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Math Indicates Pollster Is Forging Results
An anonymous reader writes "Nate Silver suggests the political pollster Strategic Vision is 'cooking the books. And whoever is doing so is doing a pretty sloppy job.' Silver crunched five years worth of their polling data, and found their reported results followed a suspicious pattern which traditionally suggests fraud. The five-year distribution of the numbers 'is not random. It's not close to random.' The polling firm had already been reprimanded by the American Association for Public Opinion Research for failing to disclose their methodology, though the firm argues they did comply with the organization's request. Their response to Silver's accusation? 'We have a call in to our attorney on this and fully intend to take action that will vindicate us.'"
As much as I don't like to see NASA die, what is Bad News for NASA is probably Good News for the private launch industry. Go go SpaceX and Armadillo!
Bello vel Pace Paratus.
a. you can't post
b. if you do manage to post, post goes to wrong topic!
Pretend I know nothing about Pollster (which happens to be true). Why should I care whether they've faked results? By that, I mean: do they research options of favorite flavors of cotton candy, or public support for health care reform, or the best style of car, or...? In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I call total, 100%, biased, fuck me up the ass horseshit on this inane accusation. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
So, which category do they deny? The category of truth or the category of lying?
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Even in the alleged truthful poll, the percentage difference between highest tally and lowest tally is 20%. So what if the Pollster tallies have 57% difference? I feel that their threshold between "random" and "totally not random" is simply arbitrary. Who says that 20% is okay, and 57% isn't?
I once had a signature.
Polls show that 78.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Agreed. Who is this Math guy anyway? Perhaps it's Math who faked the results, and Pollster is beyond reproach!
This "respected blogger" seems to be doing numerology. Take any data set and you'll find patterns that are statistically impossible. This is because you're asking the questions after you have the data at hand. It's like placing a bet at the Kentucky Derby after the race rather than before.
I'm not sure I understand what Silver is claiming about the data.
He shows that the distribution of second digits in the results of Pollster's polls doesn't follow a uniform distribution -- and from that he somehow deduces it's not random.
If you look at the figure in the second article, it looks to my untrained eyes like a gaussian curve with maximum around 8 -- since when are gaussians not random?
Reading TFA, Nate's analysis implies that there is a systematic bias toward some last digits in the overall poll percentages aggregated over many disparate topics.
What seems so improbable (to me) is that if someone really were grossly "cooking the books" like this - literally not doing the poll, or tallying any numbers at all, but instead simply reporting fake results for press ... is that they would be so stupid to make up the results manually instead of using a computer in some way. What, some guy in an office reading other polls and saying "gee I think the number will be 45%."
If this kind of bias really has been introduced by manually creating and publishing the results (as the analysis seems to imply), then it will be easy to track down and prove with further digging into the data, interviewing people who made the calls or took the data, etc. However, accepting such an explanation would requires a level of stupid on the part of the principals in this company that is so extreme that I find such a scenario an improbable explanation for the results presented.
Nate Silver does great analysis at the first order multiple-linear-regression level -- he outperformed all the other polls/predictors in 2008 iirc.
He sucks at meta-analysis though, in that he just doesn't understand the math. His 2008 monte-carlo stuff gave good results, but was just a bad reinvention of averaging. His recent foray into analyzing stock returns was interesting but 0-information (i.e. useless.)
Now he's mentioning Benford's law, but playing with trailing digits. Then he handwaves a non-normal result with an appeal to "it looks wrong." Come on, give us some real math here!
That said, he's probably right, but he's given us no math to support his claim.
... and pollster's statistics
Most M2s aren't going to read the entire discussion at -1 before M2ing. I know I don't. Sorry.
By the way, the unambiguous word you're looking for is "broken". And please don't say "ppl". This is Slashdot.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Their response to Silver's accusation? 'We have a call in to our attorney on this and fully intend to take action that will vindicate us.'"
Generally, I would expect a logical course of action from an honest and transparent firm would be to hire a statistician to vindicate themselves. Lawyers don't make a reputable firm appear any less reputable.
