Sometimes anxiety is a symptom of high-functioning autism spectrum. (Note that anxiety doesn't need to be solely related to social situations in this case either)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809000/
> Burnout is caused by a series of failures. Your brain is quick to pick up patterns and will assume your next attempt will be a failure.
I like the simplicity and elegance of that definition. It means work, pressure, "stress", pain, etc., are all completely irrelevant as long as there are enough successes over some interval of time.
One thing's for certain: Facebook AI research is running deep-layered natural-language ANNs right now on a year of election comments and likes. I think well before four years they'll know exactly how to detect bubbles of alternate political reality and also how to break them up. There will be some interesting decisions facing them before the next election.
Is this really different than TV news? Most people stick to one network (Fox news, NBC, CNN, etc) and not only do they not watch the others but believe they are corrupt, fixed, and lying.
The problem is we don't have multiple major news organizations per major area like we used to. Back then there was bias, but it was easier to be called out on it. Now I think many people are fine living in the bubble.
It's different because Facebook has captured nearly every American adult and they have a Google-like (in search) dominance over social. There's no news platform in US history that has ever come even remotely close to being able to claim that. They're just about worth more than every US media company combined, their reach and financial power are already incredible; four years from now they'll be as profitable as Google is today and their reach will likely have expanded further.
I can't see a scenario where Facebook manages to avoid anti-trust action against it in the next four to six years, both in Europe and the US.
There's got be some non-political algorithms. Maybe tracking news articles to their sources (text/phrase similarity searching), showing sources, and flagging quality by accuracy of details? A few years of improvement on automatic text summarizing might be able to catch political "telephone" articles that erase and morph crucial details.
That just pushes the problem back, unfortunately. Do you trust the people who designed the algorithm? Even if they were wonderful, apolitical idealists, do you trust the people who maintain the systems after those guys leave the company to stick with it, no matter what? After all, this election is the Most Important One In Our Lifetimes, so surely it's okay to put our thumbs on the scale just a little bit in the name of truth and justice... it's for the sake of the children/gays/whoever, you know... what kind of heartless monster would just stand by when they could make a difference?
Ultimately the only way to really address this problem is to have a diverse variety of competing news sources so at least they aren't all captured in the same way at the same time. There's no way to line this up with Facebook being the One News Source, any more than if it was the government doing it.
In very few things the truth lies somewhere in the "middle". You either have rigorous treatment of evidence combined with methodological design to reduce or eliminate human bias, i.e. sciences, or you have what someone believes based on uncontrolled emotional bias.
Ok... according to woodchuck64, We live in the land of PURE unbiased science! There are ZERO reasons to lean on or massage data one way or another. Funding just comes in, no matter the conclusions.
> Ok... according to woodchuck64, We live in the land of PURE unbiased science! There are ZERO reasons to lean on or massage data one way or another. Funding just comes in, no matter the conclusions.
I didn't say we live in a land of pure unbiased science. However, you can be certain that those insisting that science is biased are basing their conclusions on vastly more biased sources of information than science itself. In one thread, we have a climate science denier who obviously gets moral and emotional comfort from a right-wing political point of view; in another, a creationist who gets moral and emotional comfort from Conservative Christianity. They don't seem to realize that to criticize science effectively, you can only approach from a position with less human bias than practiced science, not more.
> But all ten researchers, faced with the choice of what hypothesis to formulate and/or investigate, naturally chose high-impact hypotheses -- ones that, if confirmed, adjust past temperatures downward.
You have to show this, you can't just assume it. For example, sea surface temperature adjustments are the opposite; in your words, a low-impact hypothesis that is nevertheless formulated and confirmed.
http://variable-variability.blogspot.de/2015/02/homogenizati...
That's a good point. On the other hand, the SST measurements are a lot lower impact (in terms of the number of times they're used in graphs that get into your newspaper) than air temperatures.
Which may be not be logical. But humans aren't logical.
For that matter, increases in air temperature in the 20th century by no means constitute definitive evidence of anthropogenic warming, since the planet has been warming for about four centuries. Finding the anthropogenic "signal" is a matter of number-massaging statistical wizardry, not at all unlike general circulation modeling.
