Rand is not a mainstream conservative.
See, i’ve always been ambivalent about arguments like this.
Yes, i guess it would be nice to see some “mainstream” conservatives come out and unequivocally dissociate themselves from the comments in the OP. On the other hand, though, as a left/liberal, i don’t feel any burning need to condemn or apologize every time someone who happens to share my general politics makes a stupid or ignorant statement.
If we try to hold people up to these sorts of standards, then we’d all spend our whole lives apologizing, because almost any political group contains a certain number of drooling idiots who say stupid things and advocate reprehensible actions.
:rolleyes:
You want to pretend that something can be evidence but not be data (explain that one), and you’re saying that my definition is narrow and stupid? Plural anecdotes are data, in the sense that one is datum and multiples are data, but they aren’t data that can support a conclusion or evidence that can prove a point other than “there is no example of X, Y, or Z.” Even then, they are only good for proving that there is indeed at least one example of X, Y or Z, but they are not evidence of anything greater.
Your failure to comprehend is not my failure to explain, I’m afraid.
In the context of demographic claims (which, remember are what the OP is about?), anecdotes are not evidence of the statistical distribution of beliefs among a group. They are not a valid or sound logical proof as to the nature of those beliefs or their popularity amongst a group. This is the point, and it’s the point you are heroically missing. You can carry on and say silly things like I don’t know what evidence is, but you can also nail your hand to the floor, is all I’m saying.
Rather than claiming (yet again) that I don’t know what evidence is while you’re avoiding my actual argument, think about it for a moment. Your definition of evidence allows anecdotes to serve as evidence in precisely the same way that opinions would count as evidence; validly they are evidence that can counter the claim “nobody does X, Y, Z” or “nobody believes X, Y, Z,” but not one iota more.
Showing the opinions of X people is no more evidence for a the validity of a position than showing the behavior of Y members of a large group is evidence of the demographics of that group.
This is kinda the point.
Luckily, you dolt, i never claimed they were.
I was making no observation about the particular case in the OP. I made a general observation that anecdotes do, in fact, constitute evidence. The fact that you continue to misrepresent my position does you no credit, and i’m done hijacking this thread with it, because you’ve demonstrated in the past that an insistence on being right even when you’re wrong overrides all other concerns with you.
Sure, if these were infrequent and uncommon, but there seem to be many examples of this sort of talk from these folks. Or maybe I’m the victim of some confirmation bias.
I think the Republican office holders are more afraid of offending people who identify with the Tea Party movement(because they’re part of their base) than they are of the negative view of voters in the center who might actually find it offensive. That’s 100% opinion though.
That’s only part of the issue. I’d be much more impressed with the posters who come up with this “You’re taking the viewpoint of a few and applying it to all of us.” argument if those posters took the time to condemn said viewpoint.
Mhendo, since you’re clueless about what’s going on, responding with spastic anger isn’t exactly helping you out.
The context in which I used the phrase “the plural of anecdote is not evidence.” was in response to the claim that if someone could gather a few more anecdotes of bad behavior on the TP’s members, that would show that TP membership is somehow mutually exclusive to rationality. To which I responded:
That’s the whole point. That’s why I was trying to explain to you why serving as the basis for a demographic conclusion or a valid and sound logical proof was exactly what was at issue. That you have continually dodged the actual arguments I’ve made to repeat, over and over, that I just don’t ‘get’ what evidence is, is both juvenile and absurd.
And as pointed out several times (and ignored by you several times as you get increasingly more disjointed and angry), anecdotes are “evidence” in the same way that random opinions are “evidence”. An anecdote can be validly be used to falsify the claim “thus and such has never happened.” and opinion can be be validly used to falsify the claim “nobody believes thus and such.” But you’d sound pretty stupid if you were claiming that opinions were “evidence.”
Much like it’s clear that despite your anger, you don’t have a firm grasp on evidence or data, as you’d like to pretend that multiple data points aren’t data, but they are evidence. I’m not even sure how you reached such a conclusion. But it’s telling that you either can not or will not back it up and would rather change the subject to your bubbles of incoherent anger. When shown why you’re wrong, you continually dodged the issues and then claimed that somehow I’m unable to admit when I’m wrong, which is why of course you can’t even address the actual argument here.
That you’ve now ducked out with an ad hominem fallacy isn’t all that surprising.
You’re more than welcome to come back and explain how multiple, non-random data points aren’t data, but they are evidence.
