Millenials and Communism

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I was perusing Twitter this past weekend when I started to see some concerning headlines float by.

“Survey: 1 in 2 millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than capitalist one”

“Millenials think socialism would make a great safe space”

“Nearly 1 In 5 Millennials Consider Joseph Stalin And Kim Jong Un ‘Heroes’”

While I could see a survey of young people turning up with the socialism result, that last headline really concerned me. At first I thought it was just a case of “don’t just read the headline“, but all the articles seemed to confirm the initial statistic. AOL said “a lot of them see Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong Un as “heroes.”” Fox News hit on my discomfort when they said “The report also found that one in five Americans in their 20s consider former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin a hero, despite his genocide of Ukrainians and Orthodox priests. Over a quarter of millennials polled also thought the same for Vladimir Lenin and Kim Jong Un.”

Seriously?

While I know polls frequently grab headlines by playing on people’s political ignorance, this seemed to go a step beyond that. I had trouble wrapping my head around the idea that anyone in the US could list Stalin, Lenin or Jong-Un as a hero, let alone 20-25%. I had to go see what question prompted such an odd set of results.

The overview of the poll results is here, and sure enough, the question that led to the results is worded a little differently than the article. Here’s the screenshot from the report, blue underlines/boxes are mine:

I think the “hero for their country” part is key. That asks people to assess not just their own feelings, but what they know about the feelings of a whole other country.

Interestingly, I decided to look up Kim Jong-un’s in-country approval rating, and some defectors put it as high as 50%.  According to one poll, 38% of Russians consider Josef Stalin to be the “most outstanding person” in world history. You could certainly debate if those polls had problems in wording, sample or other methodology, but the idea that a 25 year old in the US might see a headline like that and conclude that Russians really did like Stalin doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. Indeed, further down the report we find out that only 6% of millenials in the US state that they personally have a favorable view of Stalin. That’s lizard people territory folks.

In this case, it appears the polling company was actually pretty responsible about how they reported things, so it’s disappointing that further reports dropped the “in their country” piece. In my ongoing quest to name different biases and weird ways of skewing data, I’m now wondering what to name this one. What do you call it when someone asks a poll question in a way that encompasses a variety of scenarios, then the later reports shorten the question to make it sound like a different question was answered? I’m gonna work on this.

Daylight Saving (is not the worst of evils)

/ bs king / 10 Comments

Well hi there! At this point on Sunday, I’m going to assume you’ve remembered that your clock should have been set back last night. With the advent of cell phones and auto-updates, I suspect the incidence of “showing up to church an hour early because no one remembered daylight saving time” has dropped precipitously since I was a kid.

Growing up, daylight saving time was always the subject of some debate in my house. My dad is a daylight saving time defender, and takes a lot of joy in pointing out to people that no matter how irritated you are by the time change, not changing the time would be even more annoying.

To support his point, I found this site that someone posted on Facebook rather interesting. It’s by a cartographer, and it lets you see the impact of Daylight Saving on the different regions of the country. It also lets you monkey around with different schemes….eliminate daylight saving vs impose it permanently vs keep the status quo…and see what impact they’d have on the sunrise/sunset times. (Note: he created it in 2015, so some numbers may not reflect the 2017 time changes)

My Dad’s point was always that daylight saving blunts the extremes, so I tried out a few different schemes to see how often they made the sunrise very early vs very late. For example, here’s how many days the sun would rise before 5am in different regions if we keep things status quo vs eliminate daylight saving vs always use it:

If you go to the actual website and hover, you can get the exact number of days those colors represent. If we did away with daylight saving, my region of the country would have over 120 days of pre-5am sunrises. I’m an early riser, but that seems a little much even for me.

Here’s how it would effect post-8pm sunsets:

So basically my Dad was right. If you want lots of early sunrises, push to abolish daylight saving. I think most people sort of know that’s what the time change thing is all about, but it is interesting to see exactly how many early sunrises we’re talking about. When you consider that the sky starts to lighten half an hour before sunrise, you realize that getting rid of daylight saving is signing yourself up for a LOT of early morning sunshine.

I think the real PR problem here is that the time changes happen so far away from the extremes that people forget that it’s really designed to help mitigate situations that would occur several months later. I think there’s a new bias name in here somewhere.

