Factiness
nathanjurgenson.com
nathanjurgenson.com
It shouldn’t have surprised you that the United States is a deeply racist country. And because that fact is more obvious now, you shouldn’t be surprised what will happen when open bigotry is given even more permission, legitimacy, and empowerment.
It's almost completely impossible to comprehend the possibility that many Trump supporters aren't racist, because the very same media that got the election wrong told us it was true.
Shocking fact: I know a number of Trump supporters and only one of them is white. White supremacists, all of them? Including the African woman who's literally never been in a social setting that was majority white?
Shocking fact #2: you probably also know a Trump supporter or two who are simply afraid to tell you.
I don't think anyone has figured out exactly how important white nationalism was to Trump's victory (he carried most of the traditional Republican coalition), but it is clear enough that he got support from white nationalists in a different manner than any recent president, and that he was doing things to court that support.
Or would that conclusion only seem natural if it somehow fits your agenda?
I'm saying that if you assume that most doctors shop at grocery stores that some of the people you see at the grocery store are probably doctors.
The phrasing of my statement about the traditional republican coalition isn't very clear, but I wasn't trying to make a statement about the views of the traditional republican coalition there, I was conceding that much of the support Trump got was from the traditional republican coalition.
But yummyfajitas is a Leftie playing devil's advocate for righties... So never mind.
Just labeling, not judging --me
I'm not saying there aren't racists who support Trump. There undoubtedly are. But that's not why he won.
In 2012, the margin in several of the individual closest states was larger than that (and even larger in 2008).
That could be what changed in the very people in the Rust Belt who voted for Obama in 2008 and then gave the election to Trump in 2016.
I don't consider it to exactly be a good thing (among other minor details, absent e.g. Trump building that Big Beautiful Wall, it will inevitably lead to civil war and ethnic cleansing), but I think it's hard to argue it's not inevitable, unless whites just collectively decide to commit suicide as so many are individually.
Regarding election day coverage, 538 did report that some districts in Florida were doing very well for Clinton, compared with 2012. But they quickly reminded people that this could just mean that the votes were distributed differently.
Some people are going to say we need better models, but perhaps the best thing to do is to quit relying so much on polls and counting. Predicting the future is a dangerous business even if you're "right" most of the time.
It's also a fact that we now know that the polls themselves had some kind of measurement or sample error, and that whatever this error was, it or something like it also happened in the Brexit and Canadian election.
I'll take facts over punditry any day, even if they have errors, because errors can be corrected more easily than opinions.
A more relevant point the article made is that the continuous daily updates of the probability didn't mean much to real people. They may have represented real facts about the world in some sense, but they still weren't that useful to people in terms of keeping them updated. It's not very useful for a polling site to predict <10% chances right up until the very end, where it raises to 29%, and the 29% chance comes through.
Again, please very carefully note my distinction between useful and true. Noise wiggles and twitches months before the main event being continuously interpreted in the press aren't facts; they're just that "factiness" that feels like you're being informed, but you really aren't.
I did it too; it's not like I'm immune. I can't even promise I won't do it again. But it's not useful to the vast bulk of people.
538's numbers were very bouncy between 10% and 50%, and they took some heat for that.
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#...
What is horrifying to me is the prospect of living under a government that is not bound by its own laws. It's fairly obvious that Clinton knowingly broke the law, despite others advising her not to. There are people in prison "as I type this" for similar, but far less serious offenses. Why should Clinton be above the law?
But so does the end of the Rule of Law in them....
I agree substantially more with his own analysis than I do with this blog post. He even mentions that the introspection may have gone too far. Why is it that Trump's victory has been seen as a "another failure of the pollsters"? Fivethiryeight had him at 35% chance. Betting markets were at around 4.1 the day before IIRC. In my view it's just another narrative to sell to people - laughing at other "stupid" people, here, read our newspaper instead.
Conjecture: before the election, liberals wanted reassurance, so he took heat for not being reassuring enough, afterwards they wanted someone to blame for their shock.
Also relevant: people (other than gamblers) have no sense of what 70% means, so they round up to "Hillary".
But I think it's misguided to apply it to this situation. 538 had Trump at a chance of 1/3 on election day. Not because there were any polls that pointed at a possible Trump win, but because their model was excellent enough to detect the uncertainty in the polls (mostly the high number of undecideds and volatility).
Regarding the "mainstream Media" I fail to see what they did wrong. They showed Trump for what he is (after some hesitation). We now know that 30% of Americans are willing to throw millions of people under the bus, either because they're racists, or because they're willing to empower racism and an assortment of other hate just because some caricature of an imagined "coastal liberal" made fun of them. Another 50% can't be bothered to vote at all. Are people expecting the media to take its clues from these voters and triangulate their morals? Luckily, minority rights aren't actually subject to popular approval, even in a democracy.
