Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 7

Today I return to Peru.  If you're not up to speed on this discussion please go back to post 1 of the present series. I could include this post in either this series, this series or this series.  But I think it works best within my first Peru series because the present post covers an …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 3

This post continues my series on Silvio Rendon's rejoinder to the reply of Daniel Manrique-Vallier and Patrick Ball (MVB) to Silvio Rendon's critique of the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). OK that's complicated so how about this? The present series covers a second paper by Rendon that definitively shreds the TRC's …

L’Affaire Burnham: Ten Years Later

I just gave this presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Toronto. The title of the talk is taken from Richard Kulka's Presidential Address to AAPOR.  Back in 2009 AAPOR censured Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins University for refusing to disclose basic information about his methodology for …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 2

Back to blogging after diverting my energy in recent weeks to putting out a few fires. I'll assume here that you've read the first post of this new series.  So you know that overfitting is a terminal problem for the Shining Path (SP) estimates published in the statistical report of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission …

The Statistical Estimates of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are Really Bad: Part 1

Silvio Rendon's powerful rejoinder on the statistical work of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is finally out. This is a big development so I'm starting a brand new series to cover it.  Of course, this new series is related to the earlier one.   But I'll strive to make the present series self-contained so you can start here if …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 6

This is the latest installment in a series that considers the statistical report done for the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Silvio Rendon’s critique of this statistical report and a reply to Rendon from Daniel Manrique Vallier and Patrick Ball (MVB) who worked on the TRC statistical report.  The present post continues to discuss the MVB reply. (Note …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 5

I'll start this post by reacting to some interesting comments to part 4 of this series which was, you may be surprised to learn,  preceded by part 1, part 2 and part 3.  I'll assume that readers have some familiarity with these posts but I'll also try to go slowly and remind readers of things …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 4

This is the fourth post in a series on the statistical report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) , the critique of that report published by Sylvio Rendon, the reply to Rendon from two authors of the statistical report and, eventually, Rendon's rejoinder which has not yet been published.  My earlier posts are …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 3

This post continues a series that started here and continued here.  The earlier posts covered Sylvio Rendon's critique of the statistical report of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  Rendon argues that the two striking and central statistical claims made by the TRC are both wrong.  These claims are:  The true number of deaths in …

Important New Violent Death Estimates for the War in Peru with Implications Beyond just Peru: Part 2

This is a follow up to last week's post about new estimates,  published by Silvio Rendon, of human losses in the war in Peru, 1980 to 2000. Important context is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Peru published estimates that were quite surprising in at least two respects:  The TRC's estimate for the total number …