Talk:John Lott/Archive 1

message: Perhaps someone should contribute something more on Lott's involvement in the brouhaha over the Florida 2000 voting debacle.  His paper was cited by the two dissenting commissioners to the Civil Rights Commission's report on the disenfranchisement of minority voters in Florida, which in my opinion makes it a historically significant matter.
From the dissenting statement:
http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/dissent.htm
"The statistical analysis in the report is superficial and incomplete. A more sophisticated regression analysis by Dr. John Lott, an economist at Yale Law School, challenges its main findings. Dr. Lott was unable to find a consistent, statistical significant relationship between the share of voters who were African Americans and the ballot spoilage rate.
"Furthermore, Dr. Lott conducted additional analysis beyond the report’s parameters, looking at previous elections, demographic changes, and rates of ballot spoilage. His analysis found little relationship between racial population change and ballot spoilage, and the one correlation that is found runs counter to the majority report’s argument: An increase in the black share of the voting population is linked to a slight decrease in spoilage rates, although the difference is not statistically significant." -Abigail Thernstrom and Russell G. Redenbaugh. July 19, 2001.
The abstract of Lott's paper, published a week or two before the dissenting statement, is here:
http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/lepp/papers/256/
As I'm a newbie to Wikipedia, and no expert in statistics, I'm not about to leap in and try to digest this paper and its implications.  I'll try to do a bit of legwork, though, unless someone else steps into the breach.
 --MR 00:45, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Florida 2000 

message: *Criticisms of Lott's credibility
Lott's stature began to fall in 2003. His academic rebuttals to subsequent peer-reviewed work which reached conclusions opposite to his have been plagued by coding errors and other systematic sources of bias, which all served, whether innocent, deliberate, or subconscious, to falsely support his theory. Lott's op-eds and other popular works have been found to contain a number of elementary errors of fact; rather than admit them and correct them, Lott has tended to blame faulty editing on the part of the media, then go on to repeat the same errors elsewhere. Similarly, the identifications of the errors in Lott's academic publications have been met not with agreements and subsequent correction, but with denials, attempts to replace the files with corrected ones while denying they had been changed, and even clumsy attempts to give the new files backdated file dates to match the originals.
:What is that? Thomas Jefferson for President 23:36, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thats better, I'll put it in the article. Sam [Spade] 20:48, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: i have no clue, if somebody doesn't answer me ASAP I try their talk page. Sam [Spade] 20:48, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess I'm the one responsible for the offending paragraph; on the one hand I knew when writing it that it seemed a little slanted, but on the other hand I couldn't see any nice way of putting things. FWIW I think your edits are bending over backwards to be NPOV, so I suggest just go ahead. Gzuckier 21:33, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved from article 

message: When reading this article, I learn far more about critics of Lott than Lott himself. Its very obvious the primary authors don't agree w Lott whatsoever. It strikes me as a snowjob personally, the Adolf Hitler article is more fair and balanced, to my eye ;) Thomas Jefferson for President 23:47, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: --
Ok, so maybe "without altering the stats" was the wrong phrase to use.  In any event, I can provide at least 5 examples where a potential crime was stopped by the presence of a licensed handgun, and it was not reported to the police.  
Some people might ask "Why not call the police?"
The answer is in 4 parts.  
1.  No shots were fired, it wasn't necessary.
2.  The weapon never left it's holster, it wasn't necessary.
3.  SOME of the 5 incidents happend in locations where I know the local police are not friendly to CPL (Concealed Pistols License) holders.  It was not necessary, nor wise to call the police in these instances.
4. In ALL the incidents, the perp took off running.  They were long gone, and the chances of the police finding them was very remote.  In other words, it wasn't necessary.
I know, some of you are STILL going to say, "You should have called the Police."  Maybe I should have, but I didn't.  And I'll bet there are thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of other incidents that have not been reported, just like mine.  Who knows, maybe even millions.
--Al 15:49, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I probably wouldn't have called the cops either. Gzuckier 04:59, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The wrong phrase? 