Meta-moders, There are posts on here that are from the NASA story. The reason is that /. is currently broke (as in a bug, not as in USA debt). Some came here automatically. Mine was posted because I was following the other posters. Please nuke the modders that hit these as off-topic. It should be obvious that they KNEW that /. had issues and some of the posts came here (a post from in front of here told them so). For these modders to be nuking ppl for posting in this area is ridiculous considering the situation.
I disagree. If a posting ends up linked to the wrong story it is off-topic. It doesn't matter whether it is the fault of the poster or a bug in the Slashdot code, off-topic is off-topic, and should be modded as such. The purpose of modding is for the benefit of the readers, not the posters!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
First, I DO look at discussions before metamodding. I prefer to understand the context of what is going on.
Second, I PICKED the word broke, I was not searching. ZING.
Third, I am not going to change the ppl to people just because somebody wants to be a nazi. THIS IS SLASHDOT.
Mod parent up.
What he said.
MegaDittosâ.
"You're a great American."
Here is some more info about them. According to the article they are a "Republican-oriented polling firm based in Atlanta."
I think it would have been nice for the poster to indicate that this refers to Strategic Vision, LLC., and *not* Strategic Vision, Inc., since Nate Silver specifically suggests that they may be trying to play off the credibility of the latter.
It's "Who cares?"(s) all the way down.
There's not enough eigenvectors in this thread...
http://controls.engin.umich.edu/wiki/index.php/Occasionally_dishonest_casino:_crimes_or_just_noise%3F
By all means, dont back up your numbers with mathmatical proof of your own.
I cant wait to see how they try to sue mathmatical laws and formulae.
Protip: Winning a lawsuite doesnt make you any less a liar.
Honest people do "give a fuck." This is a sleezy Republican pollster that is inventing results, and it does matter.
Oh yeah,
I am must learn to quit replying to self,
Sincerely
BitterOak.
But replying to an offtopic post does not make one offtopic. (Posting AC because I think I'm the only one who believes in this idea).
Is that the accusing organizations are cooking their books to make their polls come out to statistical dead heats to encourage their clients to buy more subsequent polls...
The closer poll results are, the more polls are taken, plain and simple.
If Gallup polls and finds McCain 45, Obama 44, undecided 11, then you can be you're butt that both sides are going to request a new poll the next day.
If Gallup polls and finds McCain 48, Obama 37, undecided 15, then chances are it'll be a few days before they pay for another poll..
So, it is in the Pollsters' best interest to have bunching around 4 and 5 as described in TFA, and therefore they are the ones who are probably cooking the books.
FYI:
Good: Strategic Visions Inc. @ http://www.strategicvisionsinc.com/
Suspect: Strategic Visions, LLC @ http://www.strategicvision.biz/
See: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/few-more-questions-for-sketchy-pollster.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow, I even screwed it up... they're both "Strategic Vision" without the s at the end, and the Good is at http://www.strategicvision.com/
I'd like to see the trailing digit distribution for three or more other polling firms for the same period and with a comparable amount of data points. At first glance, non-random distribution looks pretty bad. I'm curious to see if other firms demonstrate random distribution as expected.
It's not uncommon for polls to be conducted in a less than objective fashion. For example, a pollster might play a series of carefully selected audio clips from a political debate, which are designed to make one candidate look better than the other, and then ask the subject their opinion of the candidates. The goal is to "push" an opinion on the subject rather than collect information. If a push poll is successful, the data is going to be skewed. And after applying Benford's Law you're probably going to see a lot of 7s.
