this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 228 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn't started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

We don't need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

[–] GluWu@lemm.ee 174 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn't doubt 10-20.

The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago (4 children)

still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

The front runner? Really?

I'm not being sarcastic. Im genuinely interested, but can't be arsed to start going through polls because it'd mean going through the biases of the pollers.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 32 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Really it’s too close to call but he does appear to have a slight edge if you had to pick a favorite.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world -2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

it's not really.that close.whem you compare it to 2016/2020

Trump underpolls significantly,.by 5-8%, and did for both 2016 and 2020.

Bidens hasn't led trump in polling in 500 days

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You're wrong about a lot and you're presenting your opinions as fact. Trump doesn't underpoll by that amount now.

There was a phenomenon in 2016 where people were reluctant to tell pollsters they were voting for him, because they were embarrassed. Now Trump supporters are the loud minority of voters. And Biden is the boring safe choice. Biden voters are less likely to stay on the phone and answer questions.

Also, national polls mean very little. You have to actually look at the swing state polls to find out who's winning. And there's not much data this far from the election.

Finally, we can tell there's something wrong with current polling just because "Mr. Brainworms" RFK Jr polls around 10% right now. No one is going to vote for him, and definitely not 10% of the population. People are just fucking with the pollsters right now. Do you know anyone seriously considering voting for RFK Jr?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You can project whatever narrative you want into the data but what is I'm saying is fundamentally the case.

Trump outperforms his polling. He did so in 2016 by a wide margin, and he did so again in 2020. You can just go look at the week prior polling. This isn't some grandiose fiction it's a statement of fact, that you seem to be ignorant to.

Your interest in a particular narrative doesn't change what is. What matters is that Biden needs around an 8% lead on Trump nationally to be secure, and has been trailing, basically the entire time.

If the election were tomorrow, and we believe the offsets observed in the two previous national elections, and we should because those were real events made from real data, then Biden would lose in a landslide today.

Because I can't stand all of your group think naivete:

I went and pulled the 2020 data. The above is the relative error in polling from polls during the months of October and November 2020, calculated against the real votes cast in 2020. Biden underperforms his polling by about 4% and Trump overperforms his polling by about 8%. You can argue with why this is the case, but you can-not pretend that this isn't the case. You should be adjusting how you see polls with this in mind. When you see Biden trailing Trump in national polling (and he has been for 400 days in a row), you should see that as a CLEAR Trump lead considering that Trump CONSISTENTLY overperforms on election day relative to his polling.

Sources: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/42MVDX

https://electionlab.mit.edu/data

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/data/president_polls_historical.csv

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

You didn't answer the question:

Do you know anyone who is voting for RFK Jr? He is polling at 10% right now, so if it's real then statistically you should know someone.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s almost certainly true the RFK’s support will decline as we get closer to the election. This is a common trend with third party candidates.

However, it’s not totally clear which candidate those voters will choose. My sense is that RFK is not particularly popular but is a stand-in for the rejection of both candidates at the moment. However, most of these voters will switch over as the reality of RFK’s loss becomes more real. Often, last minute voting decisions will be based on the conditions and media narratives happening immediately around the time of the election. So the implications of what you’re saying on who will win are not certain currently.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

Yes, that's right. Basically you can't rely on polls this far from the election.

The question says "if the election were held today, who would you vote for". But the election isn't today, and the person answering the question knows that. So you see more people answer with third party candidates then would actually vote that way.

Not only that, but candidates' GOTV efforts do not happen until the election is approaching soon. That's what actually wins elections, not polls from 6 months before.

[–] Instigate@aussie.zone 1 points 6 months ago

That’s… not how statistics work there, friend. If there’s a 10% chance of something happening per person and I have ten people in a room, that doesn’t guarantee that one of them will have the thing happen. In fact, my sample could have 10/10 happenings or absolutely nothing happen and the statistic value would stay the same, because it’s an average of the entire population.

Trying to apply anecdotal evidence to statistics and then calling the statistic false when it doesn’t align with your anecdote is kinda doing things arse-backwards.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago

I'm not interested in your questions because your views aren't aligned with reality or supported by the data..

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe. Maybe not. Pollsters typically adjust methodology between elections so this type of analysis is questionable.

He hasn’t led in the average but is currently within the margin of error. The available evidence suggests a toss up but we won’t know for sure until after the election, as always.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mean..

No. It's not margin of error right now. It's a clear Trump W. Not once you account for Trump's consistent over performance and Bidens consistent underperformance relative to polling aggregates. Everyone with eyes has been seeing it for better than a year.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Consistent in two elections? That’s not consistent. That’s not even data, let alone a trend.

As I said, pollsters adjust the demographic weighting based on election results. It is possible they will again underestimate Trump’s performance. It’s also possible they will overestimate it. Only time will tell.

But regardless of that issue, it is within the margin of error—that is a statistical reality irrelevant to your speculation about polling errors.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago

None of what I'm saying is speculation, and you are a buffoon.

[–] Euphorazine@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Just remember polls gave Hillary almost a guaranteed win. For all intents and purposes, Trump is the front runner regardless of what any polling says

[–] UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 14 points 6 months ago

And the result were statistically within what they predicted. She did get the popular vote but lost in key states where the margins were small.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

No, they did not. That's not what happened.

Polling probably has taken a dive in accuracy since then, though. Uptake in cell phone use in younger generations has been lingering over the industry for a long time, and it's finally caught up with them.

[–] Euphorazine@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

72% chance from here. Probably high enough that swing state voters opted to stay home. This was the vibe practically all October. The FBI felt confident enough in her win to announce they were investigating her to appear unbiased.

Polling being inaccurate for whatever reason doesn't change the article after article assuring everyone Hillary had it in the bag.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 6 months ago

72% chance means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It's not that ridiculous.

[–] GluWu@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

From the nearly all the polls I see, yes. But like you said, bias of pollers. I've seen a few that go more in depth to try and figure out the "responds to polls" bias, but I still only see biden ahead by a margin. With those small numbers of concentrated effort vs the wide reach general polls, trump is. It does not instill any level of confidence in me that the "general" polls don't reflect the "general" voting bias. Even without all of this analysis, just a few million voting for trump is unbelievably concerning to not just the future of the US, but the world that this single country dominates. These fascists are campaigning on the cut your nose to spite your face philosophy.

[–] charonn0@startrek.website 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

plea for 1/2 that was rejected

The rejected plea was for 6 months.

[–] GluWu@lemm.ee -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] bronzle@lemm.ee 3 points 6 months ago

While that is true.

“1/2 that” would imply 1/2 of 35 years or 17.5 years.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 59 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

He committed the idealist's perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it's okay not to play ball with it.

"Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn't do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they're gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life."

"Preach."

"I'm gonna plead not guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."

"No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake"

Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 16 points 6 months ago

Yeah. Don’t talk to cops. Get a sympathetic/movement lawyer. And this is fucking crucial, do what they say.

A lot of idealistic people understand that you can sell your soul piecemeal and are always in danger of it. But they don’t really understand what not giving up your values is vs not doing what’s smart. You take the plea deal unless you have to rat someone out. And also you don’t commit crimes you aren’t comfortable with the consequences of.

[–] Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 3 points 6 months ago

for breaking and entering*

and DoS

[–] xor@infosec.pub 4 points 6 months ago

also he worked with wikileaks... i think he was named as a source posthumously...

he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates... like the manning chat logs)
dead drop is now called "open drop" and powers every major newspaper's leak submission system...

he was murdered.

not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would've at least left a note... in the form of some post online...