If we had a sample of about 20 independent planets we could experiment on, it'd be no sweat. But science is hard. There's no law of nature that says the definitive experiment actually has to be practical. The definition of science is "we know," not "this is the best we can do."
> What we don't understand (unless we decide GCMs are predictive and can be validated) is the impact of a given thermal forcing on planetary temperature. This is the "climate sensitivity." Unfortunately, this is the number we actually care about.
The data quality in natural "experiments" like ice ages are as dubious as the GCMs, in the sense that you're simplifying very complex systems into single numbers. You'd never take this data set seriously next to the data you could get if you could mount a scratch planet and actually control the inputs.
Explain to me how ice core sampling is a dubious science, since apparently the experts are it have been using it quite effectively to do science in many other fields apart from climate research.
That's the problem with any method used to try and determine information about the distant past: you have to make assumptions about your information-gathering method that may turn out to be incorrect. In the case of ice core samples, many scientists ASSUME that x number of layers corresponds to y number of years. Which is fine and dandy until some example comes along which throws that assumption into question. Consider, for example, the "lost squadron" of WWII. These planes were discovered over 200 feet deep under many layers of ice. Therefore, they must be many thousands of years old, right? Now, this doesn't mean that ALL deep ice structures are that young, but it certainly throws into question any conclusions drawn from ice core data. Now, this is my opinion, but I for one feel like many (not all) scientists continue to assume such methods are reliable and accurate. Perhaps they need the grant money. Perhaps they have devoted so much to their research that they just can't accept that all the time they spent drilling ice cores may have been wasted. Or (again, this is my opinion), perhaps they are climate change zealots who feel that they must convince the population they are right, regardless of the cost of their scientific integrity.
Since I am conveniently unable to respond to Mr. Woodchuck's comment below his, I'll make it here. You assume I am a creationist because.... I point out evidence that questions the validity of historical climate research - that happens to also be used by creationists? You miss the point. As the article you linked to to "refute" me itself indicates, ice layer accumulation is inconsistent. Therefore, any conclusions regarding historical events drawn from such data would have to be questioned. The fact that they were pointing out differing conditions leading to the rapid ice accumulation in Greenland is tacit admission that accumulation is not consistent and uniform. Who is to say that any other ice structure has been formed by consistent and predictable processes anywhere, when you are dealing with historic weather patterns? The ONLY way to be sure of such things is with an actual HISTORIC record, recorded by intelligent beings. My original comment was in reply to an assertion that ice core samples are a reliable source of scientific data, and your attempt at invalidating my argument by appealing to disdain for religion ("oh he must be a Creationist! Don't listen to him") is insufficient. I may actually believe in God, but I find comments such as yours to be all the more religious in their fervor.
Because the only reason to reject well-established scientific conclusions such as evolution and global warming is moral and emotional reasons deriving from membership in a Conservative Christian religous group that confuses the Bible with reality.
> As the article you linked to to "refute" me itself indicates, ice layer accumulation is inconsistent. Therefore, any conclusions regarding historical events drawn from such data would have to be questioned.
Instead, ice cores are dated by measuring independent signatures: isotopic compositions (reflecting season variations in local temperature) different kinds of impurity (reflecting seasonal dust and other mineral concentration), known events (such as volcanic eruptions, fires). In addition, there's a host of new methods and statistics being used and developed.
Effectively, there is no reason to reject the sound science behind ice-core dating unless your Church Group told you that God wants you to. But that's a silly way to find truth.
You are a creationist so it is likely your moral and emotional need to believe in God is biasing and corrupting your understanding of science.
> Consider, for example, the "lost squadron" of WWII. These planes were discovered over 200 feet deep under many layers of ice. Therefore, they must be many thousands of years old, right?
This is straight from the Institute of Creation Research, known Liars for Jesus. This nonsense is dealt with here http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD410.html. In short, ice layers are counted by many different methods and no one thinks that 200 feet deep automatically means thousands of years old.
It's good science - but you'll find that hard to tell amidst the astroturfing armies Thiel has installed here.
An analogy would be to sit in a burning building, arguing that until we've seen the building completely burn down, we can't be sure it's on fire, so there's no point in turning off the gasoline hoses.
All of those suggesting that scientists universally introduce bias are sorely lacking an understanding of the scientific method and process, and confuse their own compromised morals for those of others.