Those polls tragically expected a repeatable electorate ("everyone who voted in 2012, less the dead and plus some fraction of new voters, will turn out"). Arguably, the shy Tory effect was at play as well.
We shouldn't celebrate poll averaging as some data science genius; it is only as good as the polls being averaged.
From what I've been reading and my own anecdote it's that they didn't follow Trump enough. They didn't hear his true message, and that was one that appealed to many. You don't have to be racist to buy into it.
My anecdote: One fine afternoon, in fact it was the afternoon after Trump won the NH primary, I found myself at home for some reason far too early in the day. I flipped on the TV and came across a news network that I had never seen before. It's called the One America Network. The mission of the One America Network is to bring a conservative viewpoint to the masses through media. Fox, it seems, has become nothing but a bunch of crybaby liberals and for Real Americans (TM) OAN is the new place to be.
OK. Let's see what these dipshits have to say.
On comes Trump. He is at a rally in (IIRC) South Carolina. OAN had him budgeted for an hour of air time, but stayed with him until he finished.
He talked about ObamaCare. It was a horrible system. It was made by Obama but he was in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry (sic - most would say insurance, but- truthiness...). He was going to throw it out and replace it with something better.
Did you catch that last part? Had you heard that before? His appeal to his supporters was that ObamaCare wasn't working because it was written for big business by corrupt politicians and not for everyday Americans. And he was going to have a better plan. For them.
You don't have to be a racist for that to resonate. And for the mainstream media to miss the nuance in these messages (I'm guessing there were more) is to not understand what the election was truly about. And, as everybody on this board knows, when you don't understand the fundamental concepts the Final Exam is a crapshoot.
Instead they just laughed about the possibility of Trump winning the Primaries (people voting for Trump don't watch CNN they watch Fox News), laughed about the possibility of Sanders winning (he got extremely close with 0 name recognition despite all the dismissing, laughed about the possibility of Trump winning.
They did their normal of prioritizing access to politicians in the future, and helping their advertising donors, instead of feeling passionate about showing the truth.
They didn't, as you said, get outside of the bubbles created by the campaigns themselves, or the reality distortion fields AKA narratives they pushed for both candidates, and wear out any shoe leather talking to real people. And perhaps this was true for any side of the campaign?
Of course, we have to factor in that anything contrary to those narratives, i.e. anything they'd have discovered that would be vaguely interesting, would have been spiked at best, see this testimony from one of our own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928615 Given that, would they have even gotten authority or budget to get out there?
So maybe we shouldn't be blaming the reporters, except that they continue to play this lazy, if not intellectually corrupt game.
However, "factiness" as a concept has been recognized for much longer. The most popular expression expressing it would be the quote that Twain attributes to Disraeli: "lies, damned lies and statistics".
Thruthiness probably grew up as an antidote to factiness. Proper math education and recognition that most preliminary scientific studies are bullshit is probably a better antidote, but trusting your gut is an easier antidote, and often effective. It's just that when your gut is wrong, relying on your gut makes it almost impossible to change your mind.
If the Second Amendment is the last line of defense against tyranny, a skeptic and inquisitive mind is the first and most important one.
This country is out of touch with itself and we are out of touch with ourselves. We worry about what others think of our opinions and bury the parts of us that don't align with the right opinions. But they stay there, latent until they are triggered by something that is outside of the script that we prepared for. As one of my friends put it, "I'd rather know who is racist than not know and have people pretend they are not". It starts there. By knowing who we are and who others are. By being honest with ourselves. And then looking outside of the bubble we created for ourselves and understanding the other perspectives that exist and why they exist.
Personally, I listen to a wide range of podcasts from far left to far right. I am uncomfortable with the intolerance I hear on both sides of the spectrum but I would rather know what the perspectives are than not know and be surprised and completely unable to understand when someone like Trump wins.
People are just trying to understand what happened and for some this involves exercises in thinking out loud.
i think that every eight year the pendulum swings between Democrats and Republicans; people get tired of one side and choose the other one. In about two years we will know more...
It is a good reminder that just as one should be wary of arguments supported only by truthiness, one should also be wary of arguments supported only by factiness.
It mentioned other liberal-aligned media that creates this feeling of knowledge, such as ted talks and "NPR-style neuroscience".
Basically, it's calling out the liberal trend to presume that the facts are on their side and then be wrong about it. Presumably due to a failure in their epistemology, how they gather and sort data about the world.
There are a couple of other minor points and rhetorical points, like equating liberals "factiness" to the hated outgroup's "truthiness". But that's the general thrust.
I was keeping tracking in the NYT real-time dashboard and all started 80/20 for Hilary and then it suddenly changed 80/20 to Trump (I guess Pareto is happy with that).