Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#2Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#3Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias.
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be...
You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election.
Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia):
In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#4[flagged]
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#5Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be... You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election. Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia): In Janua…
This is a great example of the issue the blog post is addressing, namely:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The play book is:
1. Set an impossible standard (an undefined "unbiased" fact checker)
2. When impossible standard cannot be reached, throw toys out of the pram
Meanwhile, egregious levels of bullshit now go unchallenged.
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#6[flagged]
You mistake average and dispersion.
That's why "data" is not "anecdotes".
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#7Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
The "falsiness distribution" by itself is not capable of answering this kind of question. Imagine a politician who speaks just one statement, a "pants on fire" lie. They immediately reach the top liar spot.
The distribution also leaves out the significance and the reach of the statements.
Your statement is about as meaningful as the "fastest growing " trick. E.g. growing from 0->1 user is infinite growth, so wins fastest growing immediately.
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#8Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be... You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election. Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia): In Janua…
> In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
No relationship with the fact that Trump became president again in Jan 2025 with Zuckerberg giving money to his inauguration, obviously.
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#9Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
The "falsiness distribution" by itself is not capable of answering this kind of question. Imagine a politician who speaks just one statement, a "pants on fire" lie. They immediately reach the top liar spot. The distribution also leaves out the significance and the reach of the statements. Your statement is about as meaningful as the "fastest growing " trick. E.g. growing from 0->1 user is infinite growth, so wins fas…
If this were ESPN or similar, they would say "min 50 games" or something to sort the outliers (heh).
Re: Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
#10[flagged]
The graph is from 2007 onwards. So it doesn’t include when he was president.