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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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This might become my go to example of cancel culture:

Besides, the proof is in the fucking pudding! Unlike most people in politics or journalism, pollsters have a track record that can be tested against actual results. They can be held accountable for political bias that might render their polls less accurate. Rasmussen has indeed had strongly Republican-leaning results relative to the consensus for many years. Despite that strong Republican house effect, however, they’ve had roughly average accuracy overall because polls have considerably understated Republican performance in several recent elections (2014, 2016, 2020).

Even when you can track and mitigate the "bias", the wrong thinkers must be purged.

The nutty thing is that, per 538's own data, their bias isn't even that egregious! While they definitely have a Republican tilt, that tilt comes out of them having misses on BOTH sides of the column but just having MORE misses in the GOP's favor.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/rasmussen-reports/

They otherwise have exactly the same kind of shape you would expect a decent pollster to have: Some outliers in both directions with a big mass of near misses in the middle.

Bias would best be measured against ground truth if you have it, not the "consensus", so Silvers's statement above means that Rasmussen is only about as Republican-biased as the typical pollster is Democratic-biased, and thus singling out Rasmussen is even more partisan.

If you read the substack, what is funny is some people are claiming the Republican leaning pollsters are deliberately trying to change the outcome due to polling whereas the democrat leaning pollsters just make honest mistakes.

It is funny how each partisan group genuinely believes that all of their guys are just stupid but all of the other guys are just evil.

It's another victory for conflict theory. Politics is every bit as tribal as your standard Basketball game. Everything the other team does is a foul. Every foul that gets called on your team is a rigged conspiracy against you. And then there's the trappings of the mundane reality somewhere, hanging around.

Although in politics you could make the argument that conspiracies abound. I think William Blum had a good political heuristic:

... Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy...

... I believe in conspiracies. So do all of you. American and world history are full of conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy. The cover-up of Watergate was a conspiracy. So was Enron. And Iran–Contra. The October Surprise really took place. For a full year, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney conspired to invade Iraq while continually denying that they had made any such decision. The Japanese conspired to attack Pearl Harbor while negotiating with Washington to find peaceful solutions to the issues separating the two governments. There are numerous people sitting in prison at this very moment in the United States for having been convicted of ‘conspiracy’ to commit this or that crime...

"I make accidental errors, they make stupid mistakes, you try to influence outcomes."

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