Abizaid seems to have drunk deep from the waters of Foggy Bottom. I wonder how long his thinking has extended the war.
17 September, 2007
Speculating on the Syrian Raid
Speculation it is, but it seems to be informed speculation.
Hunting al Qaeda, Part II of III
Yon’s latest dispatch includes this handy advice:
We walked and walked, and Soldiers kept asking me if I was okay. Especially one Soldier named Staff Sergeant Chuomg Le, who kept asking if the heat was getting to me. I kept saying I would be carrying him before he would be carrying me. He just laughed. Other Soldiers said Le is a physical animal. But one of the tricks to combat reporting that I’ve learned is you don’t have to be tougher than all the Soldiers, just tougher than one. When the first one collapses, and they stop to stick an IV into him, you also get a break.
In fact, the next day three Soldiers would collapse from the heat during some fighting, and two of them were so dehydrated that their veins collapsed, proving once again that you don’t have to be tougher than everyone, just the guys who don’t drink enough water. If you can beat those guys, you are like the Lion King of reporters. Soldiers say, “I can’t believe the photographer is still standing when Sergeant So-and-So face-planted.” It’s all smoke and mirrors. I drink water like a fish and dive for every sliver of shade, thinking of the body like a battery that gets drained quickly by the heat and sun. With only so much juice, taking every sliver of shade, even if it’s only for 30 seconds, and pounding that water continuously, all adds up to a longer charge.
Malfeasance
In Dearborn the local government tried to keep the arrest of a Jihadi secret to “avoid stirring anti-Muslim sentiments”.
In related news, a Health Inspector in Florida has witheld information about a cockroach infestation at a local restaurant to “avoid stirring anti-cockroach sentiments”. And California school curricula will no longer teach the germ theory of disease, so as to avoid stirring “anti-bacterial sentiments”.
Healthy Skepticism
A long, but very worthwhile article in the New York Times by Gary Taubes , author of the forthcoming book “Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease.” (Yes, the NYT comes in for a lot of well-deserved grief for its vile politics. The science pages are, nonetheless, often excellent.)
It covers very well the perils of epidemiology and points out why I’m miffed every time a new health-related study gets reported in the MSM: The first study is the most likely to be wrong. That’s not a failure of science, it’s just how science works. A hypothesis is something to be tested.
His summation on what to do when we read studies, found on the last page, is vital reading. So, for those who won’t read the whole thing, here it is:
So how should we respond the next time we’re asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it’s the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it’s this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical.
If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they’re also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity.
If the association involves some aspect of human behavior, which is, of course, the case with the great majority of the epidemiology that attracts our attention, then question its validity. If taking a pill, eating a diet or living in proximity to some potentially noxious aspect of the environment is associated with a particular risk of disease, then other factors of socioeconomic status, education, medical care and the whole gamut of healthy-user effects are as well. These will make the association, for all practical purposes, impossible to interpret reliably.
The exception to this rule is unexpected harm, what Avorn calls “bolt from the blue events,” that no one, not the epidemiologists, the subjects or their physicians, could possibly have seen coming — higher rates of vaginal cancer, for example, among the children of women taking the drug DES to prevent miscarriage, or mesothelioma among workers exposed to asbestos. If the subjects are exposing themselves to a particular pill or a vitamin or eating a diet with the goal of promoting health, and, lo and behold, it has no effect or a negative effect — it’s associated with an increased risk of some disorder, rather than a decreased risk — then that’s a bad sign and worthy of our consideration, if not some anxiety. Since healthy-user effects in these cases work toward reducing the association with disease, their failure to do so implies something unexpected is at work.
All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologist’s study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, it’s never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.
Buttle's World 