• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: May 1st, 2024

help-circle





  • You’re definitely on the right track.

    The only actual job of the police is to file crime reports.

    They do not prevent crime. Protect innocents. Make people show up for court etc. They have no obligation to stop a crime in progress or protect someone being hurt, even if they’re standing right there and could stop it.

    Anything in the justice system that you value is either done by someone else, or actually isn’t done at all.


  • This is a good example of keeping your mind so open your brain falls out.

    No. The article doesn’t explicitly say what party he planned to vote for. That’s right.

    Almost all instances of election violence have been committed by the same party - even the attempted assassinations. I’m sure there could be examples of violence from the other party but I’m genuinely struggling to think of any.

    So if a reasonable person hears someone in an election line was violent they’re not going to think “well there are crazies on both sides, so yaneverknow.”


  • Post hoc ergo propter hoc means “after this therefore because of this”. The name of the fallacy is the claim the arguer is making, that because one event happened soon after another event, it was caused by the earlier event. A common example is that deciduous trees lose their leaves after it gets cold, so they lose their leaves because it gets cold. The actual reason is complex and has little to do with temperature. It’s partly that day lengths get shorter and the leaves no longer can absorb enough energy to match their costs.

    It is similar to correlation doesn’t equal causation, but is more specific that it has to do with two events that happen at similar times, which is specifically called out in the tweet.

    That the argument is heuristic and not logical is that logic has a pretty limited use - where you can reasonably agree on premises to make a specific type of argument that relies on how that argument is constructed. Heuristics rely on probability, what’s the most likely outcome given a set of preceding causes, or what are the most likely causes given a following event. For example most problems in my line of work are from loose connections, so it’s the first thing I look for when something is going wrong. You can’t say “because I see this event it is logically this cause” but you can say “When I’ve seen this event before 80% of the time it was cause A, 15% of the time it was cause B, and 5% of the time it was cause C. So I’ll check them in order of likelihood”

    So the tweet isn’t making a logical claim. They’re saying it’s unlikely that Trump talked to Putin about informants, requested the list of informants, had a list of informants in an unsecured place, but somehow wasn’t related to those informants being compromised.

    EDIT: Also Wikipedia has a better explanation of pheph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc








  • They’ve already been trounced for pulling up a 6 year old article using 8 year old data.

    Then they doggedly refused to do the math for recent years that there’s literally a school shooting every week in the US.

    And that doesn’t even touch mass shootings in general.

    The really sad part is they do eventually make a point that a lot of the problem is mental health and America’s obsession with gun violence. But simply refusing to even admit to the actual frequency of the shootings or that the availability of guns is part of the issue means they’ll continue to be ignored.






  • Someone fucked these up badly and there’s no way to tell from this how.

    Are the numbers swapped between candidates but the sizes correct? Are the sizes swapped between candidates and the numbers correct?

    As an aside, this is why serious data people don’t use pie charts. They’re terrible for lots of reasons, one being it’s very hard to compare areas instead of lengths, like a bar chart, as demonstrated by how many people didn’t notice these were so bad at first.

    If you see data presented in a pie chart you should immediately be suspicious that it’s dishonest or incompetent.

    None of that is to take away that voting for third parties this election is a terrible move - just saying this chart is useless.