The Thing About Statistics

Helping you see what you wanna see.

To make surveys and statistical research instruments more accurate we are taught to insure that nothing about the conditions of the test encourages one group to participate or not participate more than others. I took two graduate level statistics courses to learn that. Of course, the other guys who took those graduate statistics courses know this and, as I did, learned all the sneaky ways there are to make a study or survey's data say what the researcher wanted it to. 

 

Knowing how to game the system is a very valuable skill in the political marketplace. So long as the researcher is careful to make these sorts of tricks very hard to find for the normal person untutored in the ways of statistical analysis, statisticians can make very good money designing studies that skew the results in exactly the way the client wants it skewed in order to make the study say what the client wanted it to say. 

Why do you think the polls had Hillary winning by a landslide in 2016? First it would convince the voters that her victory would be inevitable and people would either vote with the perceived herd or not bother to vote at all since there was no chance Trump would win.

The other reason the polls favored Hillary was that by selecting a data sample from large urban areas, there would naturally be more left-leaning respondents in the sample. It's a little trick called selective sampling. It was profitable to do so, because the people paying for those polls (mostly the liberal media) don't like to buy studies that don't show progressives winning. Conservative media is a much smaller niche market.

That's why so few polls tend to show conservatives ahead, especially in the early stages of an election and right at the end. Often they feel some guilt in the middle and publish a more accurate data set, but go back to the more profitable selective sampling and rigged questions that skew the results their way.

The US census is a golden opportunity every ten years to bend statistics to the service of the deep state. The federal and state bureaucracy has a natural inclination to prefer left-leaning big government politicians and therefore are highly motivated to tell them what they want to here and by extension, tell the public at large what big government liberals want the public to hear. Government employees keep their jobs where they sit at desks all week accomplishing little and getting paid on Friday by telling the people who vote to enlarge government bureaucracy what they want to hear.

Just giving out my little warning here. Don't put too much stake in polls in a race that's close to the wire. Herd instinct will pull many voters toward the side that seems to be winning. One of the reason Trump likes big rallies and parades is that the visuals there help overcome the negative polls and tend to neutralize the media bias with voters as they stand in the booth punching out those chads!

© 2020 by Tom King

 

Sins of the Brethren - Lies, Guilt, and Manipulation, Oh My!

I called out a fellow conservative yesterday, who posted one of those catalogs of conservative grievances and ended it by saying, "I am betting most of my friends don't have any guts, that's why so few actually read or respond to my Posts..." Poor baby. Nobody reads his posts. Boo hoo.

I pointed out that doing such things is using the same tactics the unearned moral superiority gang does to herd their own sheep and is little more than verbal bullying. If I don't glut my friends' timelines, message boxes and emails with their crap, the I don't love Jesus, I have no guts, or I'm a traitor to all that's good and holy.

When I pointed out the problem with this tactic, I got the following responses:

•  Bully you? How much of a sissy are you?
•  Someone must feel his manhood is threatened if this bullied him. Geezus!
•  I think you need to get a grip and stop acting like a baby.

I've heard this before from toadies in junior high trying to glean a pat on the head from the local bully. The deal is who feels threatened here - me who refused to be guilted into passing along something even though there is some misinformation in it or the folks who passed it on because they were told they had to in order to have "the guts".  Then, like good little toadies, they go after me for telling the truth about the manipulative crap at the end of this post.

I get tons of this stuff from people saying all sorts of inflammatory things who lay a little guilt on all of us if we don't bow to their wishes and pass this stuff on.

"I know who will share..."

"Pass this along if you love Jesus."

"Who is not ashamed of Jesus?"

"Who has the guts to pass this on."

"If you are my true friend....."

"Only true patriots will share this with 20 friends..."

Sound familiar? My manhood is not threatened at all. While the same folks who tolerated bullies and the cool kids and went along with whatever crap they were serving up back in high school are cutting and pasting, holding down their fingers and filling up their friends' emails and timelines with this softcore bullying so some twerp living in his mother's basement can brag about how many hits he got from his latest post, I'm just saying no and once in a great while instead of hitting delete, I warn people that this kind of stuff is what gave us a generation of mind-numbed snowflakes willing to swallow any sort of virtue signaling that social media and a corrupt Marxist education system ladles into their heads. Conservatives are supposed to be better than this.

There is, sadly, a fear-based far right element of conservatism that is every bit about controlling the schlubs as anything Antifa and BLM put out. They fear conservatives who think for themselves and are constantly searching for ways to take our minds off of what we need to do to save our nation. Instead they focus on generating blind rage against "the other guys."

We need to be building bridges instead of blowing them up. We won the presidency last time by speaking to that part of the center that wants to hear the truth. Trump even got to that part of the electorate that just wants to feel they are on the winning side or that someone understands their fear and is going to have their back. Trump did that remarkably well to the dismay of the left.  We can't rest there, however, until by reason we help those feeling-based voters see how their positions are reasonable and intelligent and teach them how to defend themselves against the herd. If we do that we free them from the influence of the herd and give them the courage of their convictions to stand alone. 

Using manipulation, fear of not belonging, and well-meaning lies to get people to do what we want makes us no better than the liars behind the progressive movement. All it does is convert them from one kind of herd beast to another. So let's stop using this tactic. The president is out there busting up the DC China shop. That's what we hired him for. What he needs behind him is a calm, cool-headed rational army with their passions engaged, but fully engaged in the service of reason and purpose.

Just saying.

Tom King