Probability, Don’t You Mess With Me

/ bs king / 2 Comments

In honor of Halloween, please enjoy the only stats based/horror 80s music video I know of:

 

From 3-2-1 Contact, one of the more formative shows of my childhood.

The Weight of Evidence

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about the law and evidence this week, for 3 reasons:

First, this article my lawyer father sent me about the Supreme Court’s aversion to math. It reviews a case about gerrymandering  I’ve mentioned before, and the attempts of statisticians/computer guys to convince the court that their mathematical  models are worth using. While the case hasn’t been decided yet, some researchers were fairly annoyed at how reflexively some of the justices dismissed the models presented, and their invocation of the “gobbledygook” doctrine.

Second was this article I stumbled on that discussed an effort to fact-check supreme court decisions, and found a rather alarming number of them contain factual errors. This one was concerning for two reasons: some of the errors actually appeared to be related to the ultimate decision and some of the errors appear to have come from the Justices doing their own research.

Finally, this article about yet another evidence scandal in my state. Apparently our state lab has been systematically withholding evidence of failed breathalyzer calibrations, calling in to question hundreds of DUI convictions. This is not an aberration…for those of you not from around here, Massachusetts has been on a bad run with our state crime/forensics lab. This is our 3rd major scandal in the past few years, and we now have the dubious distinction of being cited in every report about the problems with forensics.

This got me thinking about a few things:

  1. The line between gobbledygook and “good idea, needs work” is often familiarity. In reading some of the Supreme Courts skepticism of mathematical models and contrasting it with the general acceptance of forensics despite serious concerns, it’s hard not to think that this has something to do with familiarity. Forensics is a science that was quite literally built to support the criminal justice system, whereas computer modeling was built to support….well, all sorts of things. I suspect that’s why one gets more scrutiny than the other.
  2. Mathematical models have to simplify and/or those who build them have prioritize explaining them to people who are not on their side The new wave of mathematical models is intriguing, exciting, and a little bit frightening all at once. Complexity is necessary at times, but ultimately can be used to hide assumptions and get your way. The justices on the Supreme Court know this, and their first suspicion is going to be that all that math is just there to hide something. Anyone hoping to build a model that effects policy should probably keep in mind that for everyone they impress, they will make someone else suspicious. As with any argument, trying it out on someone not inclined to agree with you will teach you a lot about where the holes might be.
  3. Lawyers need to learn more about statistics This one has been the subject of many long talks with my Dad. Unless they were required to take it for their undergrad degree, many lawyers can get through their whole higher ed career without touching a stats class. This seems like a gap to me, especially now that so much of the evidence they’re seeing requires some knowledge of probability and evidence. I’ve mentioned before that doctors struggle with the concept of false positives and false negatives and base rates,  and it seems clear many people in law enforcement do as well.  With all the new types of evidence out there, it seems like this is a gap.
  4. The Supreme Court needs a fact checker Seriously. Are you really telling me there’s not one clerk out there who would be willing to just read through the decisions and find citations for each stat? Or better yet, someone who’d read through each briefing filed with the court and error check them before they got to the Justices? In the case the article cited, the stat in question wasn’t a common controversial one (the % of workplaces that drug tested employees), but the answer provided (88%) apparently had no source at all. I feel like of all groups, the Supreme Court should have figured out how to get this stuff screened out before it biases them.

I am thinking there’s a presentation in here somewhere. If you have any more good articles, send them my way!

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night….

/ bs king

Yes, another short post. There’s a longer one coming Wednesday I promise.

A friend (Ben, of the Pop Science series) put up a challenge on Twitter this week, where he promised that if you replied to his Tweet he would introduce you like you were a character in a novel. I thought you all would appreciate the one he came up with for me;

Now there’s an intro I can get behind. The only thing I’m trying to figure out what genre of book it is. I got kind of a Western vibe, but since I can’t think of a Western plot that involves numbers, I’m thinking space western?  Open to other thoughts on this.

Related: when I’ve had the “who would die first in a horror movie” discussion with friends, it’s pretty much been determined that I’m the pessimist who’s been warning everyone of the danger all along. My death is almost certainly ironic/inevitable. Kind of a cross between a Cassandra and a Harbinger of Impending Doom. Sounds about right.

Population Maps

/ bs king

Not a new comic (source here), but the problem with population maps doesn’t seem to be ebbing:

 Maps don’t often get included on “deceptive graphs” lists, but it’s good to remember that they can be tinkered with just as easily as any other data presentation method.

