choose not to lest you continue to think that my criticism "appears" to be something other than what it is. I'm not going to pretend I am. I am not pretending that I don't have a point of view. But my point of view isn't always in the driver's seat. I get on rants every now and again but much of the time I engage in pursuits other than pushing my point of view. I do that because I'm curious about what other people think, because I want to improve my understanding of something or other, because I'm being professional in my analysis, because it's important to me to be reasonable and civil, just for example. And, frankly, because I don't want to prevail if I'm wrong nor if I have to use tactics that are distasteful to me. This should be a gentleman's game. Partisans are driven to prevail by any means necessary. They typically put tribe above all else. Neither of those is what I'm about. Which is not meant hostilely. Likewise. Different is simply different. It does not necessarily imply a value judgment. And it is not inherently hostile.