"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."
Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:
Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:
While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity, her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong.
It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are "disinterested parties", either. Pretty much everyone who's knowledgeable about nuclear power has a stake either way.
There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong or that you are being disingenuous, just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world. And then you may of course also be selectively reporting those facts known to you, which is more dishonest.
But saying this argument is like pointing out "motive" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward.
"While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity"
Credulity doesn't factor into it. I found their "article" to be insulting in its lack of statistical rigor. If you have not read it, then you should read it.
They compare two averages - each taken over a completely different length of time. They do not even make the smallest attempt to control for any external factors. Finally, they look at some dates and assume direct causation.
This doesn't even make it to my credulity. It stops short of it, landing somewhere between disgust and amusement.
"her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong"
No, but her shabby statistical methodology does nothing to help her cause.
Perhaps I should have put the link to their article first before I introduced their backgrounds.
"It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are \"disinterested parties\", either."
No, but they are in an entirely different realm when it comes to the rigorousness of their methodology.
It is all well and good to have an opinion one way or another, but I do not think that we should pretend that there is any equivalence between the MIT nuclear scientists and Dr Sherman.
If you want to see intelligent debate on the merits of nuclear power, may I make the following recommendation:
(Note: It is not entirely obvious, but you can navigate between the phases of the debate by click the dates on the "latest updates bar".)
"There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong"
Are we talking about facts or opinions? Facts, by definition, are true. With that definition in mind, facts can not be "wrong".
I should hope that if someone is making an argument they go through whatever efforts needed to find and report the facts that support their case.
"just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world."
If you see two sides in a debate and both sides have strong, compelling arguments then it is the responsibility of you, the individual, to make your own choice.
However, just because someone favors a certain perspective on an issue does not mean that their viewpoint should be discarded because they are "biased".
Bias is not as simple of a concept as you make it out to be. Any issue worthy of intelligent debate and discussion is likely to be extremely nuanced.
There will be an interaction between the nuances of a complex issue and the personal values that people place on certain things.
In other words, it is possible for more than one group of people to be "right" on a certain issue. However, I think that the key point to remember here is that building an argument based on facts is a prerequisite to correctness.
"But saying this argument is like pointing out \"motive\" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward."
Actually, I completely agree with you here. I read the comment describing my initial argument as "motive", but you would figure that in order to have a motive someone had to have committed a crime.
Maybe this is a good explanation. I suppose that from my perspective their "article" was a "crime against statistics", and having elected myself judge, jury, and executioner all that I needed to do is come up with their motivation.
I probably should have made my perspective a little more clear in my original post, but I was trying to be succinct. Unfortunately, in my quest for succinctness, I created a post that may be construed as suboptimal.
Just to be clear, I think we have the same opinion about the study in question (though I just read the posted article). I just think you did yourself a disservice by stating "... is an anti-nuclear activist." Just pointing out that the article was "insulting in its lack of statistical rigor" would have been enough. At that point, arguing about the opinions of the writers is superfluous.
But regarding "facts": It is entirely possible to only know things that are true but still have an extremely biased view of the world, if those facts are a biased subsample of all possible facts. I work in astrophysics, and it happens all the time. We have such scant information that it's easy to draw all kinds of erroneous conclusions if you don't constantly keep in mind the potential facts we do not have because even if they were true we would have failed to acquire them.
While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity, her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong
Ehh, no, but...
While ad hominem makes for lousy arguments, when we're dealing with a claim that's already completely freaking implausible, knowing that it comes from an unreliable source is generally enough for me personally to decide it's not worth my time.
If a respected professor of physics claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine then I'll probably take some time to actually investigate it and figure out exactly why it's wrong. If it's some random dude off the street I'll dismiss it without consideration because... well, who has time?
What you say is true for practicality. But ad hominem is still invalid. You are ignoring the other persons argument (as a means of saving time), not countering it.
Isn't this the kind of argument that Paul Graham charcterizes as "ad hominem" and usually gets voted down on Hacker News?
Don't get me wrong, personally I think it's very valid to bring up and important to keep in mind while reading their article. But it seems like a double standard to me.
Sometimes people tend to throw around logical fallacies a bit too much.
In the legal system it's perfectly acceptable to bring up such an ad hominem argument: motive.
No one should be convicted on motive alone, however it does frame the interpretation of facts in a certain way.
In this particular case we have a seemingly sensationalist article, along with some suspect data collection, and then a large jump from correlation -> causation about nuclear fallout. Once it is seen that the authors have a vested interest in damning nuclear power, it's much easier to draw conclusions about what's going on or to increase scrutiny considering the impartial nature of the researchers.
Basically, I only consider something "ad hominem" if the flaws pointed out are irrelevant to what is being said. I think background is relevant when someone is presenting something as a fact that may not be (like the statistics in this post). When background is irrelevant is when it's used as an attack on someone's logic.
