7 ms·

Factiness

41 points by csantini 10y ago

fagnerbrack 10y ago
My theory is that everybody thought Trump winning was so "out of reality" that they just didn't care in doing the count right. 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).
ecnmic 10y ago
I don't understand what this article is saying?
- gadders 10y ago
  I think he is trying to reassure other liberals that they are still better people than all those racist fascists that voted for Trump.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  He wrote it at 2:41 am, Nov 9th. People are just trying to understand what happened and for some this involves exercises in thinking out loud.
  - MichaelMoser123 10y ago
    > 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...
- nmalaguti 10y ago
  What I took away from the article is that just as one may support an argument with 'truthiness' i.e. I feel it in my gut but have no facts or the facts oppose my argument, there may be a thing called 'factiness' where all the facts support your argument, but it misses the truth that others see and feel and that can't be quantified with traditional facts. 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.
- traverseda 10y ago
  It calls out what they see as a liberal trend of "factiness", that is, the feeling of knowledge without being able to actually use that knowledge to predict the future. 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.
sambe 10y ago
Nate Silver made a rather good analysis of his own failings with respect to the primary: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi.... 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.
- rjdagost 10y ago
  The day before the election, Nate Silver took a lot of heat from the left because he rated Trump's chance of success as being much higher than most other prognosticators. The day after the election, he took a lot of heat from the same people because he didn't rate Trump's odds highly enough.
  - inimino 10y ago
    This has been fascinating to watch. 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".
yummyfajitas 10y ago
It's entertaining to read an article which simultaneously recognizes it's sources are deeply wrong about some things, and then immediately parrots information gained from those very same sources: 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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- c17r 10y ago
  I stopped reading after that quote.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The author might point out that you are getting caught up in factiness. 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.
  - onetime321 10y ago
    If you assume that most doctors shop at grocery stores, would you conclude that most people shopping at grocery stores are doctors? Or would that conclusion only seem natural if it somehow fits your agenda?
    - 10y ago
airesQ 10y ago
FiveThirtyEight did not dismiss Trump, in fact it kept saying that Trump had a very real chance of winning. The last prediction was a 29%, and a 29% chance is quite a lot. If you interpret a 29% chance as 'dismissing' then you are misreading the numbers, and besides the numbers, they never said/wrote that Clinton was anywhere close to a sure thing. 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.
- crispyambulance 10y ago
  Yes, you're right. Probabilities of ~1/3 are quite hefty, but that didn't keep talking heads from blabbering as though a Clinton victory was a sure thing. 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.
- empath75 10y ago
  He also caught a lot of crap from the media for giving trump that high of a chance including a fucking embarrassingly stupid and uninformed attack from Ryan Grim at Huffington Post.
  - dictum 10y ago
    It's the downvoting your comment because I disagree with an opinion you don't hold, but recognize as being held by some people of media commentary.
- CoolGuySteve 10y ago
  Ya, I find this article annoying because it wasn't "factiness" that the polls showed Clinton leading. It was a fact. 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.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
What an excellent word. "thruthiness" is an awesome word to describe what's happening out there now, so "factiness" as its corollary should also join the popular lexicon. 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.
rhapsodic 10y ago
"As I type this, Trump’s crowd is chanting for Clinton to be jailed. It’s horrifying." 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?
- hga 10y ago
  The only horrifying thing about it is if it's viewed as a punishment for losing the election, that sort of thing quite reliably kills Republics. But so does the end of the Rule of Law in them....
carsongross 10y ago
Smart people find very elaborate and clever ways to be wrong.
partisan 10y ago
Nowadays you can have reality your way with relatively little work. In fact, you have to work hard to get other perspectives. You can even lie to yourself about your own viewpoint. You could be a left leaning liberal ready to say all of the right things on all of the right topics and then feel uncomfortable when a person of color enters the room. Or joke with your friends in "Ebonics" when everyone in the room looks the same. Ever done a triple take when an interracial couple sits near you at a restaurant? I see it all of the time. 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.
hunvreus 10y ago
The author is assuming media have a sacred mission of objectively informing us. Media ethics haven't been honored in a long time, if ever. If the Second Amendment is the last line of defense against tyranny, a skeptic and inquisitive mind is the first and most important one.
matt4077 10y ago
I much prefer Richard Feynman's term of "cargo-cult science" for what is basically the same idea. 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.
- fixxer 10y ago
  The basic reason the polls failed was upstream from averages generated by 538 et al. 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.
- dhimes 10y ago
  Regarding the "mainstream Media" I fail to see what they did wrong. 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.

