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Biden's approval rating just hit its lowest mark on record
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Sigh Relevant XKCD
You are misinterpretting the XKCD.
Its not as if incumbents with approvals this low haven't competed. They have.
We have the data on it. You don't win the presidency with an approval this low.
They aren't misinterpretting the XKCD.
Even though Biden is not very popular a lot of people will be thinking twice about voting in a man convicted of thirty-four felonies to the white house.
This might make Biden the guy who breaks that record and that's what the comic is about.
My (parent) comment didn't mention Te-felon Don.
So I'm sticking with them not understanding the XKCD or the parent.
But the whole idea is so-and-so can't win if so-and-so.
Until they do.
No, its not. Again, a misunderstanding of what was said.
The point isn't that it hasn't been attempted. It has, repeatedly. The XKCD is all examples of things that haven't happened.
The example provided is something specific that has been attempted, repeatedly, where we know the answer (not the felonious aspect, but the low approval. Don being a felon was never a point of discussion).
Its both a misunderstanding of the XKCD and the statement.
Plenty of incumbents with low approval have run. They don't win their elections. We've got lots of data on this.
Until they do and that's the point of the comic.
Sure, but its still a misinterpretation.
Consider why the comic cites categorical reasons, not continuous ones.
Specifically, I can put a mean and a standard error down on polling, approval, and using a factor like incumbency calculate a probability of re-election based on a given approval or polling metric.
Polling and approval data, is something at least hypothetically 'exists' for all candidates, ever, even if it went unmeasured.
And it does exist for these candidates. Don's felony would fall within the bounds the premise of this comic, but not polling or approval. The relationship between polling, approval, and incumbancy doesn't because we do actually have those information on those things. We can look at all presidents prior to now that we have data for, we can divide them into 're-elected' and not 're-elected', calculate a mean and standard error of their polling, and their approval, anything we can measure, and look at the probability of occurrence for the thing given their polling. We couldn't actually do that with any of the factors in the XKCD because we'd be dividing by zero. We literally couldn't create the statistic to get a probability distribution from because there are no examples of President running has parameter "thing B", which is the actual point of the comic. "thing B" gets more and more ridiculous as the comic goes along.
Why the current example isn't that case is that we do have examples of incumbents with low approval trying to be elected. The "thing B" about the incumbent exists and has been tested, so we can calculate the probability distribution.
A lot of the comic's statistics were height differences and that's where you argument falls apart.
All presidents have a 'height' measurement, so we can make a probability distribution and look at the likelihood of an incumbent winning based on their height.
https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/leadreadtoday/blog/does-height-make-right-u-s-presidents-and-their-height-weight-and-greatness
And because its continuous, we can extend that to Presidents whose heights haven't previously been observed.
And he's up against a convicted felon. And we have the data on it. You don't win the presidency with a felony conviction.
..
I mean the felon part actually would be in bounds of the logic of the comic. We can't observe the probability of a felon getting elected because it hasn't occurred before, and therefore we can't calculate a statistic.
Are the "probabilities" of both, based on historical data, not currently 0%?
Based on historical data, no, they are undefined. It's expressed as the number of historical wins divided by the total number of historical felons running. There have been zero historical felons running, and dividing by zero is undefined.
I'd rather express it as the number of federally-elected felons over the total number of historical presidential elects... which seems to be what the comic is using.
No convicted felon had ever won a presidency before... but no convicted felon has ever lost a presidency before, either. If you want to study that variable, you have to have the data.
The comic might be doing that, but the entire point of the comment is to show that it's illogical. It's literally titled "The problem with statements like..."
Yeah, both are "This has never happened before, [until?...]"
The comic is highlighting the absurdity of taking something that is technically undefined, and thinking that you've got a counter-factual (with is, like, exactly what is happening for most people in this thread).
If no felons have ever previously run for president, you have no data on how felons perform. You have an N of 0 because the event hasn't occurred. Its a null result. NA. Undefined. You have no information. Its untested.
Even further, it highlights the very exact point of the comic, which is that when you rely on currently has an N of zero as a counter factual, you are going beyond the scope of what your data is capable of speaking to.
To assess the impact of a candidate with a felony on their chances of winning a presidential election, we need to know how many felons have run and how many have won. However, if no felon has ever run for president, we have zero data points for both felons running and winning. This means our calculation for the probability of a felon winning would involve dividing by zero, which is mathematically undefined and impossible. Without any previous instances to examine, we simply cannot make a statistically grounded prediction about the impact of a felony on a candidate's electoral prospects; we lack any empirical evidence to base such an assessment on.
Refer to the title panel of the comic, which says the problematic statement is...
What you said was,
Or to summarize...
So is it sounding familiar?
Except that we actually have approval ratings and polls for about 90 years of elections. From which we can build the appropriate counter-factuals to actually create a statistic because an approval rating is a continuous variable, not a discrete variable. An approval rating of 51% is directly comparable to an approval rating of 31%, and all Presidents 'have' this condition, even if it went unmeasured. I also have a sufficient range of variation to build the negative case example because I have presidents and candidates across the range of variation observed in the condition, and variation in the outcome: winning an election.
Being a felon is also a condition, but 100% of the data we have is "not a felon". And we have no variation in the observed outcome. Some non-felons won, some non-felons lost. We're not testing if they are a felon or not, we're testing if they win the election or not.
Look I get that this is beyond you, but you really aren't making the point you think you are here. Also, you are on the wrong side of the fallacy the comic is presenting. I'm not trying to interpret being a felon has on becoming president, you are. I'm interested in what the polling data has to say about the probability of winning, which is a statistically and scientifically grounded thing to do.
You mostly seem like you have an axe to grind because Biden is losing the election for you. I'm sorry for that.
Its a divide by 0. We can absolutely put down a probability of Bidens likelihood to win based on current polling or approval, because we have an N to divide by.
We don't have an N to divide by in the felony issue (or any of the issues cited in the comic), and so can't calculate a probability.
"X has never happened (until it happened)" is literally the point of the comic.
It's not a divide by zero problem because we're looking at all the presidents for a given criteria. N is the number of presidents elected.
Every one of those blurbs, and the two additional ones suggested here, are a situation where N equals the number of prior presidential elections. And all of them are 0%, because the listed criteria were always 0/N.
Thats just not how probabilities work.
It seems like you're purposely ignoring the point of the comic (highlighting the fallacy pertaining to things that never happened before) so that you can continue to believe that the probability of something that never happened before is greater than the probability of something that never happened before.
Oh my good clam-baking mullet wearing jesus my dude.
Why is it always projection with you people?
The thing that has never happened: a felon is a candidate. We have no information on this or how it will impact the results of a presidential campaign.
You want to interpret this as a result, but you shouldn't. We have no data here.