Got anything in particular in mind?
Because if you’re talking about Iraq, I’ll be happy to point you to the threads where this notion was debunked over four and a half years ago.
Just sayin’.
It’s much less suspect.
Either way, it’s not inconsistent with being skeptical of peoples’ self-serving claims. (I’ve actually become less paranoid since my younger days.) There’s no need to posit a conspiracy to be skeptical of these sorts of claims when made by the UN.
Anyway, I would guess that a lot of people who want to give Peter Piot a pass would have a hard time accepting that the whole “weapons of mass destruction”/ Iraq thing was an “honest mistake.”
Yay! It’s false equivalence time!
Well, well, I would guess that a lot of the people who want to assume Peter Piot is a baby-eating AIDSophile would have a hard time accepting that Prince’s work since the late 90s has been pretty substandard!
Take that, you dastard!
I don’t understand your point.
Oh, okay, I’ll help you out: it was that someone’s opinion on whether weapons of mass destruction were deliberately fictionalised has no bearing on their opinion of whether AIDS figures were deliberately fictionalised.
When Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine, he was head of the Virus Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. So his work was thanks in part to government involvement.
What, the notion that Certain People lied?
Just sayin’.
It’s called bias. Just like when you watch a basketball game for a team you support along with someone who is a rabid fan of the other team. At the end of the game you both will feel like you got jobbed by the ref.s Both will be able to cite instances where your player was called for a touch foul while the other team got away with murder. If a third person watches who doesn’t like either team, that person will probably think the ref.s did an OK job and treated both teams the same.
How most U.S. researchers get around the numbers game is to lump people at risk for a disease in with those who actually have it. So instead of, say, stating that the problem of type 2 diabetes affects 1000 people it will be stated that 100,000 people either have or are at risk for type 2 diabetes.
If the UN had wanted to spin the AIDS information in the manner of American scientists who know how to play the money game, they would have said that millions upon millions of Africans either have AIDS or are at risk of getting AIDS through their actions.
One final note - the Salk invented the polio vaccine story is kind of like saying Christopher Columbus discovered America. In many parts of the world it is said that Kaprowsky invented the polio vaccine.
Sure, that may be part of it. A waiter may be very careful to make sure that everything you order ends up on the bill. But not that careful to make sure that nothing you didn’t order ends up on the bill.
So when you get overbilled, it’s an “honest mistake.” Kinda sorta.
Of course, sometimes people engage in out and out fraud and later claim it was an “honest mistake.”
The bottom line is that self-serving claims should be viewed skeptically and critically. Even if it’s somebody in a white lab coat who is making the claim. And even if it’s an authority figure, such as the UN or the US Government that is making the claim.
My point about Iraq is that many people have no problem turning on their skeptical high beams if the authority figure is on the opposite side of the political fence from them.
Unfortunately, but as always, the point is on your head as 1) the AIDS figures differed from reality only in degree, not in totality, and b) there is no apparent ulterior motive for the UN to overstate the problem of AIDS (as demonstrated by the fact that it is they, themselves, who have restated its extent).
But you know, never mind; if it keeps you happy to think that the world’s problems are distillable into binary pots, whereby everyone who opposes AIDS must therefore have opposed invading Iraq, then fine. It’s fucking stupid, but that does seem to be your bag. It seems a particularly tired way of avoiding making any actual argument yourself, but what the hell.
Your point is taken, but another important thing to note about scientists is that their whole process is transparent and to a large degree quantifiable. If a scientist’s work is affected by bias, other people should be able to point to exactly how it is so.
Or maybe those of use who seemed to want a very high burden of proof for claims of imminent threat from Iraq were of the opinion that launching a war of invasion requires a very damn good reason, the facts to back up which are very damn certain. If you’re going to start a war, with all of the death and destruction that necessarily brings, you’d better have an extremely solid case.
“Iraq is an imminent threat and we need to invade it.”
- Destructive and dangerous proposition (even if carried out competently and in good faith), based on an assertion of threat was in doubt from the get-go – good reason to look at it carefully.
