Reading the links, the one mentioned error by the whistleblower was actually just an example of real data contradicting the official lies. All the other mentioned criticisms are one of surface style.
What I personally found most interesting about this was not that the whistleblowers were discounted before and after they were proven right (we see this in many bubbles, for example, the housing bubble, and apparently it’s not yet certain that Sino Forestry is a massive fraud), but how one could use a sort of Outside View/Fermi calculation to sanity-check the claims. If Sino Forestry was really causing 17m cubic meters of wood to be processed a year, where was all the processing? This basic simple question tells us a lot.
I’m personally wary of hindsight bias sort of stuff. Of course this all seems obvious to us now, but… would it have when we first examined it? I don’t know.
As far as Sino Forestry goes; I haven’t read the full analysis published that triggered it, but nothing in what I’ve read has mentioned hot new data which makes the fraud case convincing.
Reading the links, the one mentioned error by the whistleblower was actually just an example of real data contradicting the official lies. All the other mentioned criticisms are one of surface style.
What I personally found most interesting about this was not that the whistleblowers were discounted before and after they were proven right (we see this in many bubbles, for example, the housing bubble, and apparently it’s not yet certain that Sino Forestry is a massive fraud), but how one could use a sort of Outside View/Fermi calculation to sanity-check the claims. If Sino Forestry was really causing 17m cubic meters of wood to be processed a year, where was all the processing? This basic simple question tells us a lot.
I’m personally wary of hindsight bias sort of stuff. Of course this all seems obvious to us now, but… would it have when we first examined it? I don’t know.
That question reminds me of http://www.gladwell.com/2007/2007_01_08_a_secrets.html
As far as Sino Forestry goes; I haven’t read the full analysis published that triggered it, but nothing in what I’ve read has mentioned hot new data which makes the fraud case convincing.