Spagat
tlambert | February 6, 2009Unfortunately, the Journal of Peace Research has published the badly flawed "Main Street Bias" paper. My earlier criticisms still apply, so I'm reposting them. Consider this the first draft of a reply to their paper.
The authors argue that main street bias could reasonably produce a factor of 3 difference.
How did they get such a big number? Well, they made a simple model in which the bias depends on four numbers:
q, how much more deadly the areas near main street that were sampled are than the other areas that allegedly were not sampled. They speculate that this number might be 5 (ie…