Strategic Vision LLC states in the first line of the first para on their political website: "At Strategic Vision Political, we craft winning results for our clients." Taken figuratively, that means that they "cook the books" and they are pretty up front about it. This /. is just another "Let's Ban Photoshop from Advertising " sensations.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I've been following Nate ever since the 2008 elections, and I've much enjoyed his analysis. Being a mathematician, I can spot BS math, but Nate usually does a decent job with no BS. But this article is has so many analytical gaps that I feel awkward supporting him this time, even though the article as a whole is convincing. To make such a bold claim as he is, I would've expected him to assess this more completely. He did no comparisons to other pollsters, and sampled data that is not IID (identically and independently distributed). i.e. if a boolean poll has 49% for one side (9) the other answer has to be 51% (1) The last digits (1 and 9) are completely dependent. Not all polls are boolean, but there will still be correlations, and many polls in the sample are boolean. Not only that, but he mis-applied the reference to Benford's Law. I know he knows what Benford's law is, because he's had multiple other posts about it, but got it dead wrong in this article.
I'm glad there is someone sufficiently mathematical to look for things like this and have a wide enough audience to be heard, but I wish he'd taken some more time to do look at more control groups and do some confidence intervals before sticking his head into a potential legal mess.
you should vote strategically
that is, you shouldn't vote for the candidate who best matches your ideology
you should vote for the candidate that best matches your ideology and has the best chance to win
yes, this means that you tend to vote for the most lukewarm limp candidate who is doing his best to appeal to as many people as possible... and that is a bad thing why?
the power of democracy is that it manufactures legitimacy. it does this by picking rulers that best match the opinion of the people. therefore, the candidates do their best to be that person. and this is a GOOD THING. legitimacy=social stability=prosperity=the whole reason democracy is a good thing. and no, it doesn't mean that the candidates are the same from the republican party and the democratic party. tell me with a straight face mccain would be earnestly pursuing health care right now. tell me with a straight face gore would invade iraq in 2003. no, the democrats and the republicans ARE NOT THE SAME
furthermore, two party system is not automatically inferior and democracy destroying. in fact, in democracies without two major parties, coalition governments form, in which, in pure grabs for power, completely ideologically opposed party representatives will get in bed with each other to grab power. go ahead, ask any german. and this is superior to two parties how? you honestly believe it is the two party system that is keeping your FRINGE beliefs from gaining traction? no, your ideas don't gain traction because your ideas are FRINGE. begining and ending of reason your ideas don't work. its not because its blocked by some status quo, its because your ideas are flawed. if they were good ideas, they would be adopted by a major party. duh
of course, those on the fringe will appeal that for you there be a pure correlation between your ideology and whom you vote for. ridiculous and naive: if everyone voted that way, 20-30 fringe candidates would take a roughly approximately equal share of the pie, and the guy who for vague reasons got a slightly greater vote (remember, he's fringe) would represent everyone. so randomly one year we would be represented by the communist party, the next the nazi party, and the vast majority of the country (the various ideologically fundamentalist factions who only vote their conscience and never strategically) would despise the guy. so superior?
of course, it doesn't happen this way. what happens in real life is fringe boosters and enthusiasts work hard to get people to vote for their fringe candidate. this usually consists of cannibalism of those who would otherwise vote for the ideologically nearer candidate. such that those who vote fringe candidates and enthuse for them wind up ensuring that the guy FURTHEST from your ideology actually wins! ie: gore, bushjr, and nader (spoiler for gore) in 2000. or bushsr, clinton, and perot (spoiler for bushsr) in 1992
don't vote your opinion. guess the most popular options, and vote STRATEGICALLY: the guy CLOSEST to you ideologically. or vote your opinion, and ensure the guy FURTHEST from you ideologically wins
politics is not about idealism. politics is about compromise. if you don't compromise, you lose. simple as that, on all levels of politics, from the white house, to the state house, to the town hall, to the voting booth: its a simple undeniable fact that compromise always wins over the idealist
meanwhile, if you think ytou are being noble by "never compromising your ideals" you are actually a fool, and you are working hard that you will never, ever see anything you believe actually become public policy. the real world never works the idealist's way. grow up and stop being naive and vote STRATEGICALLY. or forever remain fringe and forgotten. your choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First off the idea that a website or group of people are distorting polls doesn't all that much surprise me. The fact that they are,"talking to their lawyer" seems to exume guilt personally. I myself would not find it mind blowing if in fact polls were not the truth in many cases. To actually think that all polls are true at the core would seem to show a certain amount of ignorance. In some cases it would seem troubling to think that polls large enough be used by mass media are being forged. The question I would want answered would be why exactly, for who, or what purpose had the polls been messed with? Is there a certain group behind it, is there a pattern for what the polls suggest or agree with. In the end if this comes out to be true, I wouldn't be surprised, at this time it would take a lot to surprise most people about mass media I believe.
