History News Network reports about it (the title is 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently) and the rather pugnacious promotional campaign for it, which argues that Bellesiles’ Arming America was wrongly criticized. Arming America was indeed quite rightly condemned, including by our own Jim Lindgren, and Bellesiles rightly lost his Bancroft Prize, and his tenured Emory University position, as a result of the scandal. That the publicity campaign is so inaccurate is unfortunate; but it is certainly possible that the new book itself might prove to be sound, and I look forward to hearing more when the book is actually out. In the meantime, here’s the publisher’s galley letter, as quoted by the HNN post:
1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous “swiftboating” campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) — “the best kind of non-fiction,” according to the Chicago Tribune — which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.”
And here’s an excerpt from the conclusion to the Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles (appointed by Emory):
We have interviewed Professor Bellesiles and found him both cooperative and respectful of this process. Yet the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed. Even allowing for the loss of some of his research materials, he appears not to have been systematic in selecting repositories or collections of probate records for examination and his recording methods were at best primitive and altogether unsystematic. Bellesiles seems to have been utterly unaware of the importance of the possibility of the replication of his research. Subsequent to the allegations of research misconduct, his responses have been prolix, confusing, evasive and occasionally contradictory. We are surprised and troubled that Bellesiles has not availed himself of the opportunities he has had since the notice of this investigation to examine, identify and share his remaining research materials. Even at this point, it is not clear that he fully understands the magnitude of his own probate research shortcomings.The Committee’s investigation has been seriously hampered by the absence or unavailability of Professor Bellesiles’ critical and apparently lost research records and by the failures of memory and careful record keeping which Professor Bellesiles himself describes. Given his conflicting statements and accounts, it has been difficult to establish where and how Professor Bellesiles conducted his research into the probate records he cites: for example, what was read in microfilm and where and in what volume, what archives, in some cases, were actually visited and what they contained In addition to this, we note his subsequent failure to be fully forthcoming, and the implausibility of some of his defenses — a prime example is that of the “hacking” of his website; another is his disavowal of the e-mails of Aug. 30 and Sept. 19, 2000 to Professor Lindgren which present a version of the location and reading of records substantially in conflict with Professor Bellesiles’ current account. Taking all this into account, we are led to conclude that, under Question 5, Professor Bellesiles did engage in “serious deviations from accepted practices in carrying out [and] reporting results from research.” As to these matters, comprehending points (a) – (c) under Question 5, his scholarly integrity is seriously in question.
In summary, we find on Questions 1 and 2, that despite serious failures of and carelessness in the gathering and presentation of archival records and the use of quantitative analysis, we cannot speak of intentional fabrication or falsification. On Question 3, we find that the strained character of Professor Bellesiles’ explanation raises questions about his veracity with respect to his account of having consulted probate records in San Francisco County. On Question 4, dealing with the construction of the vital Table One, we find evidence of falsification. And on Question 5, which raises the standard of professional historical scholarship, we find that Professor Bellesiles falls short on all three counts.
I would not have quoted this material again, and let the new book stand on its own: Bellesiles suffered amply (though rightly) for his misconduct, and it’s good that he’s getting a second chance. But the publicity letter that HNN quoted calls for a reminder about the facts.
Soronel Haetir says:
What I find odd about that letter, at least the quoted portion is how they speak of the book and the Bancroft prize as if that wasn’t rescinded. It would be akin to an athlete who was stripped of medals after having been caught doping as if they were still considered the legitimate victor.
May 11, 2010, 9:17 pmSkyler says:
Why in heaven’s name would it be good he is getting a second chance?
May 11, 2010, 9:18 pmDon’t Make Professor Volokha Irritated. | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] You won’t like him when he’s irritated. [...]
May 11, 2010, 9:21 pmCTD says:
‘Swiftboating’ probably is an appropriate term – after all, most of the SBVT charges were absolutely true.
May 11, 2010, 9:23 pmHans Bader says:
How weird. The Connecticut academic who got this discredited scholar hired claims that criticism of him is “mobbing” and “workplace bullying” (and this academic is behind Connecticut “workplace bullying legislation” — an illustration of the dangerously vague (and perhaps unconstitutionally vague and overbroad) nature of “anti-bullying” legislation).
May 11, 2010, 9:30 pmGlenn Bowen says:
Bellesiles- the guy has to be a prescription pill addict or somesuch.
The clown got taken down in spades, I don’t know why anyone save the staff at the NYT book review would even entertain the thought of trusting his writing.
Let the sonofabitch paint houses or something.
May 11, 2010, 9:40 pm11-B.2O/B4 says:
Once a liar scheming to impact the scientific history of america to further a partisan political view, always a liar scheming to impact the scientific history of america to further a partisan political view.
May 11, 2010, 9:44 pmAngus says:
Bellesiles’ first book on Ethan Allen was good, which is why his awful misconduct in Arming America was so tragic. He can be a good scholar when not blinded to such extremes by partisanship. The promo letter from The New Press is ridiculous, I agree.
May 11, 2010, 9:45 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » A New Book Coming Soon from Michael Bellesiles -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by The Volokh Conspirac. The Volokh Conspirac said: A New Book Coming Soon from Michael Bellesiles: (Eugene Volokh) History News Network reports… http://goo.gl/fb/wzIty [...]
May 11, 2010, 9:58 pmChrisTS says:
Who is “Professor Volokah”?
May 11, 2010, 10:01 pmBleepless says:
I have run into the fraudster’s name once in a while since he was defrocked. His academic career does not seem to have suffered much, since he is a liberal martyr.
May 11, 2010, 10:14 pmEugene Volokh says:
Bleepless: You say that Bellesiles’ “academic career does not seem to have suffered much.” Are there any objective criteria one could look to in order to determine how well an academic is doing his career? Does that support or undermine your assertion?
May 11, 2010, 10:26 pmjcp370 says:
That’s odd. The Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Bellesiles (appointed by Emory) reads exactly like The Report of the Investigative Committee in the matter of Professor Michael Mann (appointed by Pennsylvania State University). Plagiarism?
May 11, 2010, 10:29 pmAngus says:
I can assure you that going from a tenured position at prestigious Emory U. to an adjunct job at Central Connecticut is a huge hit. So too is going from Knopf to the New Press.
May 11, 2010, 10:49 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
You know the saying, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging”? Bellesiles making a big deal about his last book being exposed as a fraud is astonishingly stupid. It would make more sense to just quietly hope that everyone forgot about it.
May 11, 2010, 11:00 pmDilan Esper says:
John Lott still gets work, doesn’t he? And there’s a whole bunch of lying hacks who publish “scholarship” for Washington think tanks or who author factually challenged books to sell to ideological true believers.
I’m perfectly willing to say that Bellesiles is a scoundrel, but this is America, and we publish scoundrels all the time.
May 11, 2010, 11:00 pmtamerlane says:
If Bellesiles has truly learned his lesson, the new book might be worth reading. But Bellesiles must have had some control over the publicity letter you quote. Its whitewash of Bellesiles’s disgrace and its self-adulatory tone suggest that Bellesiles has not done much soul searching. I’m going to wait until the book is vetted by some good unbiased reviewers though before I’ll consider reading it.
May 11, 2010, 11:03 pmSun Tzu's Nephew says:
Was it? Has a competent historian actually reviewed the evidence Bellesiles used? Thats the problem with being a liar: Once proven, you can never, ever undo the taint.
May 11, 2010, 11:03 pmLou Gots says:
We can’t think of Bellesiles without seeing this in our mind’s eye: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKmJPnAGUJk
May 11, 2010, 11:17 pmuh_clem says:
This.
Let me know when the LA Times stops publishing op-eds from Mary Ro^H^H^H^H John Lott.
May 11, 2010, 11:36 pmLarryA says:
I really find it amazing that anyone would consider it possible that the National Rifle Association could influence Emory University to conduct an unwarranted investigation. It would be like Rush Limbaugh telling Nancy Pelosi how to vote.
I find it a lot more likely Emory was responding to the librarians who were telling the press that the records Bellesiles claimed to have reviewed at their institutions didn’t exist.
May 12, 2010, 12:01 amThumbcruncher says:
I wonder what kind of pre-release event they will have for this book. The last time, they held a symposium in Chicago. Where will they hold the next symposium and will Saul Cornell, Michael Dorf and others from Chicago write new scholarly pros to then be used for new gun control laws and judicial rulings. Oh, its going to be a wonderful summer.
May 12, 2010, 12:09 amMatthew Carberry says:
I wasn’t aware that Lott’s work was substantially discredited in and of itself. Challenged and maybe wrong, like any research, but not necessarily utterly fraudulent. Most of his data remains available to be challenged.
That doesn’t excuse the Mary Rosh crap or give him a pass on the hard drive crash claim (though there are at least other people’s word involved in that one) but there’s at least a degree of ethical difference in his particular issues and Bellesiles’ multiple outright fabrications.
May 12, 2010, 12:13 amMalvolio says:
Look up tu quoque. For some people, it’s a fallacy; for others, it’s policy.
