4 minutes ago, Eiuol said:
The beginning would actually be engaging the facts, or stated another way, the data and facts upon which the intuition rests.
Yes, that’s an important clarification. Thanks.
Browsing through some Slashdot comments, I found another statistical analysis, based on Benford’s Law, here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1324352213595181059.html
And another one for certain specific counties: https://joannenova.com.au/2020/11/biden-votes-pattern-fails-an-easy-first-test-for-tax-fraud/
Here’s a link to the original comment: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17587176&cid=60702418
There’s also a mentioned Reddit post that basically says that, when you look at the nation as a whole, the votes do seem to follow Benford’s law. However, I would think that if there’s fraud in only a few key states, it would be harder to spot when you add in all the other states.
Edit: I found another example via a comment on Hacker News (which usually leans left). https://github.com/cjph8914/2020_benfords
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I think that almost all scientific discoveries started out as hunches which were then confirmed by a process of reason.
I believe that that is distinctly not the actual case, although it is the way that certain philosophers of science purport that science works. Actually, they do not start with hunches, they start with prior observational knowledge and causal theories that explain the knowledge, plus some observations that cannot be integrated with the theories. “Hunch” is a slovenly expression referring to a process of reasoning that corresponds with Rand’s “check your premises”: you re-inspect the logic behind the original construction of the theory and discover viable alternatives. Some practitioners may do this at a more subconscious level: the confirmation part requires conscious and explicit argumentation. So the question is, a propos the putative “anomaly”, what are the actual observations, and causal principles, which allow one to say that there is an anomaly? In this case, you are dealing not with observations, but with very high level inferences which we hope are based on the axiomatic.
Before embracing Bedford’s Law, you ought to be skeptical about the law, to see if it really tells you anything about voting patterns, and why it does. Let’s take the Wiki statement of the law that “in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small”. The first question is whether voting results are “naturally occurring”, or are they man-made. The second is, is there a “collection” or is there a single number? Third, what is the deal with “many” versus “most” or “all”? Finally, how do you validate this law? This study argues that it is empirically invalid.
Here is an example of my reasoned skepticism about the law: inspection of my monthly paycheck over 35 years. The law says that most of those paychecks should start with a 1, but actually 1 is the least frequent leading digit in that set. Does that prove that I was defrauded? How should one interpret the pictures provided by JoNova? The law doesn’t say that all collections of numbers have to have this distribution, so is there any significance to the three graphs chosen to make the case? Since there are nearly 200,000 voting precincts in the US, what is the probability that one could find three cities with this distribution. That is, is this a random sample, or a cherry-picked sample?
A basic descriptive-statistic fact missing from the discussion is information on precinct-size distribution. US Congressional districts have approximately 700,000 voters – there is a (legal) law that explains that. How big are voting precincts in Illinois, or Pennsylvania? There are 2,069 precincts in Chicago and 1,570,127 registered voters, so about 760 voters per precinct. How many votes should Trump and Biden have gotten, under the predictions of Bedford’s law? Using county-wide vote totally (invalid given the in-city vs. out of city political differences, but that’s what’s available to me), Trump’s “share” is about 33% and Biden’s is 66%. About 260+ votes for Trump per precinct, and 500 for Biden. There is a natural explanation for the graphs.
2 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
Actually, [scientists] do not start with hunches, they start with prior observational knowledge and causal theories that explain the knowledge, plus some observations that cannot be integrated with the theories.
Eiuol beat you to this observation and I already accepted that correction. Still, though, a factual observation preceding and giving rise to the “hunch” is only a step (albeit an essential one) inserted before all the steps that I described, so it doesn’t really render anything I said invalid. You see something, then you have a hunch about it, then you gather more information and submit everything to the bar of reason.
What other alternative would you propose? It seems like you’re trying to say that a hunch is only an emotion, and that therefore it’s arbitrary by definition, and that therefore it is wrong to even investigate whether the hunch might be correct or not, and the result of such an investigation must also be wrong, and so, if scientists ever followed hunches we’d have to throw out all their results, so scientists can’t be said to have ever followed hunches. I don’t know if that’s your actual argument, but it is a wrong argument, and it might be educational to consider why it is wrong even if it is not actually yours.
I’d rebut it by saying that a process of reason has inputs and it has outputs, and it also has a reason why you are carrying it out, but the reason why you are reasoning about something does not have to be one of the inputs to the process itself (and may even be invalid if used as one of the inputs). This is in much the same way that, you might cook up a recipe because you are hungry, but your hunger is not one of the ingredients in the food. So if you have a hunch about something, it’s perfectly valid to use reason in an attempt to figure out whether the hunch is correct or not, even though the hunch in and of itself doesn’t qualify as evidence. It is also valid to reason about things just because you are curious and for no other reason (even though curiosity isn’t evidence of anything either, and shouldn’t be treated as such).
This is not emotionalism, either, because emotionalism consists of elevating emotion above reason, and you can’t do that until after you have the result of the reasoning (which you would then elevate the emotion above). It is a contradiction to claim that you can engage in reason before you engage in reason, for the purpose of deciding whether to engage in reason. I guess you’d have to engage in reason before you did even that, and so on back.
