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Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

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Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#291

We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following: 1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office). ^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address. 2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address tha…

This was not done after the 2016 elections. Why should such a procedure be adopted now? Are there any indications of widespread fraud / miscounting / etc. ?

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#292

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to ma…

+1 my thoughts as well. He's been a stellar QA, stress testing various facets of government, politics, and media.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#293
Just curious. Does anyone have a reasonable response to the following contention:

Trump claims to have engineered the world's greatest economy, but in fact he has just benefitted from the Fed holding rates artificially low in spite of an ongoing economic expansion. In other words, he's taking credit for something he essentially had no hand in.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#294

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

if you're a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?

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Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#295

We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following: 1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office). ^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address. 2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address tha…

Do you realize how fucking hard it is to influence elections by ballot shenanigans?

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#296

It's amazing. My friends on the left think the only reason for voting trump is racism, and friends on the right think the only reason for voting biden is socialism. Where did all the intellect go? The social dilemma documentary I think is very useful. It feels like social media bubbles are a large component, although of course there have been many contentious elections in the past. Being centrist I can relate to part…

The thing is: your friends aren’t completely wrong, in that their are loud racists that support Trump, and loud socialists that support Biden.

But they aren’t the majority of either party. It’s just our media that amplifies their voices.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#297

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

> Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data.

... and a lot of assumptions about the supposed underlying probability spaces.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#298

What is really keeping me up at night is the existential problem the US faces for the next 50 years: the ever increasingly large divide that is the polarizing of the electorate. We have to come together as Americans or someone will divide and conquer us.

Totally agree. How do we adjust our laws quick enough to stop strongmen using social media to whip up fear and anger?

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#299
While it’s true that the US government needs structural reform, the issue wasn’t anything the Constitution can fix by nibbling around the edges. The issue is that the unified Republican elite, along with > 35% of the electorate, is fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic, and will do anything it can to cheat its way into power. All three branches are implicated and have been for a while: Bush v Gore in 2000, the US Attorney firings, Shelby County in 2013, the refusal of the Senate to convict Trump in 2020, the disgusting anti-science politicization of coronavirus, and so on. The scale of Trump’s personal corruption is unique among Republican national figures, particularly in foreign policy. But the racist authoritarianism and fundamental disrespect for elections is a defining creed of the party.

One of the more unpleasant truth about democracy is that it’s quite fragile. In any real sense, the US has only been a democracy since 1965. When large segments of the population are ideologically opposed to democratic governance - universal human rights, respecting fair elections, following the plain text of the law, and so on - mechanisms by which democracy sustains itself begins to fail.

One possibility is to amend the constitution to change first-past-the-post voting in all local-to-federal elections, to let never-Trump types speak out without facing electoral suicide, and to divert right-conservative attention away from a single “leader” figure. And obviously the electoral college needs to go.

But the fact that more than 65 million people voted for Trump at all speaks to a great sickness and nihilism in American culture. Trump himself might be put out to pasture. But Trumpism existed before he got here, and it isn’t going anywhere.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#300

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10? I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it…

Fivethirtyeight's polling averaging model underestimated Trump in all the swing states. Trump wine 2-3 states predicted for Biden, and 0 vice versa. States that Biden had a supposedly strong lead in turned out to be statistical ties in the official vote. The direction bias in the polls (about 20 of 25) is obvious, it's not symmetric random error.
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