Bellesiles or his editor is taking diametrically the wrong tack. His notoriety could make the book, whatever it is, a success but if there’s much of that whining “they done him wrong” tone, people just shy away.
May 12, 2010, 12:43 amSteve says:
Look up tu quoque. For some people, it’s a fallacy; for others, it’s policy.
Except no one is attempting to excuse Bellesiles’ fraud by pointing to the fraud of others. They are merely noting that it is not at all exceptional for an exposed fraudster to continue to find a receptive audience of fellow travelers.
May 12, 2010, 12:48 amJohn Skookum says:
You beat me to it. This guy shouldn’t even be teaching American History 101 to hung-over community college students. He deliberately falsified the historical record in Orwellian fashion to promote a narrow political ideology. Do you think Dan Rather deserves a second chance too? How about Jayson Blair?
May 12, 2010, 1:26 amMatthew Carberry says:
Steve,
If I tell my roommate I didn’t take his last beer when I did, I’m a liar and a thief.
If tell my roommate I didn’t take his last $50 when I did, I’m also a liar and a thief.
Is your position that there’s absolutely no moral distinction between the two?
What if when caught I finally admit it? What if instead I continue to deny it and in fact try to accuse my roommate of framing me?
I’m more or less a Kantian and even I try to distinguish between degrees of unethical behavior a bit more tightly than that.
Their actions, both wrong, weren’t apples and apples and neither were their responses when caught.
May 12, 2010, 1:50 amSteve says:
As a lawyer, I know that any two cases are distinguishable. Not every distinction is persuasive, however. Arguing whether this guy’s fraud was 18% more excusable than that guy’s fraud because of various factual differences strikes me as an uninteresting debate and I will decline to participate.
Bellesiles’ fraud was easily serious enough that I could no longer find any of his scholarship credible. Even though it might be true, I just couldn’t trust it unless it was independently verified somehow. So, too, with Lott. If Lott’s fraud was 18% less serious, I don’t really care because they’re both across the line in my estimation.
But both of them seem to have an audience who is ready and willing to lap up their conclusions in spite of it all because it’s what they want to hear. That’s the similarity that is the point of the discussion.
May 12, 2010, 2:02 amMatthew Carberry says:
That makes sense. I definitely need to get better at sticking to the tree that matters and not getting distracted by the forest.
I also need to get better at coming up with analogies.
Thank you.
May 12, 2010, 2:22 amJim March says:
Here’s what gets me: the year 1877. The final Cruikshank decision was only a year earlier, and allowed the states to do basically unlimited civil rights violations of every sort including of course gun control. Charles Lane’s 2008 book “The Day Freedom Died” currently stands as the last word on that.
Is Bel-liar going to ignore all that somehow? Seriously? Because criticizing the Cruikshank decision or it’s horrible aftermath is a distinctly pro-RKBA thing…and it’s damned hard to imagine Bel-liar turning over a new leaf on guns. So how is he going to deal with Cruikshank’s aftermath?
Unbelievable.
May 12, 2010, 2:57 amRicardo says:
I’m also not aware of John Lott being directly accused of falsifying or cherry-picking data. His methodology has been criticized: the fact that a given state passes concealed carry legislation may be correlated with some unobserved variable that will influence crime rates in the future. That may or may not be the case but it doesn’t make Lott’s contributions fraudulent.
By contrast, Bellesiles seems to be much more in the category of someone like David Irving who has deliberately misrepresented primary source material to lead to an ideologically convenient conclusion. Michelle Malkin also comes very close to this as is clear from reading this brutal (but very substantive) take-down of her book on Japanese internment.
May 12, 2010, 3:48 amInstapundit » Blog Archive » A NEW BOOK COMING SOON from scholarly fraud Michael Bellesiles. Here’s Jim Lindgren’s Yale Law Jo… says:
[...] A NEW BOOK COMING SOON from scholarly fraud Michael Bellesiles. [...]
May 12, 2010, 8:26 amTim McDonald says:
Ah yes, 1877. The year the Republicans sold the ex-slaves back to the Democrats for the sake of the presidency. As shameful an episode as ever was in our history.
I knew it was bad in the South, but was it a violent year in other parts of the country? I am now wanting to read more about it, is there another book covering 1877 or will I have to wait until someone fact checks this one?
May 12, 2010, 8:48 amThomasD says:
If Bellisiles truly were interested in regaining some semblance of credibility perhaps he could correct the egregious mis-statements from HNN?
Silence in the face of such bald faced misrepresentations could be viewed as complicity.
May 12, 2010, 8:49 amSteve says:
I guess you could argue that creating a false identity in an effort to bolster your credibility is something other than scientific fraud. I don’t know that I would agree with that. But you’re right that Lott was never “directly accused” of falsifying data, as the Freakonomics kerfuffle makes clear. What is undisputed, however, is that a number of scholars were unable to replicate his results, and that Lott gave a number of implausible “dog ate my homework” excuses for why he couldn’t produce his data. Bottom line for me is that I could never assign him any credibility at this juncture.
May 12, 2010, 8:56 amKatahdin says:
How do you know? That’s the rub.
(I, at least, have an implicit assumption – nonfiction can only be good if it is accurate. When I want to be entertained, I read fiction. When I read nonfiction I want to be informed, and thus reading falsehoods is worse than reading nothing at all; it poisons the cache, so to speak.)
May 12, 2010, 9:12 amaloysiusmiller says:
Once again confirming the definition of swiftboating: an inconvenient truth that utterly demolishes a convenient lie.
May 12, 2010, 9:16 amJabba The Tutt says:
CTD says:
‘Swiftboating’ probably is an appropriate term — after all, most of the SBVT charges were absolutely true.
T Boone Pickens offered a million dollars to anyone, who could prove claims made in the tv ads were false. No one collected.
There are some claims to errors in John O’Neill’s book.
‘Swiftboating’ can be defined as telling the truth about a lying liberal.
May 12, 2010, 9:40 amSk says:
“You say that Bellesiles’ “academic career does not seem to have suffered much.” Are there any objective criteria one could look to in order to determine how well an academic is doing his career? Does that support or undermine your assertion?”
I can name one. One noted professor states: “…it is certainly possible that the new book itself might prove to be sound, and I look forward to hearing more when the book is actually out.”
It is not clear why such a statement would be made. Thousands (tens of thousands?) of books are written every year. Hundreds by fellow professors. Clearly, every professor in the country, for all intents and purposes, ignores the overwhelming majority of books, and scholarly books by colleagues, written. Yet, in spite of the accurate scandal surrounding Bellesiles, it appears that simply by being famous, he will still get attention that hundreds of non-plagiarist professors will not enjoy.
As someone mentioned: shouldn’t this guy be painting houses? A night manager at a WalMart? Selling insurance? What does it take for an academic to warrant a career change?
Sk
May 12, 2010, 9:59 amSk says:
I see above that David Kopel gets it.
Sk
May 12, 2010, 10:12 amClayton E. Cramer says:
It was the year that a series of railroad strikes across America turned quite violent. National Guard units, in some cases, changed sides when ordered to fire on non-violent strikers. In San Francisco, labor union leaders incited a riot against Chinese, but the better class of citizens used rifles to hold back the mob until Chinatown was evacuated. My book For the Defense of Themselves and the State has a number of pages about this.
May 12, 2010, 10:19 amSteve says:
T Boone Pickens offered a million dollars to anyone, who could prove claims made in the tv ads were false. No one collected.
Well, that’s because the judge of whether the claims had been proven false was T. Boone Pickens. The technicality on which he relied was the same one typically employed by Swiftboat defenders like the ones in this thread: even though the Swiftboaters lied repeatedly in their book and their media interviews, there wasn’t anything literally false in their TV ads. Well, okay then. In other news, Dan Rather’s name has been cleared because there were several of his stories that weren’t false.
May 12, 2010, 10:21 amuh_clem says:
The obvious difference, though, is that when Belesiles was caught he pretty much disappeared from sight; this is the first peep I’ve heard out of him in years. I had thought that he was (rightly) drummed out of the business. Bellesiles is not taken seriously and I doubt his new book will sell well – I’m certainly not going to read it after being fooled by him before.
By contrast, Lott is still taken seriously by many gun advocates, despite a similar level of academic dishonesty. He can’t be trusted any more than Bellesiles, yet for some reason people here and at the LA Times still give him creedence. Why is that?
May 12, 2010, 10:24 amA New Book from Michael Bellesiles | Snowflakes in Hell says:
[...] Eugene Volokh notes it’s titled “1877: America’s Year of Living Violently.”, and notes it’s publisher mentioned: 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous “swiftboating” campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) — “the best kind of non-fiction,” according to the Chicago Tribune — which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. [...]
May 12, 2010, 10:48 amloki13 says:
1. I personally hold Lott and Bellesiles in the same regard- purported academics who did *interesting* things with their data to shape them to match their pre-formed ideological conclusions. However, like a certain character in a Harry Potter novel, I worry about saying Mr. Lott’s name too much as he has a tendency to show up when invoked. ;)
2. That said, I also agree with the above tu quoque comments; that Mr. Lott did something similar in no way excuses Bellesiles. There is nothing more reprehsensible in the academic field than falsifying or massaging your data. Academics require trust- it is impossible for every piece to be completely verified, and without personal integrity, the edifice of knowledge crumbles.