Samples aren’t evidence of the statistical distribution of beliefs, either. The inferences we draw are only as valid as the distributional assumptions we make going in and the honesty of the participants. We want a representative sample, not a random one. They’re different. Even if you try to minimize the chance of oversampling, you are subject to it all the same. At least sampling error can be quantified. Selection bias, typically, cannot be.
People who actually do this for a living rely on anecdotal evidence to sanity check their numbers. Intuition derived oftentimes from anecdotal evidence informs research design and survey questions.
But you’re a pedant and not a professional. Your screeds aren’t going to be published in APSR. You inferential standards are out of proportion to your facility with inferential rigor. Can you tell me how large a population it does take to generate “evidence” of statistical distribution of beliefs? Do you have some suggestions for ameliorating selection bias? How do you feel about the Heckman correction? Perhaps you can tell me something useful about research design.
No, I doubt it, since you capitalize Null Hypothesis. For someone who clearly doesn’t read formal political science literature, you sure do talk tough.
And neither are statistics, you cretin. Beliefs are private information which individuals have incentives to misrepresent. Surveys are subject to sampling error, selection bias, and a host of other issues that make such “proof” fraught, to say the least. “Proof” would entail a mechanism that can require the entire population to answer surveys sincerely. Anything else is just constrained inference. When the assumptions of the statistical model are not reasonable, this form of inference is no better than a collection of anecdotes. It can even be worse, since it cloaks itself in jargon and Null Hypotheses to mislead people who don’t know better.
But I suppose I shouldn’t expect someone who fulminates as much as you do about Null Hypotheses and “valid and sound logical proof” to have ever modeled political data.
John Mace has made it clear for years that his opinion is the one true unbiased way of perceiving any given piece of data. Anything that he disagrees with is partisan disinformation - something to which he isn’t answerable, seeing as how he’s the ultimate nonpartisan.
-Joe
Sigh.
Dan, doesn’t your back get tired from lugging that big, wide brush around? One guy makes a jerk of himself and you promptly paint all Tea Partyers as being the same.
You’re apparently liberal, and you made a total fool of yourself with this post. I guess, by your logic, that makes all liberals fools, right?
Glad you clarified that for us.
Let me make it very clear for you, using this particular case as an example.
The case cited in the OP constitutes evidence that at least one Tea Party rally included calls for violence, and the cheers by the participants indicated that this call for violence was supported by at least a certain portion of the audience.
Furthermore, there have been previous incidents, similar to this one, where Tea Party speakers have made racist remarks and/or calls for violence, and have been cheered by people attending the meetings. Each of those particular incidents also constitutes evidence that at least one Tea Party rally included calls for violence, and the cheers by the participants indicated that this call for violence was supported by at least a certain portion of the audience.
Taken together, these incidents constitute evidence that a certain subsection of the Tea Party movement is willing to countenance violence and racism in support of its ideology.
I have never once claimed that this evidence is sufficient to draw conclusions about all Tea Party members, or about all conservatives. But the fact that this evidence is insufficient to make specific demographic pronouncements does not mean that it is not evidence.
A couple of people have made similar pronouncements about John Mace recently, and i just don’t see it.
John and i have disagreed on a bunch of issues in my tie here, and i think that we’ve even been pretty hostile to one another on a few occasions, but i’ve always found him willing to be persuaded by a reasonable argument, and to make reasonable arguments himself.
Just MHO.
And if that’s what you want to believe, good for you. If you were to check back a bunch of years I belive you’d find me to be the first making that pronouncement. I was correct then, and I’m correct now.
The first flaw in your beliefs is that it doesn’t match his. You’re incorrect, and it’s just your fault that you’re not the perfectly unbiased observer that he is. Everything else will flow from there.
-Joe
You mean, as I’ve already explained to you several times, and you’ve ignored?
And yet again on this point too:
And on this point too, yet again:
You’ll notice the context involved, you’ll notice the semantic value of the plural used, as a single anecdote is enough to indicate the presence of a view within the TP movement, but multiple anecdotes do nothing that the first did not. Because plural anecdotes are no more evidence for anything but falsifying an absolute than a single anecdote is. Or, yet again, as I already posted
You can still explain why data points aren’t data but non-random datapoints are evidence of anything other than the mere fact that such datapoints exist (which, again, was not the context in which we were discussing those datapoints and their use as evidence). Any time now, how can multiple bits of data not be data, but can be evidence?
