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You're going to be downvoted either way, because a post that just complains about theoretical downvotes gets downvoted on this site. So you might as well take t

You're going to be downvoted either way, because a post that just complains about theoretical downvotes gets downvoted on this site. So you might as well take the opportunity to explain. It's also worth mentioning that the question GP is asking isn't really "how can people support the administration", as there's many, many answers to it. The real question is "how can people support this?". And frankly, enlighten me. Do you support this? Edit: I should also remind you that Trump is not supported by a "silent majority". Quite the opposite: Trump is supported and was elected by a vocal minority. His approval rating today is the lowest it's ever been according to 538's aggregations. It's time americans get their head out of the sand on this topic.

ryanx435 9y ago
You trust 538? Lol their polling is terrible: they over sample Democrats in their own polls, and over weight polls from other sources that also overweight Dems. Lol. They though Hillary was gonna win in a landslide.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  1. Why are you not answering my question? 2. Why are you saying something patently false about 538? They gave Trump the highest chances to win across most polls pre-election. They wrote several articles about how Trump could still win despite the polls. 3. Why are you equating election predictive polling with aggregation of approval ratings? 4. What's with your hostile tone? You're a very unpleasant man, aren't you, calling people "you dummies", being overtly aggressive and playing the victim? Maybe it's time for you to face that you're being downvoted not because you "have different opinions and mental models of how the world work", but simply because you're a nasty person. After all, you haven't actually expressed any opinion yet, and you're still being downvoted, so it can't be because of your opinions. Here's something for you to think about: I have different opinions and mental models of how the world works. I often enough say controversial shit, and yet I manage to do so mostly without getting flagged. Clearly, your approach is wrong.
  - dang 9y ago
    As you well know, you can't cross into this kind of personal attack here. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this and stop doing it, regardless of how wrong or unpleasant the other person is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  538 doesn't do polling. They aggregate and analyze others' polls. 538 gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning, where virtually all other outlets (Princeton, NYT, HuffPo, etc.) were giving him a 1-5%. They appear to have had the best handle on Trump's chances.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    That illustrates how useless such predictions are. What "Trump has 30% chance of winning" means? If Trump won, did this prediction work or not? If he lost, did it work or not? How one could distinguish successful prediction from a failed one, even post-factum? I don't see any way. Now, if we had 100 identical Trumps running in 100 USA elections, and 30 of them would win and 70 of them would lose, we'd say good work 538, you were spot on. But since we have one Trump winning one election - I do not see any way of seeing how 538 was "better" than NYT since I can't see how you can say whether both were successful or not. NYT gave Trump 1% to win, he won - so that 1% worked. Big deal, people win lottery all the time, with much lower chances. So maybe NYT was completely right and 538 is full of it, maybe it's really an one in a 100 event? How would you know?
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      We know 538's model was better because of what happened on election day. Their model gave Trump a dramatically higher chance than other poll aggregators for a variety of reasons (detailed at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-model-is-more-bullish-than-others-on-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-...) and #4 there (correlated polling errors between states) wound up being very significant. Now, you're right that we can't perfectly determine if 99% or 70% (or something else entirely) was Hillary's actual chance of winning. We can, however, look at the assumptions made by each model and evaluate those on their merits.
    - dllthomas 9y ago
      Over many predictions we can apply a proper scoring rule to judge calibration. It's certainly the case that we don't learn much from looking at a single prediction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru...
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > They though Hillary was gonna win in a landslide. Actually, 538 was pointing out why other poll-based predictors were overrating her likelihood of winning (because, unlike 538 and contrary to historical evidence, thet were largely assuming deviation from polling averages in the election would be independent between different states rather than correlated.)

ryanx435 9y ago

You trust 538? Lol their polling is terrible: they over sample Democrats in their own polls, and over weight polls from other sources that also overweight Dems. Lol. They though Hillary was gonna win in a landslide.

scrollaway 9y ago
1. Why are you not answering my question? 2. Why are you saying something patently false about 538? They gave Trump the highest chances to win across most polls pre-election. They wrote several articles about how Trump could still win despite the polls. 3. Why are you equating election predictive polling with aggregation of approval ratings? 4. What's with your hostile tone? You're a very unpleasant man, aren't you, calling people "you dummies", being overtly aggressive and playing the victim? Maybe it's time for you to face that you're being downvoted not because you "have different opinions and mental models of how the world work", but simply because you're a nasty person. After all, you haven't actually expressed any opinion yet, and you're still being downvoted, so it can't be because of your opinions. Here's something for you to think about: I have different opinions and mental models of how the world works. I often enough say controversial shit, and yet I manage to do so mostly without getting flagged. Clearly, your approach is wrong.
- dang 9y ago
  As you well know, you can't cross into this kind of personal attack here. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this and stop doing it, regardless of how wrong or unpleasant the other person is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ceejayoz 9y ago
538 doesn't do polling. They aggregate and analyze others' polls. 538 gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning, where virtually all other outlets (Princeton, NYT, HuffPo, etc.) were giving him a 1-5%. They appear to have had the best handle on Trump's chances.
- smsm42 9y ago
  That illustrates how useless such predictions are. What "Trump has 30% chance of winning" means? If Trump won, did this prediction work or not? If he lost, did it work or not? How one could distinguish successful prediction from a failed one, even post-factum? I don't see any way. Now, if we had 100 identical Trumps running in 100 USA elections, and 30 of them would win and 70 of them would lose, we'd say good work 538, you were spot on. But since we have one Trump winning one election - I do not see any way of seeing how 538 was "better" than NYT since I can't see how you can say whether both were successful or not. NYT gave Trump 1% to win, he won - so that 1% worked. Big deal, people win lottery all the time, with much lower chances. So maybe NYT was completely right and 538 is full of it, maybe it's really an one in a 100 event? How would you know?
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    We know 538's model was better because of what happened on election day. Their model gave Trump a dramatically higher chance than other poll aggregators for a variety of reasons (detailed at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-model-is-more-bullish-than-others-on-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-...) and #4 there (correlated polling errors between states) wound up being very significant. Now, you're right that we can't perfectly determine if 99% or 70% (or something else entirely) was Hillary's actual chance of winning. We can, however, look at the assumptions made by each model and evaluate those on their merits.
  - dllthomas 9y ago
    Over many predictions we can apply a proper scoring rule to judge calibration. It's certainly the case that we don't learn much from looking at a single prediction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru...
dragonwriter 9y ago
> They though Hillary was gonna win in a landslide. Actually, 538 was pointing out why other poll-based predictors were overrating her likelihood of winning (because, unlike 538 and contrary to historical evidence, thet were largely assuming deviation from polling averages in the election would be independent between different states rather than correlated.)