3. I am surprised and disheartened that Bellesiles received another academic job. I am all for second chances, but…. damn. This is like putting a kiddie rapist in charge of a day care center.
4. All that said, I do agree with the OP. Works stand on their own. Assuming that the research Bellesiles did for his new work is verified, his past conduct has no bearing. However, I would recommend sifting through it with the finest-toothed comb available. And until such a time, I will use the short-cut heuristic that Bellesiles is a lying liar and will weigh his “research” accordingly.
May 12, 2010, 10:49 amSteve says:
By contrast, Lott is still taken seriously by many gun advocates, despite a similar level of academic dishonesty. He can’t be trusted any more than Bellesiles, yet for some reason people here and at the LA Times still give him creedence. Why is that?
Good question. Maybe it’s because there are institutions like AEI that are willing to give Lott credibility. Imagine if Bellesiles, instead of being exiled to some community college, were rewarded for his dishonesty with a prestigious job at Harvard. I can imagine media types saying “well, I guess there’s some controversy about this guy, but he’s still a Harvard professor, let’s print his stuff and let people make up their own minds.” The media is big on credentialism.
May 12, 2010, 10:50 amDonP. says:
Perhaps he has used Jayson Blair as his unnamed co-author and assistant researcher?
May 12, 2010, 10:55 amRicardo says:
Steve, I admit I never followed the John Lott controversy all that thoroughly but my understanding is that there are two separate studies involved. The first — the hypothesis that concealed carry laws caused decreases in crime rates — has apparently been replicated. A separate study based on original survey work — rather than publicly available crime statistics by county and state — is at issue in the failure of anyone to replicate the work and the “dog ate my homework” excuses. Jim Lindgren’s post on the subject and the Wikipedia article on the John Lott defamation suit against Levitt and Dubner seem to bear this out.
As for the definition of scientific fraud, in empirical work (which is kind of my area) I’d say only two questions are relevant:
1. Is the dataset accurate and does it reflect an unbiased sample for the purpose of the study?
2. Is the statistical analysis reported accurately and is it a sound analysis?
John Lott’s Mary Rosh sock-puppetry is a sign of extreme weirdness but does not constitute academic or scientific fraud as it does not involve the falsification of data or results.
May 12, 2010, 11:04 amJabba The Tutt says:
Hey Steve!! Put up or shut up. You’ve accused the Swiftboaters and John Lott with lying, but without giving one example to make your case. Typical
May 12, 2010, 11:08 amwhite womandrive by, Dan Rather believing, liberal, kool-aid drinker.Steve says:
You’ve accused the Swiftboaters and John Lott with lying, but without giving one example to make your case.
Well gosh. I assumed everyone familiar with the T. Boone Pickens bet would know about the 13-page debunking of countless Swift Boat claims. Frankly, I’m chuckling that there’s still anyone in denial on the subject.
As for Lott, even Jim Lindgren said he doubts Lott ever conducted the infamous “lost survey,” not to mention that the Mary Rosh debacle is a matter of record. What’s interesting about Lott is that his credibility has been called into question by so many individuals like Jim Lindgren, Randy Barnett and Julian Sanchez who are themselves staunch defenders of the Second Amendment (as I am as well).
John Lott’s Mary Rosh sock-puppetry is a sign of extreme weirdness but does not constitute academic or scientific fraud as it does not involve the falsification of data or results.
Well, that may be a philosophical distinction. I’m no scientist myself, but the editor-in-chief of Science magazine said “What [Lott] did was to construct a false identity for a scholar, whom he then deployed in repeated support of his positions and in repeated attacks on his opponents. In most circles, this goes down as fraud.”
May 12, 2010, 11:31 amHoward Zinn says:
Hey guys,
May 12, 2010, 11:55 amI’ve distorted facts and fabricated evidence for years to match my ideological agenda. What’s the problem?
Tamerlane says:
Uh_Clem:
There’s strongly suggestive evidence that Bellesiles smade up his data and tried to cover this up after the fact. He’s never been able to produce credible evidence otherwise. No one has ever questioned the data set John Lott so meticulously constructed. His sources and methodology are completely transparent. He’s made his data and methods available to anyone who wants to analyze them. Others have disagreed with the methods he used to analyze these data and the conclusions he’s drawn. But this is stanadard in social science research. You’re a hysterical ninny to suggest there’s any comparison between the two.
May 12, 2010, 11:58 ammack says:
“What is undisputed, however, is that a number of scholars were unable to replicate his results, and that Lott gave a number of implausible “dog ate my homework” excuses for why he couldn’t produce his data.”
Lott’s data on CCW and crime rates have been available and replicated by numerous scholars. Charges of fraud involve one single firearm study he referrenced based on research he later claimed to have lost in a computer crash, which he then later reported replicating and then provided the data.
May 12, 2010, 11:58 amDid he lie about the one study and computer crash – I don’t know – no one else does either – was he idiotic and weird to post under an assumed female name to defend himself and his research – yes in my opinion. Does that discredit the scientific basis of his peer reviewed and available research – no. Lott’s sins are not comparable to Bellesiles who was caught lying and fabricating data. Conflating the two shows a lack of honesty in evaluating their research.
Clayton E. Cramer says:
I won’t defend Dr. Lott’s sock puppetry. But the comparison to Bellesiles doesn’t fly. The worst that you can say about Lott’s hard disk crash claim is that it makes his evidence unverifiable. Bellesiles’s work was easy to verify–and Bellesiles was a fraud.
May 12, 2010, 12:21 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Bellesiles didn’t do “interesting” things to his data. He made up his data. The Lott survey that was lost in a hard disk crash? Heck, I’ve lost data in hard disk crashes. I don’t find it utterly impossible, or even particularly implausible. Bellesiles’s problem was that the data was easy to check–and he was a liar. (Or perhaps Bellesiles got all the way through a Ph.D. without anyone noticing his severe reading disability.)
May 12, 2010, 12:26 pmWeary G says:
“Bellesiles suffered amply (though rightly) for his misconduct, and it’s good that he’s getting a second chance.”
The fact that this release tries to re-write the facts of that former case illustrates to me that Bellesiles:
1) Has still not really owned up to what he did
2) Has not suffered enough
3) Does not deserve a second chance
4) Does not deserve a reader’s trust on any subject
Call me harsh, but I do not understand why a supposed historian is deserving of a “do-over” after deliberating trying to fictionalize history, and then continues to defend himself as being slandered.
If he had made a few errors, okay. We’re all human.
But creating what seems to me wholesale propaganda under the guise of scholarship, seems deserving of academic exile.
This episode damaged not only him, but the larger field, and defending him only does more damage.
May 12, 2010, 12:30 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Amusingly enough, I am teaching Western Civ to community college students, and American History next semester. I am glad to report that none of them seem to be hung-over. And I am fortunate to even be able to be an adjunct at a community college, after exposing the Bellesiles fraud. Bellesiles, of course, is adjunct at a state university. Shows where fraud gets you, and where exposing it gets you.
May 12, 2010, 12:32 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I’ve never managed to get any book published without at least one error of fact or typo. I like to pretend that it’s like the Amish quilts that always have at least one error, to keep the maker humble. :-)
And yes, what Bellesiles did was not errors, but a wholesale falsification on a scale that is breathtaking. I discovered, the more that I checked his claims, that I could flip Armed America open at random, and it was rare to get through a page without finding at least one tendentious claim, and often, outright fraud.
May 12, 2010, 12:36 pmmack says:
Just to be clear in Bellesiles case there are many documented instances of lies about where he obtained or found data – he made no attempt to clarify or reconstruct his data – he was caught making contradictory statements – he also misrepresented and did not accurately report data that he did have.
In Lott’s case – his data has been made available – (excluding as noted the data from one study he claims was lost in a computer crash – a study he reported later replicating and then provided the data from the replicated study) Lott has therefore not been shown to have lied about or fabricated data unlike Bellesiles. Also the results of Lott’s research have not been refuted like Bellesiles was refuted.
Lott has answered critics of his work and addressed the specifics of the research and the data involved. Bellesiles never addressed the deficiencies in his data or research.
Is Lott’s personal character better than Bellesiles – I don’t know – that certainly is open to debate, but the character of their research and the validity of their data is certainly not comparable.
Lott is still given some credibility because his research has been essentially sound and has not been discredited. Thus we see attacks on him that stem from his idiotic use of an assumed name to defend his work in public forums and accusations that may or may not be founded regarding one single study (far from the body of his work). With Bellesiles the entire central theme of his book and research was shown to be fraudulant.
However if you disagree and assert that Lott’s research is fraulant and that he lied about data – then feel free to publish your claims and readers here will be happy to follow your case in court.
May 12, 2010, 12:42 pmWeary G says:
“I’ve never managed to get any book published without at least one error of fact or typo. I like to pretend that it’s like the Amish quilts that always have at least one error, to keep the maker humble. :-)”
While one always *expects* someone to get everything right when doing a serious work of scholarship, whether paper, book, documentary, I think most people realize errors will be made.
If those errors are relatively few, and are admitted, no foul as long as someone can be shown to have NOT deliberately forged something. It’s kind of what debate and reviews are for; checking each other’s math and keeping everyone honest.
To compare that to deliberately falsifying large portions of one’s source material, or “conveniently” being so sloppy with it one can’t find it again when asked, seems ridiculous.
Either way, if a good portion of someone’s work is in error, there is a serious problem with either honesty or competency.
Again, sorry to be harsh, but with the explosion in information availability, one has to be very discriminating when it comes to sources having proven to be wildy unreliable.
Bellesiles shot himself in the foot, pun intended, and so I can’t generate much sympathy for him.
May 12, 2010, 12:52 pmmack says:
Mr. Cramer – just want thank you for your work in exposing the fraud of Arming America. When I review the unavailable data sets and the misrepresentation of results from years of “gun studies” – like the infamous Kellerman studies that are still quoted as authority – or the hachet job attacks of flacks funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation – I shake my head in amazement. Such a double standard.
May 12, 2010, 1:04 pmmariner says:
Since when is calling someone’s credibility into question the same as proving someone is a liar?
Bellisles’ fraud was proven . The same cannot be fairly said of Lott.
Every conservative’s credibility is “called into question” by leftists.
May 12, 2010, 1:08 pmThumbcruncher says:
I did the same thing in a book store: just read a page at random of Arming America and found a “historical fact” that was nothing but fiction. The book was trash from begining to end and was shown to be. After 90% of it was toast, Mr. B began harping that his probate data had not been refuted and that made his case. When that data was shown to be in error he came back and said that his probate data only represented about 10% of his book and that left 90% unrefuted. The guy lives in his own world and needs help.
As for hardrive crashes, haven’t had one myself; But my motherboard fried almost three weeks ago if thats acceptable. Computer crashes occurr, work of a week or more is lost, some personal images lost forever. But real research can be replicated as was Mr. Lott’s. Michael’s yellow pads proved to be unrepeatable. No one has been able to show the same results as Mr. B. And repeatability is key to all good scholarship.
May 12, 2010, 1:09 pmuh_clem says:
Computers crash, basements flood. This much is true.
But actual research leaves traces beyond what was stored on the hard drive and in the basement. In both Lott’s and Bellesiles’ cases, there is no corroborating evidence that the research took place at all. That’s why I think Bellesiles is a fraud who can’t be trusted. Likewise Lott. Occam’s razor indicates he made the whole ‘lost survey’ thing up.
For those of you defending Lott and excoriating Bellesiles, you should check the settings of your ideological blinders – they may be on too tight. I’d say the same thing to anyone defending Lott and excoriating Bellesiles, assuming that I could find such a person.
May 12, 2010, 1:25 pmDilan Esper says:
Unless lott’s hard drive was vaporized in an a-bomb explosion or deliberately wiped by a special high security data wiping program, his files would almost certainly be recoverable.
So yeah, I think “doctor” lott (don’t you love how people who defend scoundrels always throw in that title?) is a fraudulent scumbag, as is bellesiles.
And no, I am not making a tu quoque argument. I’d love to live in a world where dishonest hacks like lott and bellesiles were driven out of public discourse and never got published again. Unfortunately, instead, we live in a world where hacks get published all the time.
May 12, 2010, 1:34 pmThumbcruncher says:
Don’t you just love Bellesiles defenders who now paint his attackers as just as bad as him.
Why do you say there is no evidence any research ever took place by either person. In Mr. B’s case the probate records he cited for New England do exist: his interpretation of them was faulty. A library he referenced does exist, he just never signed in to use the controlled archives. He obviously did some research just to make the case he did extensive research.
May 12, 2010, 1:58 pmSmokeVanThorn says:
Dilan’s only goal is to highjack threads. He’s strictly scroll through material.
May 12, 2010, 2:00 pmKatahdin says:
Can you elaborate on what kind of hard drive malfunction was involved? I’m aware of the common recovery methods where a drive on which files have been ‘removed’ solely by removing their directory entries can be recovered. That is an easy and economical process.
In the case of an actual head crash, with head to disk contact, my understanding was that any data recovery would be a very expensive proposition. You have to remove the platters and map their magnetic patterns with quite specialized and expensive apparatus. Is there progress I am unaware of, or was Lott’s disk event of the pointer-removal-only type?
[not a Lott fan, but I've had to deal with many broken disks over the years, and it would be wonderful news if data recovery is really available economically]
May 12, 2010, 2:01 pmSteve says:
Every conservative’s credibility is “called into question” by leftists.
Jim Lindgren, Randy Barnett, and Julian Sanchez are now “leftists.” What a world.
May 12, 2010, 2:06 pmloki13 says:
Clayton,
If you read through the rest of my post, you’ll note that I’m a big basher of Bellesiles. And I think the focus of this thread is properly on him. However, my quick contribution to the Lott debate is as follows:
I don’t care much for his sockpuppetry. But I think that, if anything, it was to Lott’s benefit, as people focus on that instead of the “dog ate my hard drive” problem. Lott cites to studies that *no one* can verify ever existed. His only evidence mysteriously disappeared. But again, if you look into it, you note that there is no evidence (people remembering the poll, a polling firm conducting the poll etc.) of this survey.
He has a reputation of shading the truth to suit his ideological convictions. Does that mean all his research is bad? No. Just like Bellesiles wrote some decent stuff before Arming America. But I will not trust him.
I hold gun advocates who cite to Lott in the same esteem as I hold gun control advocates who cite to Bellesiles.
May 12, 2010, 2:09 pmmack says:
I notice again and again that those who conflate Bellesiles proven fraud with Lott’s accusation of fraud provide no evidence. I notice that where Bellesiles data was shown to be fraudulant and he was shown to have dishonestly manipulated and misreported the data he did have – that critics of Lott have not been able to show the same or similar examples. I note the Lott provided his data and methodolgy to his peers for review – Bellesiles did not. I note that the results of Lott’s research using his or similar methodology have been replicated. I note that charges against Lott in terms of his credibilty in a long academic career relate to the results of one single study out of hundreds and that he then redid the study in question and replicated the results he initially reported obtaining and then made that information available to fellow researchers.
So lets see – Lott gets called on his report of the results of one study – he states he can’t produce the study or data – but then replicates it and provides the data and research to his critics – the results of which support his initial claim.
Bellesiles offers nothing to support his claims, will not or cannot reproduce or redo his data/research and is caught plainly lying about his sources, and further research shows that he was inaccurate or intentionally dishonest about the data he did have.
So we have proof of fraud – Bellesiles’ case – and then we have unsupported and unproven allegations against Lott. We have an entire book that is shown to be fraudulant and filled with misrepresentation and false research and then we have Lott who has published numerous books, papers and studies over years that have been the subject of intense review and study and his credibility is equated to Bellesiles – because he “lost” the data from “one study out of hundreds” that he has done – and therefore even though he replicated the study and the results – he is “obviously lying” – and therefore all of his scientifically based research that has been reviewed in terms of both data sets and methodology is garbage – and just like Bellesiles.
Well, if one can’t see the difference then one obviously can’t understand the difference between credible research and fraud.
May 12, 2010, 2:12 pmThumbcruncher says:
Back in the 1990′s hard drive crashes were highly unrecoverable. This was particularly true if the hard drive casing was damaged. Capacity of drives in those days was also limited to the MB range, and I don’t believe the power failure design change (where the disk head retracts on power loss) existed then.
May 12, 2010, 2:15 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Let me be very clear on this: there is one fundamental difference between the survey that Lott can’t prove happen, and Bellesiles’s work. Lott’s survey might well have taken place; I found his explanations for the lack of evidence for it discouraging, but hardly impossible. If the survey on the dead hard drive was a big chunk of the evidence underlying Lott’s claims, it would cast serious doubt on his honesty and his conclusions. But it was a tiny part–and the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
By comparison, Bellesiles’s problems were far more serious. It wasn’t that a magic flood destroyed his yellow legal tablets (and apparently the spreadsheets from which the graphs were plotted in his Journal of American History article and his book). It was that many different scholars were able to independently check his claims about probate inventories, and primary sources, and demonstrate that they were not simply absent–they were contradictory.
Now, if you want to believe that Dr. Lott intentionally engaged in fraud, you are free to hold to that belief. Yes, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on the “hard disk failure ate my survey data” because he’s a friend of mine. But there is a world of difference between, “I can’t prove that this survey took place” and “Here’s a claim that can be independently checked and found to be false.” The equivalent for Dr. Lott’s survey would be if you could prove that he did not perform that survey, or that the data didn’t match Dr. Lott’s claims.
May 12, 2010, 2:23 pmmack says:
“I hold gun advocates who cite to Lott in the same esteem as I hold gun control advocates who cite to Bellesiles.”
So someone who cites the Lott/Mustard study _ (all data made available for review along with the methodolgy used – and replicated again and again by peers) is equivalent to someone who cites Armed America by Bellesiles – proven fraud.
Evidently some esteem is more worthy than others.
May 12, 2010, 2:24 pmuh_clem says:
What Bellesiles defenders are you talking about?
Read this thread carefully, and you won’t find any Bellesiles defenders, other than his publicist as quoted in the original post from Eugene. Probably the closet thing to a “defender” is Eugene himself opining that it’s good that he’s getting a second chance, but even that notion hasn’t been seconded.
This isn’t a strawman argument, it’s an invisible man argument. sheesh.
May 12, 2010, 2:25 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
When I teach Introduction to Personal Computers, I show the students a head crashed hard disk drive. Data recovery under those circumstances is expensive and limited to those sections that are not physically damaged. Failure of the controller circuitry is easy to recover from; anything involving physical contact with the platters is not.
May 12, 2010, 2:31 pmmack says:
Nah, Lott must be lying – it’s just coincidence that his replication of the study produced results supporting his orignal claim and it’s just coincidence that his computer suffered physical damage that resulted in data loss as verified by an independent source. Obviously he must be lying because, well because some people just believe his is….so there. It’s just the same as Bellesiles because….well it just is.
May 12, 2010, 2:47 pmLarryA says:
As I remember, circa 1877 the Northeast got hit by some rather violent strike/union/corporation situations. Particularly railroad workers.
Just to be clear, the “I remember” refers to research for a novel in progress, The Red Silk Dress, set in the then-brand-new state of Colorado. I’m not quite that old.
May 12, 2010, 2:56 pmSteve says:
I don’t disagree with any of the arguments for why Bellesiles is worse than Lott, or most of them at any rate. That doesn’t change the fact that I wouldn’t trust either of them going forward, even though EV is surely correct that scientific research should rise or fall on its own merits. Yes, if I had to trust one of them, I would probably choose Lott, but the thing is that I don’t have to choose.
Personally, I don’t believe that a fundamentally honest person goes around under a false identity using a sockpuppet to bolster his credibility. Others may think it’s just a random personal foible that says nothing about his overall credibility. But that incident makes me a lot more skeptical about the story of the busted hard drive, that’s for sure. Heck, I wouldn’t bet my life that none of the commentors staunchly defending Lott in this thread are actually Lott.
May 12, 2010, 3:24 pmJimS says:
He clearly did not suffer enough for his previous fraud. The guy should be selling real estate or used cars, where fraud is part of the game. No way should he ever have another book published.
May 12, 2010, 4:29 pmmack says:
Steve, I can agree that Lott’s use of a sockpuppet was pathetic and did damage to his credibility – as it was not honest. But as you note there is a difference between that and publishing data, studies, and books that contain dishonest and fraudulant data. I don’t know Mr. Lott but I have read his research and while I think he may at times over-reach in the conclusions he draws from his data – I think he is typically honest about the basic data and research as well as his methodology. I don’t know if he lied about the lost survey – only he really knows – he was called on it – and he did respond by redoing the research. Personally I would tend to trust Lott’s basic research – for the simple reason that his work is always under intense scrutiny by critics who would love to catch him out – and because having looked at his work in the past, I find that it is basically sound – with the caveat that sometimes his conclusions over-reach in my opinion.
May 12, 2010, 4:39 pmmack says:
Well Bellesiles got caught and lost his golden career – now he has a publisher who feels his infamy can help sell some books – I am sure he has done better “research” this time – as his book will be under intense scrutiny by critics – due to his last book.
Does he deserve a second chance – as a old friend used to tell me: “life isn’t fair,” though in his case he used to always add, “thank God.”
But this is America, and while Bellesiles got caught in an academic attempt to put some nails in the coffin of the 2nd Amendemnt – let us just say he didn’t really kill anybody or anything except his own reputation thanks to Mr. Cramer and other astute citizens.
Besides – didn’t OJ get a book deal? Has he found the killer yet?
May 12, 2010, 4:57 pmRoger says:
There is no reason anyone has to trust either Bellesiles or Lott. If one of them makes a surprising claim, then just wait for it to be replicated and verified, if you wish.
May 12, 2010, 5:02 pmhtom says:
Lott redoes survey, re-publishes results and conclusions, provides copies to the data, which are pretty much what the non-existant survey result data, results, and conclusions are, while Bellesiles denies and waffles. These actions are comparable? Well, I suppose any actions are comparable.
Reminds me of the global warming mess. Regardless of which side has “The Truth”, one side is doing science and the other side is doing something else.
Hard drives can crash in ways that are not recoverable. They could then, and they do now. Not nearly as frequently now, it is true. If you are so fool-hearty as to depend on recovery services, I hope you’re not in charge of data protection anywhere.
Bellesiles’ new book I’ll look at, I suppose, but I doubt that I’ll even buy a used copy. If they trumpet “Bancroft Prize Winner” or some such on the jacket, I might, just as a curiosity to keep before the recall.
May 12, 2010, 5:32 pmchris says:
The only global warming mess is global warming.
May 12, 2010, 6:21 pmJim March says:
I believe that in the “Mary Rosh” case, Dr. Lott’s alien eyebrow transplant temporarily got the best of him.
May 12, 2010, 6:51 pmDilan Esper says:
In the case of an actual head crash, with head to disk contact, my understanding was that any data recovery would be a very expensive proposition.
Given the importance of protecting one’s academic integrity, I think any truly innocent person in Lott’s position would pay for the necessary forensics.
May 12, 2010, 8:24 pmDilan Esper says:
Back in the 1990’s hard drive crashes were highly unrecoverable. This was particularly true if the hard drive casing was damaged.
This is so not true. I had software, and I knew someone who had hardware, that could recover deleted files from damaged disks for the Apple II in the early 1980′s.
You certainly could recover files from a hard disk damaged from a falling bookcase in the 1990′s. And, of course, an honest scholar who understood the importance of preserving his data and his reputation would have (1) kept the hard drive available for future forensic attempts and (2) backed up his data.
Lott is transparently lying.
May 12, 2010, 8:31 pmDilan Esper says:
Now, if you want to believe that Dr. Lott intentionally engaged in fraud, you are free to hold to that belief. Yes, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on the “hard disk failure ate my survey data” because he’s a friend of mine
There you have it. If you are Clayton Cramer’s friend, you can get away with any baldfaced lie.
If only John Edwards, Bernie Madoff, or Bill Clinton had been Cramer’s friend.
May 12, 2010, 8:33 pmElliot says:
Many very smart people can never forget how eagerly they embraced Bellesiles book, and how wrong they were. That really hurt. If he redeems himself somewhat with an excellent book about 1877, they may feel a bit better about themselves.
Anyone know how well Jason Blair’s book did?
May 12, 2010, 8:34 pmElliot says:
What is not true is that any blanket statement can be made about what can be recovered from a damaged hard drive. The damage can be to the data only, or it can be to the physical disk. Some can be recovered, some can’t.
Software can work for some data situations, but physical damage can demand specialized equupment and a whole different array of software. Whether it’s the Eighties, Nineties, or 2010, one does not know about a damaged drive until an individual investigation of that drive is done. But one can only know for sure after recovery attempts succeed or fail.
I have no idea if Lott’s drive could be recovered.
May 12, 2010, 9:12 pmmack says:
Dilan Esper says:
“And, of course, an honest scholar who understood the importance of preserving his data and his reputation would have (1) kept the hard drive available for future forensic attempts and (2) backed up his data.
Lott is transparently lying.”
So, this must apply to the Global Warming scientists who misplaced/lost/deleted data also – and it must mean that their data is all crap and that not only that, but that they must be transparently lying. Why can’t they recover the lost data, why didn’t they keep backups? Or maybe they were just sloppy and it is hard to tell what is or isn’t accurate about their data – at least Lott re-did his study from scratch and showed his data and results.
As far as, he could have recovered it if he wanted too – given the loss of his book – and the fact that not “recovering” data from the hard drive – caused both him and his publisher a lot of work – it would seem apparent that if they thought they could recover the data they would have taken steps to do so – it would have been a lot easier on both of them – but then that makes sense and supports Lott’s contention so I guess one can’t consider that.
Lastly you have no evidence or proof of your speculation the the data was recoverable from his hard drive or if the drive was physically damaged or if Lott thought/knew it was possible to recover the data. All you can really assert is that you don’t believe him and/or that he is lying. Thanks for your compelling evidence and argument.
May 12, 2010, 9:41 pmmack says:
The context of Mr. Cramer saying that Mr. Lott is his friend is that given no hard evidence, he is inclined to give his friend the benefit of the doubt. It is an honest appropriate disclosive statement and one should not stoop to take it out of context and attack Mr. Cramer. Doing so only reflects poorly on the person who so stoops.
May 12, 2010, 9:52 pmsetnaffa says:
Agreed…
May 12, 2010, 10:03 pmIndy says:
Imagine this was a conservative writer.He wouldn’t be able to get a job teaching kindergarten. Why do liberals worship liars?
