Thread:

Dear @RobertWrighter:

I have benefited in past from @BloggingHeads, so it is disturbing that the platform was handed over for 90 minutes to an activist pushing misinformation on #Syria, primarily to attack #WhiteHelmets and to deny #ChemicalAttacks.

@cain_nate My friend Nate Cain and I have worked hundreds of hours with various politicians and legal groups trying to explain the election laws and how they fit together. There are many misperceptions of what happened during this election and what it means.

Simply put, our election laws are an intricate tapestry designed to ensure accuracy and prevent fraud. They work together like parts of a car. But when certain parts fail, the car is just a hunk of scrap iron and plastic. In this case critical parts failed.
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You do not have to prove fraud or intent, you just have to show that the election officials were unable to conduct an election that met the law and relevant certification requirements. In this case, the election does not come close to meeting accuracy requirements.
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These specifications are found deep in laws like FISMA, HAVA, and state adoptions of EAC guidance. 1 ballot error out of 125,000 or 1 position read error out of 500,000. Just look at the discrepancies between incoming ballot counts and total votes, the system fails.
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It is worse in the the swing states in Democrat strongholds but it is bad in many places. You add the apparent losses of ballots through the Mail and error rates in the ‘system’ are staggering. Why do we have these rules? Sure it is to prevent fraud, but......
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Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

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Thread of decodes for the day. Make sure you check out the [SUB] threads too!

1/ The reality is that when Boehner and McConnell joined the Democrats in 2010, to thwart the impact of the tea party, they broke trust with the base.