Blogs on Lottâs coding errors

skippy comments on Lott's "coding errors". Tom Spencer thinks that Lott's days are numbered. Mike Spenis has written off Lott.

Chris Lawrence agrees that there were coding errors but argues that is easy to make such errors. I agree that such errors are easy to make, but, he did it twice, and the errors seem to systematically favour his position. Another thing that strikes me when I read Ayres and Donohue's paper is that they report many regression results, some of which are favourable to the "more guns, less crime" thesis, but more of them are not. The Lott and Mustard paper and More Guns, Less Crime also report many regressions, all of them supporting Lott's thesis. It sure looks like that even when he doesn't have systematic errors in his data, Lott just reports the results that support his position.

More like this

In his 6/9/03 posting, Lott claims that Donohue has made a "large number of easily identifiable mistakes". Even if true, such mistakes pale into insignificance compared with the coding errors that Lott made but will not admit to, but let's examine Lott's claims and see how many…
Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments. Even…
Science has printed a letter from Lott (subscription required) responding to Science's editorial suggesting that the AEI should deal with Lott the same way that Emory dealt with Bellesiles: Donald Kennedy's editorial "Research fraud and public policy" (18 April, p. 393) alleges that I made up a…
This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books. When you post a review at…