Edit: the fact that this is being vigorously downvoted on a no longer front page story with few new comments only confirms my suspicions. Do you do it for money, the lulz, or do you have a genuine ideological connection to the idea of eradicating the majority of humans?
1. It's still a front-page story for me (I've been wondering how HN determines front page nowadays, I'm starting to suspect it's not the same for everyone).
2. You're probably being downvoted for the "astroturfing armies Thiel has installed" thing.
2 is no less disprovable than the objections to climate science - and can be argued in favour of with identical arguments. Yet it is for some reason less credible than climate change denial.
> For that matter, increases in air temperature in the 20th century by no means constitute definitive evidence of anthropogenic warming, since the planet has been warming for about four centuries.
If by definitive, you mean 100%, then yes, else no. The IPCC distilled the consensus down to about 95% which is quite strong, by all means.
The SST adjustments have a larger impact on global temperatures than the land adjustments. Hence the global temperature has been adjusted higher relative to the raw data for the period before 1940.
Much is made of voter anger this election, but what if a larger factor turns out to be social media designed to inflame anger and fear? Inflaming emotions equals clicks equals profit.
China exports 800 million tons of steel and the US only imports 1.9% of that. Burning coal here will have very little impact on China steel operations.
Not just the left and right's echo-chambers, but those who attempt to actually listen to reality got it wrong, too: FiveThirtyEight for example has been using proven, reality-based statistics for a while and should have predicted this result. (As it was, Silver was lambasted for being too generous on Trump's chances.) At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters.
Huffington Post was one of Nate Silver's largest critics because his math disagreed with their political desires. This graphic [1] - laughably claiming to be scientific - was on their home page on Tuesday afternoon. 538 had Trump at about 28% at the exact moment I took this screenshot, and HuffPo's "scientists" had him at 1.7%. If anyone wonders whether HuffPo and its ilk are "biased but reliable," wonder no more. They're just biased.
No, the idea of being persecuted for what you believe and then in turn, lying in public about it is not a new idea.
It doesn't need a Wikipedia article nor a term for it. It has been around since the beginning of time.
What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
That's what you get when you behave that way. When people are threatened when they speak out, they just wont speak in public, but it doesn't change what they believe. Our society is worse off for silencing their voices.
No, the idea of being persecuted for what you believe and then in turn, lying in public about it is not a new idea.
However, formalizing the concept this way allowed the further step of the preference cascade, and that, while also not exactly new in practice, was a more enlightening concept.
> What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
Very true unfortunately. That's not all of HN of course. Many of us supported Thiel and his ideas, or else thought it was worth having an opposing voice around even if they disagreed with it.
I wrote an essay on Peter Thiel's ideas and (partly about) how the Media misunderstood him here:
It was composed from a chain of HN comments before the election went to Trump, so I can credibly state that I saw a media malfunction with reality on the cards.
I was watching his press conference from a few days ago at the National Press Club event, and I really did Laugh Out Loud when he said (paraphrasing), "You know, this is pretty much the first time I'm not making a contrarian stance, I mean literally how can I be a contrarian when half the population agree with me, and for this I get the flak? Unbelievable!".
Together with the investment in Seasteading, this has been incredibly high impact for comparatively minor sums of money. Thiel has managed managed to make himself the only venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who appeals to the majority of the working class. That is power. He'll be reaping dividends from that for the rest of his life.
This is because many serious inventions and innovations were created by the working class, not the middle class as they appear to think today. In fact historically (and I would argue currently too) the middle classes and elites looked down on entrepreneurship. Entreprenurship is seen as being unprofessional. Most engineering was created by working class with the aristocrats holding up the exploration of science. The water mills, the steam engines, these were not created by the kind of people who studied at universities. We no longer understand our own past.
This may sound like an attempt at provocation, but I swear it is not. I really do think many of the best innovators and inventors have a working class way of looking at the world.
Let us take something that isn't directly in Silicon Valley's ballpark. Tiny Houses.
All the non-cosmetic innovations I've seen in Tiny Houses have been created by working class people.
The majority of Tiny Houses are created by young aspirational middle class or those who want to retire without worrying. It is especially gratifying to see many young women picking up the hammer to forge something for themselves. I saw one who built a VOC-free house recently and that is impressive if you know anything about building.