message: I'm curious.  What was it about the previous additions that made them "INCORRECT?"  In other words, other than the possibility they were posted by a "Sock Puppet," what about them was wrong????06:16, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Where they incorrect?

message: I will not have revert wars with whomever wants to have revert wars, but I kindly ask that you NPOV the paragraph about lott improving out understanding of crime.
* Have you even LOOKED at Wikipedia:Vandalism???  I have, and I don't see where I have vandalized Wikipedia.  
Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism. Apparent bad-faith edits that do not make their bad-faith nature explicit and inarguable are not considered vandalism at Wikipedia. Al Lowe 15:30, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Al, you are vandalizing Wikipedia

message: You know, the funny thing is the statement that you and Hipocrite insist on removing isn't even mine.  But that's ok.  I guess with all the other stuff posted that is NOT NPOV, having something in his favour is just too much to ask.  Never mind about balance.  AND I'm not removing stuff, EVERYONE else is.  Also, Show me where what I've TRIED to add back is incorrect!  Al Lowe 12:35, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: And you're not??

message: Ok, here's another edit I don't agree with.
Still, Lott's work, if accurate, would seem to rule out the possibility that deregulation...
In my opinon, this just adds another doubt to a sentence that already makes that point.  If we didn't have "if accurate" in the sentence, the sentence fragment of "would seem" says the same thing to me.Al Lowe 19:00, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Another one

message: Is it just me, or is the summary on the top of John Lott's entirely on the wrong track? Lott is primarily known due to accusations of academic misconduct levelled against him. He is NOT known for the quality of his scholarship - indeed, every significant piece of work done by Lott has been criticized for deliberate misrepresentations. In light of this, shouldn't the summary of the article talk more about the controversy - and less about where Lott worked and what his research interests are?
pierre_menard
He was known FIRST for his work.  The controversy came afterward.  If you want an article on the controversy, then perhaps that calls for a seperate article.Al Lowe
Was he ever actually KNOWN for his work? There are loads of researchers in the social sciences, many who published books on guns. Most do not have wikipedia 
articles devoted to them. Methinks if it were not for the controversy, John Lott's article today would be a stub. 
User:pierre_menard
His first "splash" that I know of, was for research he and David Mustard worked on together.  And I know that I for one, heard of him and his first book, "More Guns, Less Crime" before I ever heard of the controversy.  And I know of quite a few more people who would say the same thing.Al Lowe
*MGLC was a reasonably well known semi-popular work. He was never known for being a good economist, but he's well enough known for being a good guns-rights advocate from the math side. Without the contravercy, it would be a stub.
* I disagree.Al Lowe
** I disagree with you. Look at the history of the page.Hipocrite 18:01, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introduction 

message: The article used to call Lott's work "groundbreaking" read as follows:
Lott's work is an example of statistical one-upmanship. He has more data and a more complex analysis than anyone else studying the topic. He demands that anyone who wants to challenge his arguments become immersed in a very complex statistical debate, based on computations so difficult that they cannot be done with ordinary desktop computers. He challenges anyone who disagrees with him to download his data set and redo his calculations, but most social scientists do not think it worth their while to replicate studies using methods that have repeatedly failed. Most gun control researchers simply brushed off Lott and Mustard's claims and went on with their work. Two highly respected criminal justice researchers, Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins (1997) wrote an article explaining that: "just as Messrs. Lott and Mustard can, with one model of the determinants of homicide, produce statistical residuals suggesting that 'shall issue' laws reduce homicide, we expect that a determined econometrician can produce a treatment of the same historical periods with different models and opposite effects. Econometric modeling is a double-edged sword in its capacity to facilitate statistical findings to warm the hearts of true believers of any stripe."
Are you kidding me? It's not groundbreaking, you've never, and you'll never find a remotely qualified person ever saying it was groundbreaking work.
*Maybe not, but I did find a  qualified person who called it "scholarly in it's approach."Al Lowe 15:05, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV Reinsertion