Well, this makes me sad.
David McCandless runs the fantastic information visualization blog Information is Beautiful. Nearly all of his work is fantastic information visualization (his piece on drug deaths in England is really cool.
He recently created a visual about troops and troop deaths in Afghanistan. One part of the visualization got picked up by Andrew Sullivan. It was a graph on troop levels in Afghanistan and who has contributed the most troops. Mr. McCandless accompanies the chart with the words \”That\’s a huge amount of hired guns.\”
![\"\"](\"http://politicalmath.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/hiredguns.jpg\" "\\"hiredGuns\\"")
The problem is that McCandless doesn\’t source that number. I said to myself \”71,700 hired guns? That seems high.\” It didn\’t pass the smell test.
I looked into the number. Near as I can tell, its basically a huge mistake on McCandless\’ part. He didn\’t source where he got the \”71,700 private security contractors\” stat and he didn\’t say anything when I tweeted to him to ask where he got it. And he didn\’t respond in the comments section of his blog when I asked. So I had to go searching for it.
It looks like the number comes from this Washington Times piece which mentions that there are 71,700 contractors, not all of whom are private security contractors. And yet McCandless not only changes this important data point (HUGE no-no in my book), he goes on to push the point with his \”hired guns\” comment.
Why would he do such a thing? My guess is that he doesn\’t like the war in Afghanistan, so that kind of makes it OK to push a \”mercenaries\” point of view by lumping all contractors into the \”private security\” category.
Are you teaching in Kabul? You\’re a \”hired gun\”.
Building a bridge? You\’re a \”hired gun\”.
Flying supplies in? \”Hired gun.\”
Maintaining a network for the government? \”Hired gun.\”
Working as a translator? \”Hired gun.\”
It\’s basically a data labeling mistake made worse by an wildly inaccurate (and, frankly, quite stupid) comment.
The reason it\’s taken me so long to get to this is because I didn\’t want to say anything bad about Mr. McCandless without giving him a chance to explain. It\’s obvious to me that he\’s not going to. If he does, I\’ll post his explanation at the top of this post. But it\’s given me new insight into the old saw that a lie is half-way around the world before the truth can get its pants on. Being right and being generous to others is something that takes caution and time.
(By the way, I proceeded to contact Andrew Sullivan and tell him that I thought the information was bogus. He hasn\’t responded, but I figure that\’s because he\’s completely consumed with other correspondence. I optimistically maintain he would correct his post if he had read my note.)
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