Daniel Davies has a new post on Lancet denial, with some particularly egregious examples. The worst example is by Harry of Harry’s Place whose “discussion” of the study is to make a statement that he must surely know to be false:

Dsquared is a serial bullshitter who has never given a straight answer to any question.

Davies also links to a transcript by Seixon of the Hitchens-Galloway debate, where Seixon touts his own debunking of the Lancet study. Seixon’s debunking fails because he makes basic errors in his statistics, but at least they are original, so let’s look at where he goes wrong:

Dr. Les Roberts removed 6 provinces from being in the sample. That means that every single household in those 6 provinces was purposefully given a probability of 0% of being chosen for the sample. This violates the principle of randomness, thus violating the principle of statistics that you have a random sample. … The study’s results are based on a biased sample. Resting upon this fact alone, the study’s results cannot be claimed to be accurate, nor should they be trusted as accurate. Dr. Les Roberts and anyone else cannot argue this simple point, because then they will have to take on the vast body of statistical literature and theory looming over the credibility of this study.

Unfortunately, Seixon does not understand sampling. The sample was not biased by the exclusion of six randomly chosen provinces since each household in Iraq was equally likely to be chosen by the sampling procedure. Seixon could just as well argue than all surveys are biased because after the sample has been randomly selected each person outside the sample has a 0% chance of being selected.

In response the study’s statement that “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.” Seixon offers this:

46% men, 46% children, 7% women, and 1% elderly. With this in mind, try to finish this sentence: Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were _______ and __________. In a world where scientists don’t try to hoodwink their readers, the correct answer would be “men” and “children”. Yet they chose “women” and “children”, even though out of the 4 groups, women were #3, and they put two groups into their sentence. I guess they were hoping no one was going to actually read the rest of the study and find out that they are misleading liars. Seriously, what is the point of misleading in this fashion? Could it be… a political agenda?

So even though the statement is true Seixon insists that it is a somehow a lie. The fact that seems to have escaped Seixon is that Roberts et al grouped women and children together because they are likely to be non-combatants.