Not to mention you missed being the first one to point that out by half an hour!
I tease. I was of course the one who screwed up, and it is important to correct people who accidentally talk trash on the wrong person. Not correcting me would be helping the bad strategic visions, thank you.
I have been programming accounting software for almost fifteen years and the first nasty lesson I learned was that data can be presented in unlimited ways and if you want to get paid you better make it look good. Change the scale, oversample, skew the questions and all sorts of other nasty tricks are now par for the course.
We now have well respected polls contradicting each other by double digits because of the politicizing of any information that might change voters opinions. I never thought that I would long for the post civil war years of reapproachment and unity.
If you aren't modded down, you will just be ignored. If anyone actually does pay attention, they will just say, "Teh Democrats did it too!" and be modded up to +5.
they believe the two parties cooperate to keep smaller parties from gaining traction
maybe you're just lucky you haven't been dealing with the kind of kooks i've heard from
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a classic mistake about random numbers. Random DOES NOT mean an even distribution. In fact, I would suspect the numbers if there was an even distribution in a stated random list. Meaningless patterns can and do exist in random numbers, and should be expected, rather than surprising.
There is nothing here, please move along.
I'm just "this guy", you know?
the police are too far away. so we have a status quo here currently in the usa where hundreds of urban dwellers die every year from thugs with guns for the sake of a law which serves only the rural minority. but as the usa continues to urbanize further, and begins to equal european urban/rural ratios, political status quo will fall in line inevitably
and instead of HUNDREDS of urban dwellers dying every year for the sake of rural-friendly laws as we currently have, DOZENS of rural folks will die instead for the sake of urban friendly laws
inevitable. deal with it
"I am not FRINGE because I don't vote."
that's true. your SELF-DISENFRANCHIZED because you don't vote. your vote is your voice in your society. if you seek to not vote, you have willfully removed your own voice, you have chosen to be irrelvant. so why are you still fucking talking? you seek to not be a member of society. which is fine, drop out if you like: in which case, shut up and stop commenting on a society you freely choose not to belong to. if you want your opinion to be considered by us in this society, try to be a part of it by voting, and make your voice heard
but you don't get to drop out of society by your own choice and still think anything you say is relevant
if you want to be relevant, vote, and consider yourself to be a member of the same society as me. or don't, and, in logical coherence with that choice of yours, shut the fuck up
otherwise, there is absolutely zero for me to respect about anything you say, because by your own admission, you choose to not matter to me by not voting
oh you have your gun. awesome: why solve problems with voting when you can shoot, is that your point of view? fucking shizophrenic loser
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Problem is, there are so many undecided, that many election just hinge on the vote of those. Example igf you have 40% which are deciding long in advance for DEM, and 40% long in advance for Reps, then in the evry end those 20% do the decision. If it was 60% rep and 20% dem (or reversed) then the undecided would not matter. And indeed poll CAN influence *SOME* undecided, I have seen it at action in my family. It is anecdotial evidence, but it is enough to say that SOME undecided will be influenced by a poll, about as much as by a fake poll.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm not trying to knock anyone butI know alot of people probably don't understand how much these polls impact the public decision making process. News outlets and other media often use these polls to add legitimacy to their claims and to add a public voice to an event. Its a nice tool to help with the bandwagon effect.
I'm not trying to pick on conservative sites, for some reason it was just easier to find these polls on Fox news and conservative blogs. I am sure the company has been used by other media outlets, so please don't assume I'm trying to suggest it is only Republicans,etc. that are using questionable poll data. I am very confident that if someone else investigated this more, they will see other "news" outlets using similar datasets from this same company or other similar companies.
