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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Were those people a representative sample? What was the sample size?

You start off speaking for a group and end saying you’re only speaking for a percentage of that group. You just totally invalidated the basis of your argument from earlier

Where was I speaking for a group?

I'll play along and pretend that you're a very unique individual who only considers peoples opinions as relevant when you know the exact statistical figures of how much to weigh them:

11/11 black people thought it was offensive, of a pop size of 37M, at a confidence level of 95% that gives a MOE of 30%, so as few as 70% of black people also think it's offensive at a 95% confidence.

Only if those 11 people were randomly selected. Was that the case?

I’ll go ahead and answer that one for you: no, it was not the case. The odds of selecting 11 black Americans at random and ending up with all 11 living in Harlem are infinitesimally small.

I think you're forgetting what we're talking about here. We're not talking about the distribution of people with valid IDs, we're talking about the distribution of opinions that making a racist assertion is offensive to the people it is targeting. Common sense will tell you that there is very likely an even geographic distribution in the US. But I think you're being deliberately petty and contrarian because you don't like the content of the video.

The fact that voter ID laws are often made to disenfranchise certain groups isn't racist, it’s just a fact. You’re talking about whether the targets think it succeeds in doing so, which is a different question, and a pretty irrelevant one. What matters is the intent, and whether it succeeds in that intent.

Common sense tells me that a political video consisting of eleven interviews with people picked off the street in Harlem is very unlikely to be representative of the nation except by accident. I haven’t watched the video and I don’t plan to. I’ve never seen a video link in an online argument that was worth watching and I see no indication that this one is any different.

>You’re talking about whether the targets think it succeeds in doing so

No, I'm 100% not. You haven't been paying attention to any of my responses. And you just made it clear that you wish to stay ignorant about the point I'm actually making, so I don't see the point in continuing with someone who will not communicate in good faith.

Your replies have all been about what these interviewees think about this stuff. It’s quite explicit. You repeatedly refer to “what people think” and such.

Why do you assume others are going to have trouble getting ID? Do you have trouble getting ID?

Voter ID laws are often accompanied by measures that make it more difficult for certain people to get ID. For example, it’s common to curtail hours or close DMV offices in urban areas.

In any case, that’s not strictly relevant. The intent to suppress voters is there even if it doesn’t work.

Common? When?

Example: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/10/what-effect-will-shut...

If you search for “voter ID DMV closure” or “voter ID vote suppression” you’ll find plenty more examples. Another tactic is to tailor the set of acceptable forms of ID to favor certain groups. A court ruled that North Carolina recently did this to target minorities “with almost surgical precision.”

Thanks. In AZ, when you are issued an ID, it's good until you are 65. We also have provisional ballots.

So I looked up AL: https://www.dmv.org/al-alabama/id-cards.php (and got SEO'd)

4 years. And it's expensive. Bad. Seems like it's a reason for federal innovation at least on the fee and access side. ID's are difficult to copy, I haven't heard an arg to make them expire in such a short window.

That said, I would rather fix that problem than not have voter ID, some courts appear to agree it's a problem as you mentioned and have rightly intervened.

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