One person saying something at a political rally and the audience giving enthusiastic applause is good evidence that, amongst that political group, the view espoused by that person when he said that thing is frequently endorsed, and is considered to be part of the standard spectrum of beliefs within that group.
Typically, people say a single anecdote doesn’t give good evidence for a generalization. But it 'tain’t necessarily so. If I discover a new species, and I have only one specimen, and that specimen has six legs, it is a very good bet that every other member of that species has six legs.
The size of the sample isn’t what’s important. It’s how likely the sample is to be representative.
In this case, we know that very typically, things enthusiastically applauded at political rallies are basic constitutive beliefs and attitudes held by the political group in question. A single speech, with enthusiastic applause, really is enough to establish quite a bit about the political group in question.
If there were some evidence that the incident has been misreported or that somehow biasing factors have been ignored in its analysis, that’d be another thing.
This paragraph shows precisely how stupid you are.
First, there’s this part:
Do you truly believe that multiple accounts of a particular phenomenon, taken from different sources on different days in different places, can tell us no more than a single account? Do you truly believe that multiple accounts cannot allow us to draw firmer conclusions than a single account? Is it truly your contention that the prevalence of this view within the Tea Party movement cannot be inferred, to some extent, by the number of incidents such as this? Is there no difference, in your mind, between a truly isolated incident, on the one hand, and a pattern of incidents, on the other?
Again you persist with the idea that falsification is the only function that accounts of specific incidents can perform.
By your standards, no history book ever written relies on evidence, and no history book ever written contains anything except falsifiable observations. What you have dismissed is, in fact, precisely what historians and other observers of the human condition use as evidence all the time. Yes, we have to be tentative with evidence that it not systematically and scientifically collected, but that does not mean it has no value as evidence, or that all it can do is provide a single falsifying example.
If you want to continue masturbating over Karl Popper, feel free. I’m done with you in this thread.
No. The fallacies of biased sample and hasty generalization are errors in logic, not its foundation. You can not go from “this one time in this one group, remark X was enthusiastically received” to “remark X is frequently endorsed among that group.” Especially depending on how tight the grouping really is, fallacious fungibility is never a good idea. It’s a bit like claiming that the theocratic wing of the Republic Party agrees totally with the Libertarian wing, on any subject, because people of one group would applaud a certain idea.
In order to get a valid demographic conclusion, you need sound methodology and good data. It’s just how it works.
That’s the Fallacy of Hasty Generalization. And you know that a sample is representative if it’s large enough and randomized. “The events that were extreme enough to make the news” is neither.
Put it this way, if you’d never seen a swan before, would finding a black swan really be evidence that all swans were black? Or, is there insufficient evidence to form a generalization from anecdotal events?
No, it really isn’t. Look at the consequences of your logic, say, during the Democratic Primary for the recent POTUS election. All of the democrats at the rallies were, obviously, democrats, but depending on which one you went to you’d find thunderous applause for the proposition that “Candidate X is better than all the rest and is going to win the presidency!”
Does that mean that Democrats, as a whole, thought that Hillary was better than Obama *and[/I ]that Obama was better than Hillary, simultaneously?
Brutal. I know this is the Pit, and all, but still…
Seriously, if you’re clueless mhendo, learn wtf you’re talking about. “I don’t get what’s going on, but I’m prepared to be angry about it!” is not exactly a savory position to take.
If they happen X times, they can falsify the claim that “Event Y has not occurred X times.” They are not demographic evidence. This is basic, and I’m wondering both why you cannot understand it and why your lack of understanding is causing you to lash out. Calm down. To say nothing of the fact that you’re only seeing those cases that are shocking enough to make the news, and as such they constitute a pattern on what is reported in the news, not what the rank and file believe. Again, this is basic.
“We have instances in the news of TP members saying racists things on occasions X, Y and Z therefore TP members are racist!” is no more valid than (and just as fallacious for exactly the same reasons) “we have instances of black males engaging in criminal behavior on occasions X, Y and Z, therefore black males are criminals!”
You were already done once. I expect you’ll return a few more times. If so, you can finally explain why you think that multiple data points aren’t data, but they are evidence.
You left “and serial felon” out of his title.
Tris
Sensationalism strikes again, it would appear. You seem to be forgetting the violent liberal-led riot at the Republican convention last year. If your justifying your political views by being able to point out an extremist(s) on the other side, then I’m afraid your political views cannot, at least from what your presenting, be very well tied to any reasoned arguments.