This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

Gerry Quinn · 12 Apr 2012, 21:18 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:18:06 +0100
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W50433D4FF462EBF41175FBCF3A0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W50433D4FF462EBF41175FBCF3A0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <DDC19713C77443D69FE6C1C0595DDEBA@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> Perhaps, as an American, I am more willing to believe in the effect of executions
> on willingness to murder because of the social experiment the US has provided in
> this regard. Not only do states with the death penalty have higher murder rates,
> but when a state legalizes the death penalty, the murder rate rises in the next
> few years. When a state outlaws the death penalty the murder rate declines for a
> few years. 

Are all possible confounding factors (such as, for example, death penalties being likely to be legalised/outlawed during periods when murder rates are rising/falling respectively for unrelated reasons) eliminated?

I don?t have any axe to grind here; perhaps the death penalty somehow does have a positive effect on the murder rate.  But scientific research in such fields is often highly agenda-driven, and agenda driven science is prone to miss explanations that are inimical to the agenda.

- Gerry Quinn

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120412/dfb7b738/attachment-0001.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net