How You Ask the Question: NFL Edition

/ bs king / 2 Comments

Well folks, it’s another Sunday in October and another day for me to rue how cursed my fantasy football team is this year. Both my QBs are hurt, I’ve had two players with season ending injuries, and I am getting to that level of irritated where I barely want to watch anymore.

On the plus side, I’ve just discovered that the NFL/National Anthem protests are providing me with a few new interesting statistical anecdotes.

First up, we have this interesting brand survey that shows the NFL is now one of the most divisive brands in the US. Here “divisive” really means “politically discordant”…..basically the two parties have very different current favorability ratings for them. To give you a flavor, they were more divisive than the Huffington Post, but less divisive than Fox News.

This ranking system is kind of interesting, but the article points out how unstable it is for certain brands. Getting in the headlines may give you a temporary hit, but they are starting to gather evidence that the long term impact of those hits is less than it used to be. For example, after bad press this past spring, United Airlines is now not viewed any differently by consumers than it was before the incident. It would be interesting to add some sort of weighting factor to “divisive” brands to account for temporary divisiveness vs long term.

Next up was this article, that reviewed public perception of the NFL protests based on how the polling question was asked. As is often seen with contentious issues, there is a 10 point swing when we change the wording. In this case, including the reason for the protest in the question garners more support for the cause vs a question that just mentions the protest. To note: the discrepancy came from those who support the protests, the % who opposed stayed steady regardless. This backs up my general theory that most people are only half paying attention most of the time anyway.

They also have some interesting poll numbers that show that most people support broad issues (like being against police brutality) more than they support specific actions (like kneeling during the anthem to protest police brutality), which is another way certain polls can skew the results.

It’s still amazing to me how small differences in wording can change the results of polling, and how under-reported this effect often is, and it is still stunning to me that all of my obsession with stats and details never seems to translate in to a good fantasy football team. Sigh.

No Confidence

/ bs king

I continue to be swamped with work, my capstone project, and a bad fantasy football team. En lieu of a real post, please accept this cartoon-I-can’t-find-a-source-for about social stigma among bar charts:

Kinda catty, aren’t they?

Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I’m swamped with thesis writing this weekend, but I saw this on Twitter this week and thought it was worth a repost:

It’s from a series from WNYC, and it was actually originally posted over 4 years ago. They have a whole series of these, which I have not looked through, but it would be interesting to click on them every time something bad happens and see how the advice holds up.

Lego Superheroes and Combinatorics

/ bs king / 6 Comments

My son (age 5) has developed the most fascinating (for both of us) new hobby of creating his own Lego superheroes by rearranging the ones that he has. He’s spent hours on this recently, meticulously dismantling them and looking for exactly the right piece to create the character he wants. Behold, a few recent versions:

He refused to tell me their names and got shy when I asked, but from what I can put together it’s (from right to left): Joker in disguise, Queen Tut/Barbara Gordon, Robin ripping his pants off, Happy Bug Man, Caveman Scarecrow and Spidergirl.

Never one to let a good analogy go, I attempted to explain to him that he’s figuring out how many combinations there are for any group of Legos. For example, if we wanted to know how many unique creations we could make out of the pieces in the picture above, we could make over 70,000 unique characters. He informed me “yes, but they wouldn’t be cool guys.” The kid’s got an aesthetic.

So I tried it a different way, and used it to explain to him the difference between a permutation and a combination. If I told him he could only take 2 out of these 6 creations in the car, he has 15 different groups of two he could select. That’s a combination.

If, however, he has a friend over and I tell them they can take two creations in the car and they each get one, they now have 30 possibilities….the original 15 possibilities x 2 ways of splitting them. That’s a permutation….the order matters in addition to the picks, so the number is always higher.

Of course, they will actually just want the same one, and then we will move on to a lesson in sharing. Also, he’s 5, and he kinda just wandered off part way through permutations and then asked if he could be a baby turtle. That’s when I figured I’d move this lesson to the blog, where I was slightly less likely to get turtle related commentary as a response.

Anyway, the history of using Lego’s to illustrate mathematical concepts is actually pretty robust, and can get really interesting. For more on permutations and combinations, try here.  For why stepping on a Lego hurts so much, try this: