The evidence being touted in the media and the legal system that Biden won the election is … mostly nonsense.
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Digression
It’s going to be hard for me to say anything that could be interpreted as being in Trump’s favor without getting jumped.
Let me be perfectly clear. I didn’t vote for Trump. I also couldn’t bring myself to vote for Biden (I happen to think the evidence that he’s a crooked stooge is pretty strong).
I also recognize that both parties engage in a lot of low level cheating in elections. I think it’s fair to assume that Republicans took their shots, and came up short.
So I’m happy with the result. But this also means Democrats should be worried if people like me are suspicious.
I also think Trump has zero chance of overturning the election, so Democrats could and should be a lot less defensive about this. You won; get over it.
Anyway, here goes.
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Statistics is hard.
And the nature of hard topics is that people invent explanations that seem believable … and then shut themselves down to other evidence.
Here’s the thought experiment. If it helps, find a friend. You’re going to need a container and items you can draw in three colors. The textbook metaphor is usually marbles in a sack, but who the heck has marbles or sacks these days?
Have your friend hide these actions:
- Put zero or more red marbles in the sack,
- Put zero or more blue marbles in the sack, and
- Put a large quantity of white marbles in the sack.
Now select a marble from the sack. It will probably be … white. Choose another. It will probably be white as well. Keep choosing.
And, as far as I’m concerned, you should probably put some marbles back in the sack, and leave others out.
Here’s two questions: are there any blue marbles in the sack, and are there more blue than red marbles in the sack?
In statistics, we call this a black swan. The observation there is that no amount of observations of white swans can ever prove black swans don’t exist. But seeing one black swan does prove they exist.
Now back to the marbles in the sack. This mimics media coverage of the election results: white marbles are bits of information that tell us nothing about cheating in the election, red marbles are bits of information that suggest more votes should go towards Trump, and blue marbles are for stuff that goes towards Biden.
What the media keeps repeating over and over are claims that some aspect of the election was fair, and because there’s a lot of them, the whole election must be fair. That’s a non sequitur. It is the equivalent of drawing white marbles and asserting that they tell you something about blue marbles. They don’t.
Statistics is hard. And for want of a better word, let’s call the typical persons level of understanding statistically-retarded. Frankly, most of what we are seeing is the statistically-retarded people in the media preaching to the statistically-retarded public. And it works.
Instead, what we should be looking at is the number of draws of blue marbles versus the number of draws of red marbles.
Now, back to the real world. The Trump people have been able to produce some honest-to-god red marbles. They’ve also produced a lot of questionable marbles, that the authorities eventually determine are white.
Note that once again the Democrats are making the statistically-retarded argument: no amount of judging questionable marbles as white changes that there are some unquestionable ones that are red.
And frankly, in Georgia, the Republicans came up with 3 incontrovertibly red marbles very quickly, and very easily. These were not enough to change the election result. Fair enough.
Even so, the word for this is … dismaying.
The reason is that someone … anyone … has got to find a blue marble (a mistake or cheat that moves the dial towards Biden).
This makes the limited recount in Wisconsin a huge win for Democrats when taken in historical perspective: it shows that election issues can cut both ways. Smart Democrats should be thrilled with this.
Here’s the problem: America’s presidential elections amount to the combination of 51 separate winner-take-all elections. And only 7 of them were close, and Biden appears to have won six of those. Except that the Democrats are defending those with weak evidence, and a reliance on the statistical-retardation of most people:
- In each of those states the Democrats are pointing to the preponderance of white marbles.
- In each of those states the Republicans are trying to ferret out some red marbles, and have actually produced them in Georgia.
Democrats get the idea that they need to rein in the search for red marbles.
But what Democrats seem clueless about is that they just look like cynical cheaters if they don’t start producing some blue marbles of their own.
People are OK with there being some issues and mistakes in an election. What they aren’t OK with is all the issues and mistakes breaking towards the Democrats.
The Republican dog is definitely barking, whether or not they are antagonizing it. The Democratic dog wasn’t barking at all, until late last week when it let out a single woof.
The Democrats need a lot more of those, and they don’t seem to know it. Or they do know it, and they don’t care, which is worse.
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