Fake polls are not election fraud, although they certainly are a dirty trick.
Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .
Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.
The selzer poll was not a fake poll. It was an outlier. She was famously one of the best most reliable pollster in the country. Sometimes polls are just wrong just from pure bad luck and you still publish them if you trust your methodology.
Ann Selzer used a model that had little to no weighting in it and only used phone polls. This worked reasonably well in previous elections where the combination of chance and similar levels of voter enthusiasm.
It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).
From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:
But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.
... And that approach failed with her 2024 poll. She weighted the overall population, but not the likely voter and it's possible that the approach was too strict.
But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.
Yes, that’s her public defense. Did she publish the raw data and methodology showing this? Or are these unprovable statements that cover for her reputation?
I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.
If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.
Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.
And there are biases with internal polling. I'm more likely to answer a poll by (A) whom I'm more likely to vote for than by (B) where I may be concerned that they're trying to collect my data for nefarious uses.
If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.
What it's actually saying is that polling is useful in the aggregate and useless in the individual. One can have a 66% hit rate in the aggregate, well above flipping a coin, and still not be able to predict the future for any individual outcome. Unfortunately, 90% of people are statistically illiterate, so we get takes like "getting a single poll wrong can only be the outcome of a malicious attempt to deceive the public".
Polling aggregators also have a miserable record. You get closer because by aggregating you partly eliminate individual biases, methodological errors, sampling issues, and ulterior motives, but you also have problems with the pool of polls itself and aggregators are ineffective in adjusting for these issues by weighting or eliminating pollsters accordingly.
Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)
I was the one who mentioned Nate Silver as well. That case does not undermine his skill. The 538 model's track record over hundreds of thousands of forecasts was, statistically, extremely good.
Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.
> Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.
The forecaster in question was fully aware of everything you're saying and yet he blew 100k on what he thought was a sure thing that turned out to not be. Maybe if he was as statistically-aware as you claim, he would not have made the bet, since he should have known there was a reasonable statistical probability he was wrong. I don't demand Nate get "100% of predictions correct", I'm mocking him because he's overrated and he made an outrageously confident prediction that blew up in his face when almost anyone who wasn't high on their own supply could see he was wrong, or at least could clearly see there was no basis for such a confident prediction. "There is an 80% chance Trump wins Florida by < 8pts" is very different from "I'll put down 100k that Trump wins Florida by < 8 pts."
Of course the real problem is "statistical probabilities" don't actually factor into it and 538's model is actually not that well calibrated, and anyway we're talking about real-world forecasting, for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information unless the only reason you care about election forecasts is to gamble on prediction markets.
Strictly speaking, you only need to think there's a 51% chance that Trump wins FL by <8% to make that bet +EV, assuming you have the bankroll to tolerate being a degenerate gambler. Silver didn't need to be 100% confident to make that bet. Obviously it backfired, but he literally is a gambler, he played poker for a living before online gambling regulation got him involved in politics, it's not surprising he would take what he had reason to believe, based on his past track record, was a +EV bet. Sometimes you go all-in with a full house and get beaten by a royal flush, but it doesn't mean your play was incorrect, statistically speaking.
> for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information
I mean, this is basically how weather forecasts work too. Would you say that weather forecasts are useless? I don't think they are. I think the existence of weather forecasts results in people being prepared for rain more than they otherwise would be, even if sometimes they neglect to bring an umbrella because the forecast predicted a low chance of rain. In the same way, political forecasting is actionable in terms of how politicians and their parties conduct their campaigns, focusing on areas where spending their time, energy, and campaign funds will get the most reward for their investment. I suspect a political party that makes use of forecasting will outperform one that doesn't if all else could be equalized. As for benefits to the general public, one of the big reasons Silver got into forecasting was to counteract the exact thing you were talking about earlier - he hated pundits crafting a narrative and trying to influence public opinion on elections baselessly, so his goal was to establish a more objective, numbers-based approach that was less susceptible to people just making shit up about elections.
> 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental.
Not a pollster, but Nate Silver publicly challenged someone on Twitter to a $100k bet over how red Florida would go. IIRC Silver was predicting 3-5% margin, Twitterer said minimum 8%. Trump won by 14%. Even Silver, who lived and breathed analyzing polls and their reliability, made a mistake of that magnitude with his own money on the line. Sometimes the votes don't line up with polling, and sometimes the professionals genuinely don't see it coming.
I think that that is more of an illustration that polls are always about a statistical likelihood and never about an absolute. With a 3-5% margin 14% is not as unlikely as you might think. (It's ~ 1:3).
You need a measure of variance to perform that kind of estimate. There's scenarios where 98% of results land within 3-5% of a value, and the 14% is extremely unlikely. And scenarios where the variance is high, and it's much more likely. (you can also be wrong about what you think the variance is)
The other issue is that in an election like the US, the results in different states are not independent, decoupled rolls of the dice. i.e. If the results of the first few states lean a few % one way off the polling (within the margin of error) then it's most likely that most of the other states will doe the same.
As far as I'm aware these poll results have (roughly) a normal distribution, right now the spread between the two extremes in polls with sufficiently high 'N' to be taken into account in most reports differ by 19%.
"standard normal" isn't the same as "normal"; standard normal defines the mean & variance (0 & 1 respectively), but normal distributions can have any mean & variance.
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Leto II had visions of AI-driven Ixian hunter-killers annihilating all human life in the universe. That probably had something to do with it.
After the Scattering and the fulfillment of his eugenics program with the Siona gene, he no longer cares, because it is no longer possible for even AI to eradicate humanity.
The Siona gene didn't actually remove prescience, it hid people from prescience. That's why Leto II is still able to control events as far in the future as Chapterhouse Dune.
This is an important distinction. It's also the case that Leto needed the Ixians for the no-ship technology, which he also regarded as of extreme importance for the same reason. Which also, remember, the Idaho gholas had to be confined to no-ships so they, lacking the Siona gene, wouldn't be visible to prescience.
There's a big difference between suing people for prima facie illegal hiring practices and suing people for holding Grace Hopper celebrations. We probably shouldn't conflate them. Your links, as best as I can tell, are about the former sort of activity - hiring or paying people differently on the basis of protected characteristics.
Where did the constitutional idea of an independent agency come from and what was its justification? I’ve heard a lot about the “unitary executive” but I never see what the counter argument is except for “it would be good to have independent agencies because sometimes democratic input produces bad outcomes and experts do better.” Which yeah, makes sense, nobody argues that democracies make sane decisions - but it’s always an outcome-based argument instead of a legal one.
The debate began with the First Congress, but largely petered out in the early 1800s and didn't really pick up again until the rise of the regulatory state in the early 1900s.
There are newer law review articles but none quite so comprehensive and earnest as Cass R. Sunstein & Lawrence Lessig, "The President and the Administration," 94 Columbia Law Review 1 (1994), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles/7779/
That's the same Lawrence Lessig who fought (and lost) copyright extension. 1994 is long before tribal politics became as pervasive and extreme in academia as it is today (not that it didn't exist back then). The paper pulls its punches and assumes unitary executive proponents are arguing in good faith, rather than rationalizing a foregone conclusion.
Thank you for the link. I will certainly give it a read but I'm sure the HN thread will be long dead by the time I read and absorb it.
My main beef with the tenor of this whole thread in general is people do not seem aware of the historical rises and falls in executive power. For example, perhaps they did not call it a "unitary executive" then, but the executive power surely reached its zenith under FDR, with all sorts of behaviors and actions we would regard now with boggled eyes and before which even Trump's more radical actions tend to pale. [Perhaps most applicable to this thread, FDR openly wielded the power of the 'independent' FCC to silence his opposition, to the point where NBC and CBS felt compelled to announce they "would not air any broadcast that was in any way critical of any policy of the Administration.".] Everything worked out OK.
Ironically, of course, that's also the guy who was probably most responsible for the explosion of the size of the administrative state - he really, in a meaningful sense, refounded American government. And while there was good and obvious reasons for the immense expansion of the administrative state, and I'm open to legal reasons either way, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's really good social reasons to not have "independent" agencies - I suspect more direct democratic input (the President does X) nets out better in terms of social trust and cohesiveness even when it makes often much dumber decisions.
The unitary executive approach is pretty extreme. In one recent opinion before they pulled the trigger, Roberts court admitted that they could have reigned in the excesses that followed Humphrey's Executor, implicitly admitting its fundamental reasoning was well grounded. That was quite an admission because Roberts had been championing the unitary executive since the 80s.
In fact, few legal scholars dispute that the executive power is unitary, though they might disagree on the implications. As Humphrey's explained in detail, the issue is about areas of the government where the executive nominally overseas work that has a congressional or judicial character. For example, administrative judges and Federal prosecutors exercise a kind of judicial power. And the whole Federal Reserve exception SCOTUS quickly formally carved out is because the Fed exercises a kind of congressional budgetary power.
Humphrey's said that when an agency or officer is exercising a non-executive power, Congress can limit the president's control over how it can be exercised, including reasonable limits on the president's ability to fire the officer.
Ignoring unitary executive proponents like Thomas who choose to ignore the ambiguous intentions of the constitutional drafters, or the early history of the first congresses actually limiting some executive power over officers, people like Roberts primarily argue that Humphrey emphasis on the character of the power is just too difficult for the courts to police; they want a brightline distinction defined by whether the office is nominally under the executive branch, even though that approach is in tension with the actual, if equivocal, original meaning of the constitution. But not too brightline, because letting the president control the Fed was a bridge too far. So they created that exception which clearly is rooted in the same logic as Humphrey's, but they (ironically) pretend it's just something they pulled out of thin air as a one-off.
It came from Congress creating those agencies as is their right to do so, and they were created with the idea of not being weaponize for partisan purposes. We really don't want the DOJ to be the personal enforcement of the president's whims against his political enemies.
It seems controversial that Congress could create independent executive agencies. Could they make the entire executive independent except for the military? Why or why not?