Despite this, the only major differences between most builds are cosmetic. People really are afraid of being different despite being adventurous enough to live differently to most. There is a finite amount of adventurousness people have and it is easily exhausted.
The names in italics are Youtube channels if you wanted to inspect what I'm talking about.
Esket Tiny House is built by a carpenter, and he has built a magnificent curved roof when everybody else went with a standard gable roof. If you're perceptive you'll notice that a Tiny House only has 13 ft 6 inches to play with. So logically changing the roof shape would hugely improve the living space in the loft area. Yet they choose not to change it.
Tiny House Customs is another working class Joe (framer). He has cleverly hidden the trailer's wheels and tow bars so it doesn't even appear to be a potentially mobile structure.
Life in a Box (electrician) has introduced the concept of a rain screen, despite being in Arizona! Everybody's builds (in the more rainy regions) are going to have the siding rot off in five years! This is smart.
The Not So Tiny House (power plant operator but definitely working class) has very cleverly hidden his trailer using a faux rock skirt. It now just looks like a regular house on a foundation. It is a rather brilliant solution.
The reason why I mention these is because there are very few working class people building Tiny Houses. I think that is a shame. However the thing to notice here, is that when they do build, they build them very differently to the cookie-cutter approach most middle class people do.
In retrospect, all their innovations are extremely obvious. That is quite curious.
I think this says something pretty profound. There is something about being middle class that could damage your ability to integrate innovations into real life. I realize this is anecdotal but in retrospect I have the feeling I see this pattern everywhere in life.
One explanation could be that: once your comfort increases, your comfort 'zone' decreases. I think this could be a powerful explanation for why so few Silicon Valley companies are truly inventive despite being a Mecca for all kinds of talent and enterprise.
As Peter Thiel points out: all kinds of clever young minds go to Harvard, and despite that they keep electing to join industries just as bubbles are bursting. That is not an accident, it is culture.
tldr; When you think of diversity, maybe think of the working class also. Maybe they have something to add nobody else does.
First of all, yes, they got it wrong, in that they gave Clinton a higher chance of winning than Trump. They didn't give him a 0 chance, and a model that has 67%ish certainty should be "wrong" about 1 in 3 times. They were better than the other major forecasts, insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of winning.
I respect Nate Silver for his opposition to non-data-driven media narratives. In 2012, when the media was calling the race super close, Nate called them out for making a media circus when the race was actually looking really good for Obama. In this race, he did the opposite, constantly pointing out how likely a 30% chance was and how big of a polling error there could be (and also how many undecided voters there were). He also called out herding (the tendency of pollsters to not publish outliers) when he saw a ton Clinton+3 and Clinton+4 leads in the week before the election. His forecast may have been wrong, but his instincts are pretty good.
Regarding the shy-Trump effect, we didn't see this play out in the primaries (Trump often underperformed his polls), which makes me skeptical. It might be that with all the reluctant republicans felt a need to vote for him in the general election, the effect got played up. Personally, I think there are 2 big problems in polling as we do it today:
- Not enough pollsters are polling in Spanish. From the polling we do have, we know that Spanish speaking latinos vote very differently from English speaking latinos.
- Our methods for finding people are a mess. Phone polls often use land lines (Cell numbers are often unlisted and may belong to people who live in other states despite their area code) which prejudice them towards the demographic of "people who still have/answer a land line". Internet polls suffer self-selection bias. We need a way to randomly sample people without them making the first move to join a poll. This problem needs to be solved.
Lastly, I want to point out that even Trump's campaign didn't see this coming. No one (except Bill Mitchell's yard sign and Halloween mask model) saw this coming. We have a lot of work to do to fix polling.
They were better than the other major forecasts,
insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of
winning.
You might be interested in the LA Times / USC Daybreak poll, which projected a Trump win for some time. (And similarly, "caused dismay — even outrage — among some readers, especially Democrats, who have denounced it and often criticized The Times for running it".)
Nate Silver actually wrote a post about the LA Times poll. I don't think it makes sense to compare individual polls with poll aggregates. A single data point being accurate/inaccurate can be due more to luck than methodology, while an inaccuracy in a probabilistic model like Silver's indicates more of a systemic bias across all polls.