May 12, 2010, 10:13 pmKatahdin says:
Dilan, you’re not even wrong. The key is that you say ‘I had software‘. When the head touches the disk and the head is damaged and the sterile disk enclosure is filled with debris larger than the head to platter gap, your recovery software isn’t going to help.
My employer spends millions of dollars a year on large robotic tape silos, raid arrays, and backups to ameliorate the effects of disk failures. I literally cannot remember how many times I have been in the computer room at 0200 recovering from disk failures over the decades (thankfully, much reduced now due to RAID). If disk failures can be easily recovered with software, don’t you think it is a little odd that companies spend all that money and effort on backups, and systems programmers spend so much time recovering using those backups?
Darn those pesky disk drives, after all. It was easier when we used cards!
May 12, 2010, 10:49 pm(actually not true – card decks could become unreadable, too. I knew a lady with all her thesis data on cards, and they got wet, and no backup. She spent the weekend ironing them dry. They looked perfect but were juuust too big to feed. And they weren’t printed (I’m blanking on the term for having the text printed across the top). She had to manually decode the punches on 2000 odd cards.)
Elliot says:
Cheap, easy way to back up your data:
Email it to yourself. I have lots of stuff mailed to myself on gmail. Just attach the file, and hit send. Files are then on Google servers. Can be done anytime, anywhere, with no extra equipment.
May 12, 2010, 11:27 pmDilan Esper says:
What is not true is that any blanket statement can be made about what can be recovered from a damaged hard drive. The damage can be to the data only, or it can be to the physical disk. Some can be recovered, some can’t.
Unless a disk is demagnetized or destroyed (not simply damaged), data is generally recoverable, even if there may be gaps or missing / unrecoverable files.
In any event, you missed my broader point, which is that if Lott were being honest, he would have turned the disk over to the best available forensic technicians to TRY and recover the data. Or he would have retained the hard drive so that people could later inspect it and attempt to recover the data.
What’s suspicious isn’t that a hard drive failed when a bookcase crashed into it. It’s that he didn’t take every step possible to protect his reputation, i.e., backing up the data before the incident and allowing third parties to attempt to reconstruct the data afterwards. This would not only allow a potential data recovery, but would also allow us to confirm that his hard drive was not wiped and/or even simply that the file STRUCTURE existed.
And the reason he didn’t do that is because “Doctor” John Lott was LYING, just like he was when he invented his alter ego Mary Rosh.
May 13, 2010, 12:53 amDilan Esper says:
he context of Mr. Cramer saying that Mr. Lott is his friend is that given no hard evidence, he is inclined to give his friend the benefit of the doubt. It is an honest appropriate disclosive statement and one should not stoop to take it out of context and attack Mr. Cramer. Doing so only reflects poorly on the person who so stoops.
Quite the opposite. He was saying “he’s my friend and therefore I don’t care if it’s perfectly clear that he’s not telling the truth– I choose to believe him”.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t maintain friendships with academic frauds.
May 13, 2010, 12:56 amDilan Esper says:
If disk failures can be easily recovered with software, don’t you think it is a little odd that companies spend all that money and effort on backups, and systems programmers spend so much time recovering using those backups?
Backups, which Mary Rosh, excuse me, “Doctor” John Lott, had for his personality but not his data, are cheaper than forensic data recovery. But forensic data recovery works, even though it costs money. MANY “damaged”, sometimes extensively damaged, hard drives have had data recovered from them over the years. (As I mentioned in my post, I know someone who was doing data recovery using HARDWARE from damaged Apple II floppies in the early 1980′s. This is a longstanding technology.)
If Ms. Rosh really did that research, she would have made her hard drive available for forensic technicians to TRY to recover the data. Unfortunately, since it was a baldfaced lie just like her internet fan, she didn’t do it.
Indeed, think about how Mary Rosh came to be. Do people who face FALSE accusations invent internet fan girls to defend them and make their case? (Especially since she could have just asked her “friend” Clayton Cramer to do it for her?) That SCREAMS admission of guilt.
Face it, Ms. Rosh only still gets work because she has powerful friends in the gun rights community who like what side she is on.
May 13, 2010, 1:01 amDilan Esper says:
So everyone can see, here’s some more evidence that the “hard drive crash” story was phony:
“The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 60 percent. Lott replied that “national surveys” actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott’s conclusions in More Guns, didn’t exist.”
http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/the-mystery-of-mary-rosh
And as for the claim that Ms. Rosh “reproduced” the results of the study:
“So why harp on it, especially when the crash clearly isn’t central even in the Post’s cursory account, unless it’s to give the false impression that confirmation on this point constitutes some kind of unambiguous vindication? Ditto comments about how the results have been “reproduced.” I guess that’s true, insofar as the first survey’s measure of “mere brandishing” rates was statistically meaningless, and so is the second’s, but I don’t know what we’re supposed to conclude from those signally unhelpful facts.”
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2003/02/13/red-herrings/
So, basically, we have a hard drive crash with no backup data and no attempt to forensically reconstruct the data, which could not have destroyed all the evidence of the alleged study anyway. Then she “reconstructs” the study in a fashion that is completely meaningless. Finally, she sock puppets under the name Mary Rosh to defend her work.
Now, other than the fact that she is Clayton Cramer’s “friend” and that he will vouch for her character (only he won’t with respect to the sockpuppetry, actually), why exactly are we supposed to believe her?
Look, I have no doubt that people in the gun rights community like Ms. Rosh. She says things that they like.
But under any reasonable conception of scholarship and academic ethics, she would never publish anything again, just as Mr. Bellesiles should not do so.
May 13, 2010, 1:21 amMatthew Carberry says:
Dylan,
You claim it is “perfectly clear” Lott wasn’t telling the truth, yet multiple posters have presented equally compelling, to a layman, explanations why data loss from physical impact is reasonable.
Also, Lott actually went to the trouble of replicating his study, which was made available for review, with essentially the same results, which objectively grants credibility to his prior work. Unless your position is that he was lying the first time and then got lucky enough that the facts happened to match his lie the second time around?
While I certainly respect your opinion as I have read your posts on VC before that match things I happen to know and that grants a certain semi-anonymous credibility in my mind, I don’t know why your position on the hard drive crash claim, given the follow-up data Lott produced for review, is any more valid than anyone elses. I have a far bigger problem with the Mary Rosh stuff in particular.
As far as the “More Guns, Less Crime” data goes, the beauty is that every study, even from the explicitly not “pro-gun” CDC and NIJ, support that at the very least loosening restrictions doesn’t increase crime or accident.
When the default position in the USA is that restrictions on rights are only justified if they can show a reasonable relation to a positive effect on crime or safety, no documentable negative effect means the restrictions need to go away post haste.
The pro-gun, pro-freedom side wins both legally and philosophically on a decrease OR null effect.
May 13, 2010, 1:29 amBrian G. says:
Your continued dishonesty in this thread is astounding. Saying that it’s “perfectly clear he’s not telling the truth” does not make it so. Given the quite robust debate on this point, it is most certainly not perfectly clear. You do not get to insert your own interpretation into the midst of his giving his friend the benefit of the doubt lacking the kind of “perfectly clear” evidence you seem to think exists, but have failed to convincingly deliver, then convict him of accepting dishonesty when that is not what he has done. You, on the other hand, have proven yourself quite at home with it.
May 13, 2010, 1:32 amBrian G. says:
Sockpuppetry hasn’t seemed to hurt Glenn Greenwald’s career much.
May 13, 2010, 1:36 amRicardo says:
Michelle Malkin still has her career as a conservative commentator despite her extremely sloppy and tendentious reading of the historical record concerning Japanese internment. Daniel Pipes cited her book in a positive manner and claimed it helped him revise his opinion on the issue of Japanese internment.
So, yes, conservatives who do lousy historical research can continue to have highly lucrative careers in the conservative echo chamber where they will continue to receive praise and attention from fellow conservatives.
May 13, 2010, 5:09 amklohy says:
I have to agree that Dilan Esper has jumped the shark here. In the mid 2000s I suffered a hard drive crash. The techs at the company I work for (a Fortune 100) were unable to salvage anything. We then sent the hard drive to a leading (and incredibly expensive) data recovery firm who couldn’t even recover a single file.
I am in no position to comment on the rest of the Lott controversy, but the claim of a hard drive crash sounds plausible. Dilan’s comment (“Unless lott’s hard drive was vaporized in an a-bomb explosion or deliberately wiped by a special high security data wiping program, his files would almost certainly be recoverable”) is just fabricated nonsense. Rather ironic that Dilan uses this to comment on Lott’s supposed dishonesty.
May 13, 2010, 7:32 ambob says:
Hell, I’m a liberal anti-gunner who thinks the 2nd amendment should be repealed. Even I say Bellesiles’ work was, at best, shoddy and without merit.
May 13, 2010, 8:20 amRobbins Mitchell says:
Isn’t Bellesiles the guy who,when asked for his research notes for independent outside analysis claimed they had all been irretrievably damaged when his basement flooded?..a ‘dog ate my homework’ moment to be sure.
