Do you think John Lott will post this?

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Michael

I’ve written about John Lott in the past. We were even Facebook buddies for a little while. At least until I embarrassed him by, ya know, doing research. It turned out he was being dishonest about something or other and he didn’t want to deal with someone pointing that out (see here). I suppose his history of apparently making up studies and impersonating women on the Internet who praise John Lott (fancy that!) would make him a little sensitive. So I suppose with that in mind, the guy isn’t likely to post anything like this:

Maybe Mary Rosh can tell us what he she thinks.

Check out Deltoid for many more wonderful John Lott stories.

Update: I don’t read Lott’s terrible blog (he mostly just reposts junk from other sites…weird that he doesn’t like original material, huh?), but I was interested to see his freaking out and whining from when Obama won the presidency. And what did I find? Why, this:

minor puzzle: Obama predicts a million plus at his “celebation” tonight but there are a lot of empty hotel rooms

That was the grammatically painful title of a post the sore loser made. Is it true? Nope.

Mayor Daley predicted Tuesday that more than a million people would descend on Grant Park for Barack Obama’s election night “celebration” and said the city has no plans to screen people entering the park.

The mayor said “everybody’s talking about” the Obama celebration.

“It’s gonna be surprising. There’s gonna be a lot of people who will want to come down and celebrate…We hope it’s a million or more. It would be wonderful.”

The full article is no longer available, but not only is the quote from Daley and not Obama, but it looks like it wasn’t even a prediction. Daley was just saying he hoped for a huge turnout. (He got it, though it was more like 125,000.) Not only was Lott wrong about who made the prediction, he was wrong about what was actually said. Yep, wrong in his wrongness. Amazing.

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Those silly conservatives

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Michael

With all the patently silly conservatives running around, I may make this into a series.

Today’s silly conservative is none other than John Lott. I recently wrote about how Lott deleted my comments concerning some stupid things he said. This happened on Facebook. To reiterate, I criticized Lott for, essentially, claiming that Ashley Judd represented all Democrats (among some other dumb things he said). He promptly defriended me. Cute.

Up until now I haven’t been entirely sure what he did with my comments. I presumed he deleted them, but had no proof. Well, because of my super-slick spy skills*, I infiltrated Lott’s friends list and confirmed that, yes, he did indeed delete the comments.

Let’s just recap: I made a couple comments about an article he posted. He responded to these comments. They apparently were not offensive enough to delete. I then put the final nail in his coffin and called him out for making a clearly dumb statement. Despite what one may conclude from reading this here blog, I actually was quite appropriate with my comments. I then found myself defriended. After this, Lott went so far as to delete everything I said – that includes the comments he did not previously deem offensive enough to delete. Apparently this 50 year old man has the temperament of a child.

*I had a friend send him a friend request.

Update: This must be the fastest update ever.

I left a comment on John Lott’s blog. He made a post about plagiarism where he is essentially insinuating that PubMed is a bad source for information. I presume this is because I have cited PubMed several times on his blog, but maybe he grew to hate that particular science outlet from somewhere else. At any rate, his post was specifically about plagiarism, but it isn’t a far cry to say unethical behavior is highly related. So naturally, I pointed out to Lott that it is well documented that his behavior is unethical. What did he do? He changed my post to say “This post has been removed by a blog administrator.”

Let’s take a moment to review Lott’s behavior over the years (and to avoid any insinuation from the 50 year old child, the following comes from the previous link).

  • he almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data
  • he presented results purporting to show that “more guns” led to “less crime” when those results were the product of coding errors
  • he pretended to be a woman called “Mary Rosh” on the internet in order to praise his own research and accuse his critics of fraud.
  • he probably was the person who anonymously accused Steve Levitt of being “rabidly antigun”

    All those claims are backed up quite well, too.

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