At 6:12 AM -0700 1/21/01, Chris Rasch wrote:
> > What you really need is a piece with
>> coauthors, one of whom one side will find it hard to attack, the
>> other the other side. You can get that by picking authors who are
>> identified with one side or another in general, but are not committed
>> on the particular issue. I actually have a project along those lines
>> I am trying to get going--and I hope that if it does happen, I'll be
>> able to persuade John to be one of the researchers.
>
>This makes sense to me and I wish you the best of luck with the
>project. My
>primary interest is to encourage well-designed studies that both sides of the
>gun control debate would find difficult to dismiss due to bias. I
>think that,
>all other things equal, a study funded/managed roughly equally by
>individuals on
>opposite sides of the gun control issue will be trusted more widely than a
>study funded/managed by individuals from a single side of the gun-control
>issue. Whether such studies are done by a academics at a newly formed
>institute or academics at existing institutions doesn't matter to me.
But my proposal is not a study done by people on opposite sides of
the debate, but a study done by people who both sides of the debate
trust--which is a rather different thing.
More specifically, my idea is for a study designed to estimate the
rate of false positives in the criminal justice system--the fraction
of the people convicted of serious crimes who are innocent. That is a
crucial statistic for opinions about the system, and one that nobody
has any accurate estimate of. Technological progress in DNA testing
makes it technically possible to reevaluate a large sample of old
cases, and get at least a lower bound for the fraction that convicted
an innocent person.
Any such number will be even more controversial than Lott's results.
So you have the study done by two statisticians, one of whom
conservatives trust (for reasons having nothing to do with this
particular question), one of whom liberals trust. Lott would be an
ideal candidate for the first statistician. He has, so far as I know,
no particular bias on the question of how many innocent people are
convicted--but the right cannot attack him because of his work on gun
control.
> > That isn't at all clear. Suppose you were given the job "design a
>> pollution public policy that is in the interest of both the EPA and
>> the automobile industry." Do you think it would be that difficult? Do
>> you think it likely that it would be in the public interest?
>
>Yes, the EPA and the automobile industry may fund studies to their mutual
>benefit. The EPA is susceptible to "capture" by the auto industry. But to
>what extent is this happening with HEI? I don't know.
Nor do I. But you asked about who I would trust--and I regard a
conspiracy between EPA bureaucrats and the auto industry in their
mutual interest as far more plausible than a conspiracy by either the
University of Chicago Law School or the Olin Foundation.
> > I would not trust any of them. What I would trust, more or less, is a
>> competent scholarly study done by someone who had published lots of
>> articles in top ranking peer reviewed journals.
>
>Of course, but given two equally high quality studies, one
>funded/managed by NRA
>alone, the other funded/managed jointly by NRA/HCI which do you think would be
>more widely trusted? Which do you think HCI would find harder to dismiss?
I don't think a study that either NRA or HCI strongly disapproved of
would ever come out of such an institute. More generally, I think
creating "neutral institutes" by getting people on opposite sides of
an issue to fund them is not a very hopeful strategy for producing
truth. You are better off recognizing that most researchers have
views of their own, and using the usual academic machinery of
competing peer reviewed journals, rebuttals and rerebuttals to sort
things out. It doesn't work very well, but I think it works better
than "officially neutral" studies.
Consider the role of the Center for Disease Control in the firearms
conflict. They try to get authority by claiming to be neutral--after
all, the CDC has nothing to do with firearms regulation--but it's
clearly bogus. I would rather have them admit what side they are on
and then fight it out in the journals with people on the other side.
--
David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