I spent 5 years living in Wisconsin, and I've been telling everyone that Trump would definitely win there. The week before the election, I actually went so far as to say that I expected Hillary to win the popular vote, and Trump to win the electoral college.
I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were willing to overtly say.
I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.
Yeah, I deal with a lot of people all over the spectrum and there was an undercurrent of something going on. A lot of those leaked e-mails really offended people and they got passed around a lot. Its one thing to believe a group looks down on you, but its a whole different thing when you read the e-mails. I was amazed at the number of people that were going to that site and sending links.
It also seemed like the celebrity endorsements had the opposite effect. Some of the people who I've met who spoke ill of the celebrities used language that I don't think they normally use. It has been quite odd.
I agree with your analysis, but it's sort of an orthogonal point to the issue at hand. The issue is that the personalized media bubble effect prevented more people from attaining your insight, because we were simply not exposed to the same media as those who were galvanized by Trump, and on the other side of the coin, it allowed Trump supporters to avoid exposure to valid critiques of their candidate and instead be hyper focused on (sometimes fabricated, often exaggerated) content that was critical of Clinton.
That's fair. I also go out of my way to seek out people's thoughts on divisive but relatively popular topics, because people have some reason for believing what they believe. It probably helps that I don't spend much time on Facebook because I think most people who share my ideology are at least as closed-minded as people whose ideology conflicts with mine.
That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.
I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.
I think his methodology was fine and pollsters were shit. If you look carefully at the map, he basically called all the swing states hilary and trump took from one another. His model saw the holes in the pollsters data. I think to swing trump to winnning, he'd probably just have to adjust a weighting factor by fractions of a percent. Look at how close michigan, florida and wisconsin were. The tiniest of margins won it for trump in the end. Literally a handful of factories that had closed in the past decade between those states determined this race.
The scarier thing is that for the next 10-20 years, boomers in the rust belt are going to swing republican unless dems can get a Bernie. To me, whatever democrat wins the michigan primary, is their candidate above all else.
He should call it quits together with all other pollsters. All that predicting is at best a totally useless activity or even worse, it influences voter behavior. Bet on football games instead. At least that doesn't do damage to the country.
The main point of polls is to influence and give social proof to selected candidate.
Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive campaign in history couldn't help her.
Technically, they did predict it: 538 had 35% chance of Trump winning and emphasized the uncertainty factor, while other outlets had Clinton's chances as high as 99%.
If the results had been different, our prediction would have been correct.
First, that comment is about the polls, not their model.
Second, it's called a polling error. It's actually a thing.
This election happened to be extremely sensitive to polling errors due to the nature of the electoral college and the fact that a number of key races were extremely tight.
When an average poll has a 3% margin of error, and you factor in state-level correlations (and the fact that the state level polls tend to have more variable quality than national polls), a slight error results in a huge swing.
Which is the entire point they're making, if you're willing to set aside the snark and read what they wrote (since it's actually, you know, interesting and informative).
If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account.
If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the same polling error in every other state.
As I understand it, FiveThirtyEight's models reflect current and past uncertainty, but do not properly take into account future uncertainty. This greatly undermine's their models for use as a prediction, a probability, or a forecast.
At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment in time, their implication is that she would win the election in two out of three times. Taleb is saying that is nonsense, that there is more variability than that.
Of course, Taleb's model wouldn't drive page views or get people excited. FiveThirtyEight gives voters a reason to check-in daily on how their candidate is doing in polls, but it is misleading as a forecasting tool.
Eh? Taleb was criticizing the variability of 538's estimates and said they should not have been making such drastic changes to their estimates. Taleb waffles between Bayesian and Frequentist and in this case he's being Bayesian.
He didn't criticize them for underestimating uncertainty, but for being too uncertain.
Particularly nasty this time around with the amount of name calling and threats of violence[1]. I'm pretty sure any tech person who was for Trump shut the heck up after the whole Peter Thiel narrative. The amount of people who would rather act out than understand what is going on is a bit mind blowing.
Of course, this is just a weird year when a third-party had a shot at the 5% and all of them sabotaged themselves by picking people who were uniquely unlikely to get votes. Could have been the setup for a 2020 three party run.