Anyway I did a quick search and found a couple of examples of polls from this organization:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311708,00.html
http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2007/12/13/strategic_vision_poll_1/
If what the blogger is saying is accurate, it should serve as a wakeup call to the American public about how much their information is controlled.
Web 2.0
Blank until
I did a statistical analysis off the year 2000 "recount" almost 9 years ago, looking at the counties with "unusual" results.
There were six counties in which the changed votes didn't fit the normal bell curve, four benefiting Gore and two Bush.
Both of Bush's and one of Gore's had rules in which replacement ballots were made for idiot voters who used an X rather than filling the bubble, explaining them.
One of Gore's had machine problems in the recount and stuck with the original figures.
And then there were the two counties, which accounted for the lion's share of the "correction" from the recount.
One of them was 50 standard deviations out--so far out that it is less likely than winning the California Lottery every week for thirteen weeks running . . .
I wasn't the only one to notice the oddity, but the sad fact is that noone cares . . .
hawk
Holy crap you make yourself sound old ". I never thought that I would long for the post civil war years" what are you 150 years old now?
I love how the ".biz" TLD is effectively the "evil bit".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You really think that the only people who want guns legal are rural? And that the laws are "rural friendly" in that regards? I've got news for you, the vast majority of gun owners and enthusiasts are urban dwellers, and that isn't looking like it's going to change anymore now than it has in the past couple of decades.
In addition, you really think that the majority of murders with weapons wouldn't happen without weapons? People murdered each other before guns were invented, removing them might make a few cases go away but won't impact the vast majority of homicides.
Good luck voting to stop that bear from getting you by the way, I'm sure he'll listen to your excellently thought out democratic system of determining who he should eat next.
-Someone who owns no guns but isn't dumb enough to think guns are the root of problems humanity has had to deal with for centuries before the discovery of gunpowder.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Thank you. I think you meant to reply to the reply to me though. +1 insightful
Fuck you're a nutjob! OK, listen up, the reason I like to carry a gun is because a cop is too heavy. Have you heard that one before? How about this one? When seconds count, a cop is only minutes away. My original sentiment stands. I don't vote becaust things like ACORN happen and I don't matter anymore. You don't either for that matter but you're just too disillusioned to see it. Actually I did vote for the first time in my life this last election. It will be my last (see ACORN). See, what happened in my case was that my vote got disqualified. Why? Government agencies don't talk to each other perhaps? I registered with my license. Why would that happen? Fraud perhaps? If the system didn't work for me the first time, why should I trust it the next? How about an analogy? Microsoft couldn't be made to behave via the government and they are only now doing so due to consumerism. How's that for an analogy? You're a complete and utter fucktwit and everyone reading this may think I am as well but there exists one difference between you and I. I believe in America and you believe in the estabilished system. I win because the country and it's people win out in the long run because of the guns, not despite them. I'm rather glad that I angered you into incoherency. LOL, I win.
. . . would a factual post be modded troll. I guess factually correct != politically correct.
A quick google will point to the wrong company.... Unfortunately, TFA sometimes just specifies "Strategic Vision."
You don't need fraud to lie using statistics!
A conservative poll organization that not accurate? Gasp! Why, soon you'll be telling me that Rasmussen polls aren't accurate either!
Goodness, what will O'Reilly, Beck and Limbaugh do without some sort of circular reference clusterfuck to draw on?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I'm sick and fucking tired of web sites what are a slim stip of content down the middle, with horseshit ont the side.
I'm sick and fucking tired of web sites that are a slim stip of content down the middle, with horseshit on the side.
HaHa! What an excellent way to get people to listen to you.
Exactly how many times have you had to shoot someone? My guess is zero. So either you're completely paranoid or trying to rationalize your inferiority complex.
Huh? What ACORN thing? You sound like another conspiracy theorist. Just in case you haven't been paying attention (and you haven't been apparently) there was never any voter fraud associated with ACORN. It was never even in question.
Your rambling incoherence just proves you are a conspiracy theorist. Why should anyone listen to you?