(As a slight correction to the paragraph above, I must add: It is also emotionalism to use an emotion as a justification for refusing to engage in reasoning in the first place.)
In OPAR, Peikoff doesn’t say that emotions are arbitrary. He says that they are things whose relationship to reality is unknown. Any particular emotion could be arbitrary, but it could also be true or false. He also says that if you have a conflict between reason and emotion, that you should submit both to the bar of reason. But I would add to Peikoff here and say that, if you have an emotion versus nothing, because you haven’t reasoned about the issue yet, then you can submit the emotion to the bar of reason alone. You might find out your emotion has a very good reason for existing – or that it doesn’t. And when you do get the result of your reasoning, if you reason correctly, you should have an argument that doesn’t depend on the emotion at all, but on evidence and logic. So, through reason, an emotion can be validated or invalidated.
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As for Benford’s Law, the Wikipedia article that I linked to does say that there’s some dispute about whether Benford’s Law can be applied to election results or not. It also says that the Law can only be applied to certain sets of numbers. (I would say it applies to “random” sets of numbers such as the masses of planets or what-not.) It doesn’t apply to sequentially assigned numbers, and it doesn’t apply to the same number over and over (such as the amounts of someone’s paychecks).
My interpretation of the page from Github is that the first two counties in FL and GA are “controls” and do not show fraud because Trump and Biden are the same, but the last three do show it because Trump and Biden are completely different. Also, the last three are not being “cherry-picked” because they are key counties in the same battleground states that I’ve mentioned before. It would be an amazing coincidence if these discrepancies popped up in so many random counties that you could “cherry pick” the counties in the same battleground states where fraud has already been alleged.
If these people are lying, it should be pretty easy to prove it.
3 hours ago, necrovore said:
You see something, then you have a hunch about it, then you gather more information and submit everything to the bar of reason.
I don’t think you understood my point completely. Yes, we agree that information comes first, and that intuitions are based on information, but I went further to say that intuitions don’t tell you anything to use for reasoning about what is yet to be discovered. Sure, they have a lot to do with inspiration, figuring out your research interests, or simply mixing ideas. But they certainly don’t tell you about the truth of things. As you said, the fact you are hungry is not an ingredient for cooking. Yeah, hungry is the analogy with intuition, but you seem to miss that cooking is the analogy with reasoning about facts. Intuition is not an ingredient for reasoning about facts. Like hunger, or any emotion really, intuition is an important ingredient of goal oriented action (purpose and self-esteem), and part of what it means to “do” science, but there isn’t anything there to figure out anything to do with propositions.
All that considered, your intuitions on voter fraud doesn’t really count for much. Even if I don’t convince you about intuition, I should be able to convince you about using Bayesian methods that make you quantify your belief. Despite all your intuitions, we can neutralize any concern of bias by saying that on the face of it, you have no information for or against this one idea.
4 hours ago, necrovore said:
do not show fraud because Trump and Biden are the same, but the last three do show it because Trump and Biden are completely different.
I think all the law would say about numbers that don’t match up with it are caused by “something” other than mere noise. You could say fraud. You could also say that people really really really hate Trump so much that they violate the usual expectations. You could simply say that people who voted for Jorgenson follow the usual principles of human action, as did those who voted for Trump, but those who voted for Biden did not follow the usual principles. The law is good for taxes, because the “somethings” that can happen are almost all fraud. For elections, fraud is one thing, but there are tons of other possibilities.
If we go back to other elections, I actually wonder if violation of Benford’s law is consistent with controversial elections, or for elections that the incumbent lost. Not because they are all fraudulent, but because voting out the incumbent is pretty uncommon anyway.
Even then, I don’t see any confidence intervals or standard error on the github graphs…
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As you said, the fact you are hungry is not an ingredient for cooking. Yeah, hungry is the analogy with intuition, but you seem to miss that cooking is the analogy with reasoning about facts. Intuition is not an ingredient for reasoning about facts.
I don’t see why you think I missed this. At the end, I did say, “if you reason correctly, you should have an argument that doesn’t depend on the emotion at all, but on evidence and logic.”
43 minutes ago, Eiuol said:
Even then, I don’t see any confidence intervals or standard error on the github graphs…
Election officials don’t report confidence intervals when they report election results.
23 minutes ago, necrovore said:
Election officials don’t report confidence intervals when they report election results.
I made a silly mistake when interpreting, so nevermind about that sentence.
I wanted to add for clarification before:
I get why there are no error bars for the distribution of first digits (the numbers aren’t approximations, but exact numbers). The problem is that those graphs don’t really violate your expectations, not even the Chicago one. Chicago is strange even Trump. The 9 is so high that I could even suspect that Trump is more likely to have committed fraud than Biden.
5 hours ago, Eiuol said:
The problem is that those graphs don’t really violate your expectations, not even the Chicago one. Chicago is strange even Trump. The 9 is so high that I could even suspect that Trump is more likely to have committed fraud than Biden.
I do think it would be better if they had a “weirdness” score.