1) you would have to be insane to run a business and have a Trump sign in your window unless you were hoping for an insurance settlement.
I'm not in the US and I was a bit taken aback when people on my Twitter timeline started calling for boycotts of a certain online sticker service entirely because the CEO came out on Twitter as supporting Trump a few weeks ago.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
It's easy to underestimate how deeply polarized the US really is.
Trump in particular is so far out of the bounds of normal politics that to many people, support for Trump appears no different than support for, say, Mussolini. It may only be fringe extremists playing the racial supremacy song, but half the country is marching along to the beat. At that point it doesn't matter what your private reasons for supporting a Mussolini or Franco or Trump are - you're still a collaborator. The justification for boycotts etc comes from that point of view.
It's a difficult problem - the left (such as it is) needs to find some kind of productive path forward, but I'm not convinced that pandering to the sensitivities of people who have no intention to reciprocate is at all useful.
Did you glance at his charts? He's saying a "rigorous updater" would have estimated Trump's chances at almost nothing all year long, until dramatically changing the estimate just before the conclusion. In contrast, 538 estimated Trump's chances as much higher all year.
He has a point that the chances of winning shouldn't shift so rapidly, but a rapidly moving gauge is a decent indicator of uncertainty.
At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters
Definitely not that new. For example, pollsters in France have for decades been applying a "coefficient of shame" to account for Le Pen voters' underreporting.
Ex falso quod libet. The statistical mechanics can be rock solid, but if the data is garbage or the model is garbage then the prediction will likely be garbage. Hiding behind mechanical minutiae is no excuse for the overtly bold and wrong predictions.
There's no better reality-based approach than aggregating polls across the political spectrum. But who would have thought that all polls would be wrong in the same direction?
Is it uncommon that I can't ever recall being asked who I'd likely vote for? I suppose there's been a website once or twice that I've clicked a button on, but no one has ever asked me, or called me, or even handed me a survey that I can think of. What is the most common to actually make the inquiries.
After HRC supporters have gone to such great lengths to explain how Trump's warnings about fraud were delusional and unrealistic, I would really love to hear a justification why Trump could have pulled this off when supposed Clinton couldn't have.
You know, after the debacle that was the Bush vs Kerry election, there were widespread allegations by Democrats of voting fraud on the part of the Republicans -- especially in respect to electronic voting machines. For some months after the election, the Democrats made a lot of noise about those electronic voting machines, trying to get them removed. After a few months, they apparently seemed to forget all about it.
When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.
Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.
Of course there was fraud. We know better than most how easily a box can get pwned when the attacker has unsupervised physical access for a few minutes, and the manufacturer gives short shrift to security and practices security through obscurity--such as by keeping the source tightly closed.
The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.
My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.
It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.
Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.
It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.
They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.
In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.
Tyler Durden had multiple Fight Clubs, all of whom were completely loyal, anonymous, and committed to operational security. That's why I said he'd be the only one able to do it.
For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.
Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.
Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.
So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.
Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.
Well, for me, it was usually because of the high quality commentary, wherein folks had rational discussions about the content of a piece rather than resorting to Reddit-style content-free snark that neither educates nor illuminates.
All the dissident views about polls being outright wrong were met with disbelief when it was clear to anyone who looked that they were blatantly off. Mainly to create social proof to vote Clinton.
> Honestly I think the democrats should do the best the sabotage him and make sure everything he does fails.
I don't think this is necessary. With Obama, his policies were ultimately shaped, designed and compromised to benefit centrist to left-leaning voters, and so he was sharply opposed by the right and extreme right. With Trump, his policies will be ultimately shaped, designed and compromised to benefit Trump, so it is far from clear that this will give advantage to any class of voter at all.
The big issue is the sheer amount of misinformation and falsehoods that the Trump demographic takes as truth. The lack of a good education-- and particularly the lack of a science education-- means most Trump voters are ill-equipped to distinguish fact from feel-good fiction.
That's factually wrong. Documented workers’ wages rise with increases in the share of undocumented workers in a worker’s county and employed by their employers.
Why? The law of comparative advantage says we get more productive when we have more trading partners, and the arrival of undocumented workers with limited English skills frees up low-skill American workers who can then specialize in tasks that require better English.