Exactly how did people win because of guns? You haven't made a single point, instead you insist on rambling on about your wild eyed conspiracy theories.
Time makes more converts than reason
Every time a conservative does something fraudulent or immoral--which is constantly--all you have to do is scream, "OMG Teh Democrats Did It Too!" and that fixes it! Even if it's not really true. It deflects attention from your cherished Party and makes you feel a little better about yourself. Bravo!
Sure, in an unattainably perfect world with perfect election systems, this would be true. However, one most note that its impossible to have a single-winner voting system where more than two candidates stand for election where strategic voting is not rewarded if voting actually matters at all.
In the real world, strategic voting which takes into account the preferences and likely behavior of other voters, assuming it is based on accurate information, produces better results than blindly voting your own true preferences.
Even ignoring the incentives for strategic voting, though, there is a cost benefit analysis in pre-voting activities which effect the success of candidates and ballot propositions -- even if a person believes something is a good idea and plans to vote for it, they are far less likely to expend resources (whether by donations of money or of time and effort) if they feel that those resources are unlikely to make a difference in the outcome.
So, ultimately, there are good reasons why people's understanding of the popularity of a political idea or candidate affects their behavior regarding that idea or candidate.
my first and only responsibility is to the professional typist: the scretary, the video gamer, and the author. everyone else, including shareholders, must come second string.
additionally, i find absolutely nothing wrong with dying my food purple. there is actually a community of us, possibly the first intentionally 'not online' community. in fact, we are so secretive that i purposely just lied about what we do.
and instead of HUNDREDS of urban dwellers dying every year for the sake of rural-friendly laws as we currently have, DOZENS of rural folks will die instead for the sake of urban friendly laws
inevitable. deal with it
Unacceptible---and when the thug comes for you--don't make a SOUND--bend over and take it! *I* won't lift a hand---I'll be rooting for the thug, even! :)
that's true. your SELF-DISENFRANCHIZED because you don't vote. your vote is your voice in your society. if you seek to not vote, you have willfully removed your own voice, you have chosen to be irrelvant. so why are you still fucking talking? you seek to not be a member of society. which is fine, drop out if you like: in which case, shut up and stop commenting on a society you freely choose not to belong to. if you want your opinion to be considered by us in this society, try to be a part of it by voting, and make your voice heard
but you don't get to drop out of society by your own choice and still think anything you say is relevant
Yes, YOU are part of the problem with your holy "vote" which you are stupid enough to think changes anything. YOUR hand is on the rope--and YOU are one of the reasons GUNS are needed--lots and lots of GUNS. How do you like my making myself heard, NOW, victim disarmer?:)
oh you have your gun. awesome: why solve problems with voting when you can shoot, is that your point of view? fucking shizophrenic loser
Hoplophobic cornholing victim disarmer exploiter! SURE you want me to make myself heard, sweetums?:)
Liar. Just look at our incarceration statistics!
I don't really have an opinion on gun control but I think this is wrong:
Premeditated murders maybe, but crime in general is greatly assisted by the availability of guns. The problem is that they're just so powerful. If you go into a bank with a knife and start waving it around and telling people to get on the ground they're just going to run away. But pull out a gun and everyone 10 meters around is going to obey every word because you can kill them instantly.
And people are defenseless against a gun but they can at least run or throw a chair or punch an attacker with a knife. And gun killings are easy and impersonal while with a knife the attacker has to struggle and get covered in blood and listen to screams or whatever.. much nastier
Swords are a problem I guess but they're impossible to carry concealed
wat
Um.. no. The right to bear arms was about being able to carry weapons sufficient to resist the tyranny of King George, not about defending your home from the schlep next door who's stealing your chickens. Him you can beat the shit out of with a shovel. Guns are for fighting redcoats.
If you don't like it, fight for a Constitutional amendment. If you're right and the votes are hundreds to one against, it'll go through.
"ppl" is not a word, dumbfuck. Kindly learn to spell before posting.
Premeditated murders maybe, but crime in general is greatly assisted by the availability of guns.
