--- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <snip to> > This makes sense to me as a criticism of the > study design. Why they chose to lump all violent > crime together isn't entirely clear, but I can't > imagine they did this because they *expected* the > murder rate to spike and *wanted* to submerge it. > > I suspect they did it because it wouldn't sound as > impressive, PR-wise, to claim a decline merely in > assaults, as opposed to a decline in all violent > crime; and to do studies on all three types of > violent crime separately would just have been too > complicated.
You're not suggesting that the *purpose* of the study was PR, are you? Just joking. *Of course* the purpose of the study was PR. That's why a lot of people don't take these studies seriously, and lump them in with the types of studies paid for by tobacco money. Not to be argumentative but to explain, I'd love to see serious studies about the value of meditation. They could help to convince more people to try it. But when the study is done by Brand X, *promoting* Brand X, I don't think I'm wrong to be a little skeptical. I was serious about the Disraeli line. IMO *most* statistics can be twisted to say what- ever you want them to say. When I read some of the press releases about the IA course, I'm sometimes reminded of the possibly-apocryphal story of the report in Pravda of a two-team hockey match between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. "In the recent hockey tournament, the Russian team came in second, whereas the American team came in next to last."
