IRS would do well catching tax evasion by running some statistic models to find suspicious discontinuities.
Suspicious Discontinuities
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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#12OKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable.
[0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#13IRS would do well catching tax evasion by running some statistic models to find suspicious discontinuities.
They do. Tax agencies worldwide have used statistical techniques for decades.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#14The statistics on the amount of cocaine show an appalling pattern of lying and false evidence from the police. It's even more appalling that people hardly acknowledge such bias.
Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."
That seems to mean "if you assume that the drug seizure records are not falsified, you can conclude that the police are not lying or producing false evidence".
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#15The statistics on the amount of cocaine show an appalling pattern of lying and false evidence from the police. It's even more appalling that people hardly acknowledge such bias.
Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."
I do not have access to the original paper, but author's assessment that the bunching is due to prosecutorial discretion is a little puzzling to me. If it is true that prosecutors are choosing to prosecute cases that are above the cutoff at a higher rate than those below, I would have expected everything above 280g to increase, rather than a solitary spike at 280g?
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#16The statistics on the amount of cocaine show an appalling pattern of lying and false evidence from the police. It's even more appalling that people hardly acknowledge such bias.
Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."
From the quote in the footnotes:
"I do find bunching at 280g after 2010 in case management data from the Executive Office of the US Attorney (EOUSA). I also find that approximately 30% of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in cases with 280g after 2010, and that there is variation in prosecutor-level bunching both within and between districts. Prosecutors who bunch cases at 280g also have a high share of cases right above 28g after 2010 (the 5-year threshold post-2010) and a high share of cases above 50g prior to 2010 (the 10-year threshold pre-2010). Also, bunching above a mandatory minimum threshold persists across districts for prosecutors who switch districts. Moreover, when a “bunching” prosecutor switches into a new district, all other attorneys in that district increase their own bunching at mandatory minimums. These results suggest that the observed bunching at sentencing is specifically due to prosecutorial discretion"
If you had to work to parse it like I did, the TL;DR is that a minority (30%) of prosecutors are responsible for the "bunching" and it seems they intentionally are choosing to prosecute more cases at this level.
So, there may be police falsifying evidence, but the paper couldn't detect that and it seems more driven by prosecutors choosing to do "bunching" to get the amount of crack to hit the minimum.
IANAL so not sure what bunching means. Maybe instead of charges from separate arrests, they group them together as one large case?
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#17OKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Both men and women showed height above the national average. As a result I am more inclined to believe that there is selection bias in OKCupid audience (more white people, less minorities) than that there is such widespread deception going on.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#18OKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
I really miss the more technical blog posts that OKCupid used to do like this... then after selling out to Match Inc, they wen't through that weird woke period... and radio silent for over a year...
The technical insights were far more informative in terms of dating trends.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please do not jump to conclusions and read the footnote which addresses that point explicitly: "drug seizure records, amounts seized do not appear to be the cause of this change."
That seems to mean "if you assume that the drug seizure records are not falsified, you can conclude that the police are not lying or producing false evidence".
It means the police are not falsifying records of drug seizures to make them hit any of the statutory thresholds. They may be falsifying them in other ways but this can’t be verified one way or another by this data.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#20People playing speed chess (presumably) get fixated on improving their Elo rating by the next 100 point span, leading to spikes every 100 rating points in the distribution: https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/bullet