True, but the real point is that laws banning guns won't stop crime, since so many of the guns used in crime are already illegal and/or illegally obtained. It will reduce crime, though only slightly.
Unfortunately, gun control laws never have the desired effect, for the simple reason that if you're going to commit bank robbery, you don't really care about gun laws. The only place I've ever heard of having gun laws that work is Japan, for the simple reason that they have had an absolute ban for 60 years now, and therefore nobody has them, versus in the US where if they're banned, law abiding citizens will turn them in, while criminals won't give a crap.
Gun control laws in the US could work if you could simultaneously destroy every gun in the US and start fresh, but other than that, they're a band-aid on a missing limb.
That's true. Criminals will get guns anyway.
But drastically reducing the number of guns in the country would drive prices way up on the black market. If every gun had to be stolen from a cop or smuggled across the border then they'd be way expensive.
The distribution could be explained if the editor of SV was a numerologist. Suppose that SV had an opportunity to run one of two valid poll results -- one that puts McCain ahead 51-46 among white plumbers and one that puts him ahead 49-47 among white electricians. The numerologist editor decides that they should go with the electrician poll on the basis that numbers ending with 7 and 9 are luckier than those ending with 6 and 1. The plumber poll never gets published. The numerologist editor theory explains the distribution without invalidating the polling methodology.
Some of us didn't get to vote because we made the mistake of moving to another state -- and despite having several months in which to get our voter's registration requests filled, the local government sent us notices saying they couldn't register us for the current election, but we would be able to vote by the next election (fat lot of good that does).
Spoken as a former resident of Chattanooga, TN, one of the worst areas to be a thinker, a rational person, instead of a racial bigot. The locals still call blacks "boy" to their face. I've seen an office manager tell a visibly pregnant employee (a CSR) to wash the building's outside windows and afterward to clean his office -- and she did it cheerfully. Truly a disturbing and ignorant area.
Try some of those tactics in a more progressive area and see if you get a stick in your arse instead of a "yassur".
in fact, i believe that if guns were banned death by knives would go way up. but not as high as mortality rates due to guns: its simple matter of quantity of lethal force available to you. a knife is many factors less in lethality than a gun
i also believe that if someone still wants a gun, and they are committed enough, they will still get guns even though they are illegal. but that's not the point either. the whole issue are the thuggish morons who don't have the easy wherewithall to get a gun, who would do their typical retarded mayhem with far less lethality than they do today
making guns harder to get takes them out of the hands of your casual loser. that's the whole point. that's the beginning and the ending of the whole reason to constrain guns. and that matters, that makes a massive difference in mortality rates. which is the whole fucking point!: less pointless senseless death at the hands of complete losers and morons simply because they have less lethality in easy reach
now accuse me of some secret fascist agenda instead. zzz, tired and typical
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
when every conflict was decided by lethal force. there are still places today like that. like somalia: warlords and anarchy
however, other parts of this world developed this wacky thing called civilization. where there are rules, people decided their differences in a court of law, and they voted for their leader, rather than their leader being determined to be the guy with the most guns. its called civil society. where if i have a difference with you, i TALK to you, rather than SHOOT you. isn't that an amazing concept?