41 points by csantini 10y ago

My theory is that everybody thought Trump winning was so "out of reality" that they just didn't care in doing the count right. 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).

ecnmic 10y ago

I don't understand what this article is saying?

gadders 10y ago
I think he is trying to reassure other liberals that they are still better people than all those racist fascists that voted for Trump.
crispyambulance 10y ago
He wrote it at 2:41 am, Nov 9th. People are just trying to understand what happened and for some this involves exercises in thinking out loud.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  > 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...
nmalaguti 10y ago
What I took away from the article is that just as one may support an argument with 'truthiness' i.e. I feel it in my gut but have no facts or the facts oppose my argument, there may be a thing called 'factiness' where all the facts support your argument, but it misses the truth that others see and feel and that can't be quantified with traditional facts. 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.
traverseda 10y ago
It calls out what they see as a liberal trend of "factiness", that is, the feeling of knowledge without being able to actually use that knowledge to predict the future. 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.

sambe 10y ago

Nate Silver made a rather good analysis of his own failings with respect to the primary: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi.... 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.

rjdagost 10y ago
The day before the election, Nate Silver took a lot of heat from the left because he rated Trump's chance of success as being much higher than most other prognosticators. The day after the election, he took a lot of heat from the same people because he didn't rate Trump's odds highly enough.
- inimino 10y ago
  This has been fascinating to watch. 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".

yummyfajitas 10y ago

It's entertaining to read an article which simultaneously recognizes it's sources are deeply wrong about some things, and then immediately parrots information gained from those very same sources: 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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
c17r 10y ago
I stopped reading after that quote.
maxerickson 10y ago
The author might point out that you are getting caught up in factiness. 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.
- onetime321 10y ago
  If you assume that most doctors shop at grocery stores, would you conclude that most people shopping at grocery stores are doctors? Or would that conclusion only seem natural if it somehow fits your agenda?
  - 10y ago

airesQ 10y ago

FiveThirtyEight did not dismiss Trump, in fact it kept saying that Trump had a very real chance of winning. The last prediction was a 29%, and a 29% chance is quite a lot. If you interpret a 29% chance as 'dismissing' then you are misreading the numbers, and besides the numbers, they never said/wrote that Clinton was anywhere close to a sure thing. 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.

crispyambulance 10y ago
Yes, you're right. Probabilities of ~1/3 are quite hefty, but that didn't keep talking heads from blabbering as though a Clinton victory was a sure thing. 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.
empath75 10y ago
He also caught a lot of crap from the media for giving trump that high of a chance including a fucking embarrassingly stupid and uninformed attack from Ryan Grim at Huffington Post.
- dictum 10y ago
  It's the downvoting your comment because I disagree with an opinion you don't hold, but recognize as being held by some people of media commentary.
CoolGuySteve 10y ago
Ya, I find this article annoying because it wasn't "factiness" that the polls showed Clinton leading. It was a fact. 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.

bryanlarsen 10y ago

What an excellent word. "thruthiness" is an awesome word to describe what's happening out there now, so "factiness" as its corollary should also join the popular lexicon. 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.

rhapsodic 10y ago

"As I type this, Trump’s crowd is chanting for Clinton to be jailed. It’s horrifying." 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?

hga 10y ago
The only horrifying thing about it is if it's viewed as a punishment for losing the election, that sort of thing quite reliably kills Republics. But so does the end of the Rule of Law in them....

carsongross 10y ago

Smart people find very elaborate and clever ways to be wrong.

partisan 10y ago

Nowadays you can have reality your way with relatively little work. In fact, you have to work hard to get other perspectives. You can even lie to yourself about your own viewpoint. You could be a left leaning liberal ready to say all of the right things on all of the right topics and then feel uncomfortable when a person of color enters the room. Or joke with your friends in "Ebonics" when everyone in the room looks the same. Ever done a triple take when an interracial couple sits near you at a restaurant? I see it all of the time. 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.

hunvreus 10y ago

The author is assuming media have a sacred mission of objectively informing us. Media ethics haven't been honored in a long time, if ever. If the Second Amendment is the last line of defense against tyranny, a skeptic and inquisitive mind is the first and most important one.

matt4077 10y ago

I much prefer Richard Feynman's term of "cargo-cult science" for what is basically the same idea. 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.

fixxer 10y ago
The basic reason the polls failed was upstream from averages generated by 538 et al. 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.
dhimes 10y ago
Regarding the "mainstream Media" I fail to see what they did wrong. 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.