“Africa is experiencing a tremendous epidemic with 40 million infected. We need to work to stop the spread of the disease and get drugs and education to the people who could be helped by them.”
- A proposition which is neither destructive nor dangerous if carried out competently and in good faith, based on an assertion of epidemic that is not very dubious – there’s plenty of good reason to believe millions of Africans have AIDS, and even if their numbers are off by a factor of two their proposed response is about as appropriate as if their number is right.
So: a proposal of war based on already dubious claims (unless you think Iraq’s threat was generally accepted in 2003), or a proposal of medical activities based on claims that are pretty obviously qualitatively true. Which one would you take with a grain of salt, and which with a spoonful?
As for the premise of the OP, that the UN exaggerated the epidemic, such is not born out by his own link. UNAIDS wasn’t outed in a lie by a some clever journalist; they came out and revised their estimates on their own initiative. For reasons stated above in the thread, it’s perfectly believable that the could have mis-estimated a 33-million-person epidemic for a 40-million-person epidemic, given how difficult communication and testing are, and that people with HIV don’t look any different than uninfected people. If they were getting a nice big slush fund from lying about the size of the epidemic, why would they suddenly knock off their embezzlement?
So apparently UNAIDS’ crime is mistaking an estimate of millions of infections, and then later coming up with a better estimate that turns out to be smaller (but still millions of infections), publishing this information, and admitting their earlier models weren’t as good as the newer techniques. Eeeevil.
So what? It’s still a case of an “honest mistake” that happens to favor the person making the mistake.
Dude, you gotta be kidding me. If you seriously believe that, then you are about as blind as they come.
If it keeps you happy to attack straw men so you can avoid facing facts that make you uncomfortable, I certainly can’t stop you.
So why did they revise their estimate?
On the issue of incentives, here’s why the UN has an institutional incentive not to overstate its estimates of problems: credibility.
The only thing the UN has is its credibility. It has no power except that which is voluntarily given it by nation-states, and this depends in large part on its credibility. If countries, especially strong ones like the US, have reason to believe that an agency isn’t credible, they will block actions involving that agency. The only way the UN can garner respect for international law and cooperative governance is by convincing the world that it is trustworthy, capable, and credible.
This is aside from the many personal incentives people who work at the UN have. I can only speak from a US perspective, but I’m sure the same is true of most countries: with few exceptions, people working at the UN could make much more money in private industry. They work for the UN because they like the job and they believe in the mission of the UN. The notion, as some have suggested, that they do not want to solve problems because it will not get them more money is ludicrous. If they wanted money, nice offices, and secretaries, they’d work in private industry.
There probably is an argument that people who believe in a cause will overstate the problem in order to secure more resources for their fight. But there’s no indication that this has happened here, and this argument depends on an entirely different set of incentives than has been suggested in this thread. At a minimum, one arguing this would need to establish that the UN got more money for the fight against AIDS because of the difference in numbers. I highly doubt that such aid, minimal as it is, depends on the total number of cases +/- 15%.
At least that’s how things should work in theory. Do a google search on terms like “data” “foia” and “scientist.”
I don’t know. Is anyone still claiming that there are WMD’s in Iraq?
The same thing could be said of every institutional liar, exaggerater, and fraudster.
And yet people still lie, exaggerate, and engage in fraud, both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of the institutions they represent.
First, I didn’t say no one ever exaggerates at the UN. I said that there were incentives not to do so, which contradicts what others have said in this thread. Since I offered an example of when that incentive might be overcome in the very post you quote, I can only conclude that you didn’t read it.
Second, the UN is uniquely sensitive to credibility issues. Governments, for example, have power quite apart from their credibility (witness the current administration). In that way, the UN is more like a nonpartisan NGO. Ask anyone at Human Rights Watch what their most important asset is, and I guarantee they will say credibility. That is the institutional incentive to keep their reports honest.
Again, to be clear, incentive does not mean guarantee. But I should have thought that was obvious.
No, but Cheney does still say sometimes that there were links to Al Qaeda. What does this have to do with Iraq? Finding weapons in one country sounds a little easier than getting a correct read on the number of people with AIDS worldwide - what’s the link?