May 13, 2010, 8:37 amKatahdin says:
FWIW, this a picture of a disk after a head crash. This is from a company that is in the data recovery business, and so presumably doesn’t want to seem overly pessimistic. The page says:
(they, and many of their competitors, also point out that many failures are not that severe).
To recap: I’m not saying anything about Lott or his disk drive. I’m not maintaining data can never be extracted from damaged disks. I am saying that there are routine malfunctions that result in data that cannot be economically recovered, and an assertion that such malfunctions are impossible is false.
May 13, 2010, 8:56 amCarl N. Brown says:
Lott claims he did a 1997 telephone survey on Defensive Gun Use (DGU) which was mentioned in one line in the book “More Guns, Less Crime” 1998; in the summer of 1997 he had a harddrive crash which affected about five co-authors, including David Mustard who fortunately had backup copies of their Right To Carry (RTC) dataset.
When the DGU survey became a controversy, it was because David Kopel had made a connection in reprinting Lott’s gunlock editorial between Lott’s 98% non-shooting claim and Gary Kleck’s 98% non-wounding claim. When Lott admitted his DGU data was lost, he was accused of misquoting Kleck’s 98% then making up a story about doing a survey.
Of course, nobody who questions Lott’s DGU survey results wants to do a DGU survey to test his results, because in all this results don’t seem to matter.
By the way, Gary Kleck’s 98% non-wounding stat came from a 1988 article based on a 1981 DGU survey by Peter D. Hart, who now claim they lost their survey data set after publishing the results, the same “crime” Lott is accused off.
May 13, 2010, 9:54 amCarl N. Brown says:
Let me repeat: the missing data is one DGU survey.
Lott had a policy of releasing his data and math on all other papers long before it was a requirement of the American Economic Association publications; Lott is a pioneer in sharing data and math.
Lott has shared his RTC econometric regression data base and math with friend and foe alike: Ian Ayres and John Donohue would not have been able to do their critique of Lott’s RTC results without his cooperation.
Lott’s articles appear in the JEL bibliographic database in several disciplines besides classification K42 economics of crime and law enforcement, and in all these other areas, there is not the acrimony directed toward Lott that you see over the issue of gun control, which is a red flag that the criticism of Lott is driven more by gun politics than anything else.
May 13, 2010, 10:10 amJ Mann says:
Dylan, I think you’re slightlyu overstating your case. According to Lott’s story, the disk drive was physically crushed before anyone challenged his study. I agree that it would be best practice to save the drive someplace just in case the data later became relevant and became recoverable. (Like saving your cryogenic head, I suppose). OTOH, it seems plausible to me that someone might throw out the drive under those circumstances.
On the gripping hand, I think Julian Sanchez’s circumstantial case is very convincing that there probably was no survey.
May 13, 2010, 10:18 amCarl N. Brown says:
On topic:
Bellesiles is the guy who claimed that while he was in England that summer, his notes were destroyed by a flood at Bowden Hall in Emory U and third parties threw out his notes.
When the student newspaper noted that Bellesiles was on campus five weeks after the flood, Bellesiles claimed he left the wet notes on a chair all summer, and he threw them away when he got back from England.
When Jim Lindgren offered to go to the archives and replicate Bellesiles’ research, Bellesiles told Lindgren not to bother, he had the notes stored in his attic, he had just not taken the time to dry them out. Later Bellesiles denied telling Lindgren that, even though other scholars had cover copies of their emails.
That is more relevant to Bellesiles’ credibility than dragging John Lott or Mary Rosh across the trail as a off topic red herring.
May 13, 2010, 10:26 amEric says:
Do you, then, also believe that the scientists at East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit are liars as well? They lost all their raw data, just like Lott. Clearly, if they were honest scholars, they would have kept their raw data available and backed up as well.
May 13, 2010, 12:24 pmCarl N. Brown says:
The “they” I ref’d above as losing data was Peter D. Hart (Research Associates) not Gary Kleck.
May 13, 2010, 12:31 pmElliot says:
Again, you have no way of knowing if data is recoverable until you examine the disk. That is the experience of thousands of firms and professionals. I don’t care about your broader point; I am responding to the incorrect information you offer to bolster that point.
May 13, 2010, 12:32 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Anyone bother to follow the link to History News Network?
Gloria Main, University of Colorado, Boulder: “I never realized I was a ‘swift-boater’! And anyone who knows my politics would never associate me with the National Rifle Association.”
Randolph Roth, Ohio State University: “I hope and expect that Michael Bellesiles’ new book will be judged on its merits. I am disappointed, however, in the promotional campaign for the book. Mr. Bellesiles may indeed have been the target of the NRA’s ire, but he was not “swift-boated” by anyone.”
May 13, 2010, 2:20 pmDilan Esper says:
The data on the drive in this photo is completely unrecoverable due to the amount of damage that has been caused by the headcrash.
Look, I don’t deny that it is POSSIBLE for a headcrash to be so catastrophic as to make data recovery impossible. I do deny, however, that an academic would (1) not make any backup of his data, (2) not maintain any physical evidence of an extensive study he did, and (3) not make any attempt to recover the data, as MANY hard drive crashes DO result in recoverable data, and this is a technology that has existed for at least 25 years given that I knew about it in the early 1980′s.
And this same woman, Ms. Rosh, invented a sock puppet to defend her honor.
Occam’s Razor says the study never took place; Ms. Rosh made it up.
May 13, 2010, 2:21 pmDilan Esper says:
Let me repeat: the missing data is one DGU survey.
It isn’t as though that is the only instance of dishonesty on Ms. Rosh’s part:
http://www.whoismaryrosh.com/slate.html
May 13, 2010, 2:22 pmJ Mann says:
Dylan, I love you, and I even agree with your conclusion, but respectfully, you’re coming across as a jerk on the “Ms. Rosh” thing. It makes it hard to take your arguments seriously when it looks like you’re doing your best to offend people who disagree with you.
May 13, 2010, 3:07 pmCarl N. Brown says:
From the “Who is Mary Rosh” site: “In a February 2000 op-ed for Colorado’s Independence Institute, Lott wrote: “Kleck’s study of defensive gun uses found that ninety-eight percent of the time simply brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.” But Kleck’s research shows no such thing.”
Lott’s gunlock editorial was not written for Independence Institute. It originally appeared in newspapers before and after it appeared at the II website without the attribution to Kleck, which was added by David Kopel since he recalled reading similar but different stats (total DGU, FBI UCR gun crimes, percentage non-wounding) in Kleck (Kleck used stats for 1993 and 1981, Lott used stats for 1997). The iterations in newspapers had used local laws and stats, and the reprint at II website was edited to be more general.
Tim Lambert cited the attribution to Kleck in the II reprint as an argument against Lott in Oct 2002, and Lindgren repeated that argument in his Dec 2002 investigation of Lott’s survey claims, but by 6 Apr 2003 even Tim Lambert acknowledged it was Kleck, not Lott, who had attributed Lott’s stats to Kleck.
Find a fresh argument if you schoolyard bullies want to continue swiftboating Lott. ;-)
May 13, 2010, 4:07 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Tim Lambert acknowledged it was Kopel, not Lott, who had attributed Lott’s stats to Kleck.
(Must remember to type, preview, edit, THEN post (since the edit box seems written for twitter size messages))
May 13, 2010, 4:16 pmJ Mann says:
Dilan, I mean! (Sorry!)
May 13, 2010, 4:46 pmhtom says:
Some people think that keeping a separate copy of (say) a database file in a different partition of a hard disk is a reliable backup. Frequently it is. But the pros know that the only reliable backup is one that’s been written to independent media in an independent device, and that backup then used to recreate the backed-up files which are then compared to the originals. Most people won’t go to that amount of trouble, even if they are told — even ordered in writing — to do so.
Been there, didn’t do that, saved because of burp in the system that hadn’t overwritten a backup tape on schedule.
May 13, 2010, 5:41 pmElliot says:
Is there any reason to think academics are any better at backing up their data than anyone else? We have had PCs for about thirty years now, and the constant drumbeat has been backup, backup, backup.
Yet, people lose files everyday. All kinds of people, even academics. Just ask the IT department when these folks rush in in a sweaty panic.
So, how many folks here are backing up regularly? How many have lapsed? How many have mirrored drives? How many spend weeks on an article and don’t always have a backup? Anyone spent days on a spreadsheet, finally get a reconciliation, then forget to save it? Anyone have a project right now and not have a current backup on an external device? Anyone ever lose the flash drive they used to make their backup?
No need to answer. You know who you are.
Truth in backup: Even as I read all the postings on this thread, I had a chapter that did not have a single backup. Nothing. Zero. I didn’t even email it to myself as I recommended. But, then, I guess I’m not an academic.
May 13, 2010, 7:50 pmhtom says:
Elliot — don’t feel bad. Yesterday my PDA strangely died, and I hadn’t done a HotSync for 17 days. I did’t lose much, just a couple of new phone numbers and two weeks of weight and exercise data. And the reminder to go to the psychologist, so I’ll have to pay them myself, as I forgot.
May 13, 2010, 8:06 pmCarl N. Brown says:
126 comments so far on Bellesiles’ credibility, which has devolved to a Lott
bash, (with a sidetrack of a hard drive crash could never happen to me and
if it did the data fairy would save me), with focus on Lott’s use of an internet
handle or pseudonym “Mary Rosh” complete with a “legend” or background “best
professor I ever had” mostly copied from student ratings of Lott as assistant
professor at Wharton’s. The maryrosh at AOL dot com account was created by
Lott’s wife from the first two letters of their sons’ names and was used by
the whole Lott family. When Lott’s work became controversial, he thought it was
clever to post signed as “Mary Rosh” which some here find deceitful (I just
find it creepy and shortsighted). Tim Lambert has written that Lott could have
avoided controversy over “Mary Rosh” by having his wife claim she made the
“Mary Rosh” posts. But no, that unethical scoundrel Lott confessed that he had
made the posts signed as “Mary Rosh”. I know all the folks in this thread
posting against Lott would never argue on the internet under a pseudonym and
are using their real names. (Some of you, your mamas and papas should be slapped.)
But the article is about Bellesiles’ new book 1877 and his credibility.
According to my notes from following the Bellesiles affair on History News Network
website, Bellesiles chose to be a partisan in the great gun debate.
2000 Feb 16- Bellesiles spoke at a symposium sponsored by the
Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Handgun
Violence, the group previously known as Handgun Control Inc.
In Bellesiles’ presentation on the Second Amendment he ridiculed
supporters of the Standard Model: the individual rights view of
the Second Amendment.
Bellesiles attacked Bentley College Professor Joyce Malcolm,
saying her writing on this subject “borders on the bizarre ….
just makes no sense …. [she] needs a remedial reading course.”
But aside from personal attacks on Malcolm’s sanity and literacy,
Bellesiles produced no cogent refutation of her arguments.
Bellesiles mocked the statue of the Minuteman in Lexington
which holds in his right hand a musket and in his left a plow:
“I come from an agricultural family. I don’t imagine any of you
have experienced plowing, but try plowing while holding a musket
in one hand and plowing with the other.”
The Brady Center audience laughed and applauded Bellesiles.
Bellesiles’ description of probate records from Playboy magazine interview
”Arming America: When Did We Become a Gun Culture?”,Jan. 2001:
PLAYBOY: You suspected the image we have of a musket over
every fireplace. When did you first begin to notice the missing
guns?
BELLESILES: . . . . I was studying probate records, the most
complete records, the most complete record of property ownership
in early America. They contain lists of absolutely everything that
a person owned–scraps of metal, broken glasses, bent spoons,
broken plows. . . .
Probate records from the Colonial Era do not match Bellesiles’ description;
if a person died unexpectedly with debtors, the probate might include personal
property (personalty) to be sold at auction to settle the debts and such lists
do not list worthless items; other probate records listed only things requiring
title or bill of sale, real property (realty); many people died intestate with
no listing of personalty or realty (their debts were settled before death or if
they could no longer work they would transfer realty to heirs in exchange for
elder care). Probate records were not complete: many people died intestate without
probate, most probate records list realty only, and the detailed personalty lists
were usually in case of estate auction to settle debts. According to probate records,
Colonial American realty never included outhouses and personalty never included
chamberpots; the broken glasses and bent spoons are not there either. Probate
records that include lists of personalty are more likely to list guns than to list
clothing and certainly do not constitute “the most complete record of property
ownership in early America”. Bellesiles’ descriptions of gun census amd militia law
are equally suspect.
I think points like this are relevant to the possible credibility problems of 1877
May 15, 2010, 6:02 amthan questions about Mary Rosh. Jeez, when I speculated in 2006 that attacks on Lott
were partisan payback for Arming America losing the Bancroft Prize, I was told that
there was no connection. Hmmm.
Kazinski says:
Those conflating Bellesiles and Lott should remember one thing: Bellesiles was found guilty of academic fraud by a faculty committee and fired. Lott was not.
And of course the other major thing is that Lott never claimed that all of his troubles were due to a conspiracy to discredit him.
May 15, 2010, 2:46 pmKazinski says:
I might also note one other major difference between Lott and Bellesiles, Lott was making a novel statistical argument using contemporary data. Whether or not he could produce the his own data, it is not like there were any barriers for others to gather their own data to support or refute Lott’s work. On the other hand Bellesiles study referenced material that just did not exist, and it was such arcane and difficult material to track down, and as it became apparent that most of it did not exist, then he made up stories to send people on wild gooses chases in an effort to cover up his fraud:
Lott’s Mary Rosh sockpuppetry, while unfortunate and comical, just does not rise to that level of mendacity. The actual investigations of Lott’s work did not support it completely but found no fraud:
May 15, 2010, 3:33 pmRKS says:
As far as I am concerned, the term “swiftboated” means that the subject could not refute the allegation.
May 15, 2010, 3:56 pmiconoclast says:
A company I invested in a few years back claimed that nearly a third of all backups failed for one reason or another. A little web searching can come up with claims that nearly 50% of all backups fail (partially or totally). Manual “backups” often fail to back everything up. Not saying that Lott had the survey, but believing that backups are somehow perfect is a mistake (better check your backup logs!).
Also, while it seems unlikely that Lott would have had access to a RAID 0 array mass storage, that type of storage is extremely difficult to recover because of the striping of files across multiple disks.
So I wouldn’t say that someone was lying necessarily because there was no backup and the storage was unrecoverable. Anyone involved in testing disaster recovery methods knows that the unlikely is sadly far too common (in other words, Murphy was an optimist).
May 15, 2010, 7:53 pmCarl N. Brown says:
I was looking at Amazon.com at John R. Lott, “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (Studies in Law and Economics)” University of Chicago Press, 2010 (472 pages, previous 2nd edition was 321 pages). U of Chicago gave us Norval Morris (dean of the law school) and Gordon Hawkins, “Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control”, U of Chicago Press, 1970, which advocated a total ban on guns enforced by warrantless searches (there can be no right to privacy when it comes to possession of armament). The list of U of Chicago law school alumni who praised Morris in his obituary–Zimring, Hawkins, Alschuler, Mikva and Harcourt–is almost a who’s who of academics for gun control. And U Chicago Press not only published Lott MGLC 1998, but are issuing a third edition. Second edition of Bellesiles “Arming America” was what, Soft Skull Press? If Lott was as bad as Bellesiles, MGLC 3rd edition would be published by Paladin Press or Loompanics, not U Chicago Press. Attempts here to salvage Bellesiles by bashing Lott are failing.
Lott’s “fraud” is claiming to do a defensive gun use (DGU) survey in 1997 and losing the data set in a documented hard drive crash, and abandoning any paperwork to document existence of that survey during his move from U Chicago to Yale limited to what would fit in his personal vehicle. Lott did a well documented DGU survey in 2002.
May 16, 2010, 8:15 amLott 1997, 2,100,000 total DGU, 2% or 42,000 shooting DGU.
Lott 2002, 2,000,000 total DGU, 8% (raw) 5% (weighted) or 160,000 to 100,000 shooting DGU.
The other “20% or more shooting” surveys that contradict Lott’s “vast majority” or “98%” or “95%” brandishment only figure include:
DOJ NCVS, 108,000 total DGU, 28% or 29,000 shooting DGU.
DOJ NIJ NSPOF, raw 23,000,000 total DGU, 27% or over six million shooting DGU.
DOJ NIJ NSPOF, vetted for “false positives” 4,700,000 total DGU, 42% or 1,940,000 shooting DGU.
KLECK&GERTZ NSDS, 2,400,000 total DGU, 24% or 576,000 shooting DGU.
The only thing these surveys have in common is (a) 20% or more shooting and (b) widespread criticism in the literature for being flawed by either “false negative” (NCVS) or “false positive” (NSDS NSPOF) bias. The range of total DGU (108,000 to 23 million) and shooting DGU (29,000 to six million per year) in the 20%+ surveys is a stark contrast to Lott’s claims of 2,000,000 to 2,100,000 total DGU and 42,000 to 160,000 shooting. Research estimating number of shooting DGU by methods other than survey give 59,000 (Southwick) to 80,000 to 160,000 (Kleck) shooting DGU. Lott’s writeup on his 2002 survey details how his questioning protocol was drawn up to avoid the “false positive” and “false negative” problems identified by Kleck&Gertz 1995 and Cook&Ludwig 1997 for the NCVS, NSDS and NSPOF questioning protocols. But his results are labelled fraud when they are much more moderate than the results that contradict them.
Carl N. Brown says:
On topic: “I want to believe” is not the same as Bellesiles was being swiftboated by schoolyard bullies lead by Eddie Eagle.
See Lindgren’s piece on the bogus NRA conspiracy http://volokh.com/2010/05/12/michael-bellesiles-and-the-bogus-nra-conspiracy/.
May 16, 2010, 8:32 am