Even if it's Stalin saying "Murder is wrong, because kills someone", it doesn't matter that he himself was a mass murderer. It would make him a hypocrite, and a terrible person, but his logic still stands by himself.
On an unrelated note, I liked your (unintentional?) subtle humor of pointing out who wrote the article on ad hominem.
It's absolutely an ad hominem and a logical fallacy. The study itself is given. We can evaluate it without any knowledge whatsoever of the authors. The only time such a claim is not an ad hominem is when the target of the ad hominem is arguing from authority rather than from facts.
Not ad hominem: "I'm a godlike scientist and I'm certain X is true. Trust me." -> "No, he's a poopie head. Don't trust him."
In this case, the only reason we believe the speaker is because we believe him to be a godlike scientist. If he is not, we have little reason to believe him.
Ad hominem: "Here is a study. The methodology and data are available. It claims X." -> "Don't trust him, he's a poopie head."
In this case, the poopie-headed nature of the speaker is irrelevant. His methodology is either valid or invalid. The ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy in this case.
From "How to Disagree"'s definition of Ad Hominem:
For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:
Of course he would say that. He's a senator.
This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. It's still a very weak form of disagreement, though. If there's something wrong with the senator's argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn't, what difference does it make that he's a senator?
Totally agree with you, the thing I don't understand is why bias is so important, everyone is biased because people rarely talk about things in which they are disinterested.
But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it? It seems sort of unlikely that no one would have noticed a tremendous spike in the amount of environmental radiation (such as would presumably be necessary to cause such an increase in infant mortality) in these northwestern US cities.
Either way, though, that seems surprising to me that there'd be a 35% increase in infant mortality.
> But it's not at all proven that "Fukushima caused a 35% spike in infant mortality in the US", is it?
I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but that's my point, it's so implausible. US is very far from Japan, so if there was a 35% spike there then the researchers' first reaction should have been to check the corresponding stats for Japan. If they didn't it smacks of intellectual dishonesty.
by the way, it's not a 35% spike in infant mortality, which would be immediately noticed by every pediatrician in the world. it is reportedly a 35% spike in still births - defined as a non-live birth (not even a single breath taken) after gestational age of 20 weeks. Since these only occur 3 in 1,000 birth events in the US to begin with, an individual OB/GYN would never notice a 35% spike (which would increase the rate to 4/1000). This is the kind of thing only dedicated epidemiologist who are studying it intensely could ever notice in real time. The CDC won't even catch up with such a hard-to-measure spike until their next reporting cycle - several years from now.
I think it's too easy, with all this talk about nuclear meltdown and the world's worst industrial disaster (really?), to loose the following nugget of context: Japan just got hit by the fifth largest earthquake since 1900. They have bigger problems - at least in the short term - than radiation.
One of the most frequent complaints that comes up is the lack of safety mechanisms built into the reactor. Sure, they could have done a better job (the fact that electricity is needed for a cool-down is particularly disturbing) - but really, /all/ industrial mechanisms are going to start to experience a significant problems when hit by a historically significant earthquake. Sure, the engineers should have expected earthquakes (and they did - this is Japan, after all), but it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a 9.0, just as it's unreasonable to expect them to be prepared for a direct meteor strike.
Would you build a plant that could only handle a 100 year earthquake, but not a 1000 year one? You'd give your children and grandchildren a 1/10 chance of catastrophe... in exchange for what, supposedly cheaper power?
They have a 1/10 chance of catastrophe whether or not I build the plant. A 1000 year earthquake is going to cause much bigger problems then a nuclear meltdown. Would you construct a house that could withstand the sun going nova?
Again, not that the engineers didn't screw up. But the fact that a nuclear power plant got destroyed by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake should come as a surprise to nobody, and should not reflect poorly on nuclear technology in general, any more than the fact that cars crash when driven by drunks should reflect poorly on motors.
sure it does (reflect poorly on nukes in general). It means we now understand there is no possibility that they can be safely built. Unless you're okay with gradually radiating the entire planet or at least rendering little pieces of it permanently uninhabitable with each natural disaster. Chernobyl = 5% of Europe's farmland lost forever. Fukushima = 50% of the world's tuna spawning grounds permanently irradiated. I like to eat, how about you? How many more of these will you tolerate so your HD TV can have "instant on" capabiilty?
I agree with most of that, I'm just not sure why you wrote it in reply to my comment. I'm not criticizing Japan at all, my issue was with the "35% spike caused by Fukushima" hypothesis. If it were true, then I take it there wouldn't have been many surviving babies in Japan. That would have been a huge problem indeed.
Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:
http://janettesherman.com/
Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":
http://www.radiation.org/
They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html
Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/