And while I agree we don’t want the DoJ treated that way, that’s how it’s been operated since its beginnings! If anything the past few decades have been relatively not so bad. And regardless of what I want that doesn’t answer whether it would be within Congresses power to make it independent of the President.
> It seems controversial that Congress could create independent executive agencies.
To whom? The U.S. Constitution says that Congress has the power
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
That's rather clear.
The legislative branch makes those laws and the executive branch executes them. Beyond that its role is limited ... commander-in-chief of the military, pardon power, making treaties (with approval of the legislature), appointing ambassadors, judges, and other officers (with approval of the legislature).
The legislature creates (or removes) the departments and sets forth their duties. The role of the executive is to see to it that the departments carry out those duties as established by the legislature.
The "unitary executive" is not to be found in the U.S. Constitution ... it's a creation of authoritarians.
The Congress, representing the will of the people as their reps, has the most power of three branches. The president is technically elected by the states via the Electoral College unlike Congressional representatives.
The president is supposed to answer to Congress. The purpose was not to have an exectuive wielding the power of a king or a tyrant, which the US founding fathers were worried about.
Actually, the founding fathers were mostly worried about the President being dependent on Congress. They were very worried about that and didn’t want him to be! That impeachment cases would be tried in Congress was very controversial and ultimately agreed to because they figured they wouldn’t become politicized.
You can read the Convention notes yourself! Don’t let other people tell you what they thought.You might be surprised! For example, many argued that the President should not be impeachable at all!
> Such ad hominems are tiresome and more often than not are projection.
Nowhere did I engage in ad hominem. Do you disagree or agree about my statement about executive power waxing and waning? It certainly appears to be the case that people are generally unfamiliar with the details. If you think almost anything Trump has done is meaningfully "unprecedented", that is almost certainly the case! Of course, having a precedent doesn't mean its good, either.
> You have made a number of claims here that simply aren't true.
Feel free to point out what specific claims you believe to be untrue, rather than simply blanketly claiming them so. The only post I see that you responded to before you don't even seem to have understood my question, which was not about the ability of Congress to create agencies, but about its power to create independent agencies, which is indeed heavily circumscribed even under the non-unitary perspective, under any reasonable definition of "independent". The question is how dependent can they legally be.
Here is a direct link the the Convention notes I was discussing, since possibly you take issue with that?
> Mr. PINKNEY & Mr. Govr. MORRIS moved to strike out this part of the Resolution. Mr. P. observd. he ought not to be impeachable whilst in office
> MORRIS: He can do no criminal act without Coadjutors who may be punished. In case he should be re-elected, that will be [FN9] sufficient proof of his innocence. Besides who is to impeach? Is the impeachment to suspend his functions. If it is not the mischief will go on. If it is the impeachment will be nearly equivalent to a displacement, and will render the Executive dependent on those who are to impeach.
> Mr. PINKNEY did not see the necessity of impeachments. He was sure they ought not to issue from the Legislature who would in that case hold them as a rod over the Executive and by that means effectually destroy his independence. His revisionary power in particular would be rendered altogether insignificant.
> Mr. KING expressed his apprehensions that an extreme caution in favor of liberty might enervate the Government we were forming. He wished the House to recur to the primitive axiom that the three great departments of Govts. should be separate & independent: that the Executive & Judiciary should be so as well as the Legislative: that the Executive should be so equally with the Judiciary. Would this be the case, if the Executive should be impeachable? It had been said that the Judiciary would be impeachable. But it should have been remembered at the same time that the Judiciary hold their places not for a limited time, but during good behaviour. It is necessary therefore that a forum should be established for trying misbehaviour. Was the Executive to hold his place during good behaviour? The Executive was to hold his place for a limited term like the members of the Legislature: Like them particularly the Senate whose members would continue in appointmt the same term of 6 years he would periodically be tried for his behaviour by his electors, who would continue or discontinue him in trust according to the manner in which he had discharged it. Like them therefore, he ought to be subject to no intermediate trial, by impeachment. He ought not to be impeachable unless he held his office during good behaviour, a tenure which would be most agreeable to him; provided an independent and effectual forum could be devised. But under no circumstances ought he to be impeachable by the Legislature. This would be destructive of his independence and of the principles of the Constitution. He relied on the vigor of the Executive as a great security for the public liberties.
> Mr. RANDOLPH. The propriety of impeachments was a favorite principle with him. Guilt wherever found ought to be punished. The Executive will have great opportunitys of abusing his power; particularly in time of war when the military force, and in some respects the public money will be in his hands. Should no regular punishment be provided, it will be irregularly inflicted by tumults & insurrections. He is aware of the necessity of proceeding with a cautious hand, and of excluding as much as possible the influence of the Legislature from the business.
The Supreme Court already gave you an answer by pussyfooting around the FED's independence, despite their own legal reasoning that independent agencies can't exist.
OK, but the proposed battleship is what the GP described: a souped-up Arleigh Burke with hundreds of missile launchers, which are described as the primary battery.
The guns are described as secondary and, other than the proposed single railgun, are basically the same as a cruiser.
Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .
Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.
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