"Yes, YOU are part of the problem with your holy "vote" which you are stupid enough to think changes anything. YOUR hand is on the rope--and YOU are one of the reasons GUNS are needed--lots and lots of GUNS. How do you like my making myself heard, NOW, victim disarmer?:)"
my vote does actually changes things. and my vote has changed things. and with any hope and luck, my vote will continue to move us further away from the era where mortal conflict decided things, which is apparently the only reality you understand. you and people like you are the soil in which tyranny grows. where force of violence is more important than force of reason, where strength is more important than intelligence. you and people who think like you represent our downfall and everything the founding fathers of this country stood for. you and how you think represent the loyal ranks of every force of goons every tyrant has ever needed to keep his people in fear and under his boot: i have the gun, so do as a i say. the gun decides the day, not what is actually right and wrong. there are many warlords and their henchman in somalia who agree with you completely. maybe you should take your masturbatory soldier of fortune fantasies to their logical conclusion, and ship off as a mercenary to some hellhole, where in 6-12 months you will be a maggot laden corpse, which is the inevitable conclusion of your way of thinking
sir, i've talked to many pathetic losers on this here glorious intarwebs. and you sir, are a glorious loser of the highest order: a gun is more important than a vote
fucking pathetic beyond belief. the antithesis of everything the founding fathers stood for
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
with a two party system you point out i do not dispute, and agree with wholeheartedly
but the error in your thinking is that 3,4,5,6, etc. party systems are somehow superior to a two party system. multiparty systems suffer from different negatives than two party systems, but add up all the negatives, and they are basically all the same amount of suckage
in other words, looking at two parties as the source of our problems is the mistake. no, its more ephemerals reason: corruption, collusion, hypocrisy, selling out your constituents, etc., which has absolutely nothing to do with how many parties there are at all
when i ask people to stop criticizing the two party system, it is not because i defend the system, but because i know the source of the problem is much deeper. if the usa had a stable 3,4,5,etc party system in place, we would have just as many problems, of the same kind
all i am saying is that complaining about the two party system is simply a red herring, a dead end. if your desire is to effect positive change, fight the real, deeper reasons instead. fighting the two party system is simply wasting your time and energy: fruitless even if you did create more stable parties
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Without knowing more about the nature of the polls, it is just plain silly to make the claim that because the distribution is not random, there must be fraud. For a wonderful example, look at the distribution of move ratings by viewers. Assuming that you're using a 1-5 scale, you'll see is that there are far more 1's and 5's than anything else and very few 2's. If a person likes something they are more likely to give a 5 than a 4 and if they didn't they're more likely to give a 1 than a 2. If you want to see for yourself, go download the dataset used for the Netflix prize and check the distribution. Or, pick a random movie from IMDB and look at the distribution. You'll see that the number of votes for a rating of 1 is far more than those for 2 or 3. The proper way to do this analysis is to compare the distribution against the expected distribution, not to compare it against a uniform distribution. If I saw a uniform distribution of movie ratings, I'd cry foul.
The key datapoint that Silver brings up is that way too many numbers end in 7. He doesn't mention but this makes it much worse than if it were any other number that appeared too often. When people are asked to pick a random number they are much more likely to pick an odd number and are much much more likely to pick a number ending in 7. In general people are also likely to pick numbers that are close to (3/4)n when asked to pick a random number between 1 and n. Thus, when asked to pick a random number between 1 and 4, about 40% pick 3. For 1 to 10, you get a similar jump of people picking 7, and when asked to pick a random number between 1 and 50 something like 10% or 20% of people pick 37. This looks like textbook data of a human trying to make random data and sucking at it.
Finally Strategic Vision (R) got only 64% right, for an F. Strategic Vision should not be taken seriously in the future.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/pollsters/
people congregate, they are social animals. you can't outlaw political parties. in other words, yes, all of the negatives of political parties are 100% real. and yet its like pointing out that its bad you will die someday: there's nothing you can do to change it, its just a fact of reality, a negative you have to deal with, as there is no getting rid of that negative
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not by much. Simple guns, more than adequate for murder or robbery, can be turned out from scrap by any high school kid in a metal shop. Juvenile delinquents in the 1950s made zip guns out of car antennas. Guns like the Sten submachine gun can be made cheaply in clandestine machine shops -- thousands of them were made by the resistance in occupied Poland during WWII. (Plans for building a Sten here.)
Gun control keeps guns away from bad guys about as well as drug laws keep junkies away from heroin.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If you didn't believe Nate Silver at least recognize that Strategic Vision is at best very sketchy. Of their "7 locations" all 7 are actually UPS stores. They also have spent around $5,000,000 conducting polls but refuse to state their source of funding. They refuse to say who they poll or how they conduct their polls. Even if they didn't out-right make up data (which they likely did) they are not to be trusted. This is less about politics and more about valid scientific polling methods and transparency. source: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0909/Embattled_pollster_defends_methods.html
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