Lies, Damn Lies, and Eric Trump
Over 100 years ago Mark Twain popularized the saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistics themselves don't lie, of course. The liars are the scoundrels who use them dishonestly. This week Eric Trump, son and campaign surrogate for presidential candidate Donald Trump, joined that liars club in a big way with a whopper of a lie about a recent poll analysis.
On Tuesday Nate Silver, head of FiveThirtyEight, posted an article analyzing how opinion poll results split by gender. See Election Update: Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. In it he averages the differences by gender found in numerous opinion polls and then applies that to estimate what the electoral college vote would look like if only women voted and if only men voted. He summarized these results in two images shown here:
There are lot of interesting things we could talk about embodied in these diagrams. But the news this past week has all been about a bizarre thing that happened next: Eric Trump took the men-only picture, removed the descriptive title, and tweeted it as proof that his father's campaign is "gaining momentum".
Riiight. They're gaining momentum... in the alternate universe where a scifi-like plague is wiping out the entire female population. ♫dooDOOdoodoo dooDOOdoodoo♫ You have just entered THE TWILIGHT ZONE!
On Tuesday Nate Silver, head of FiveThirtyEight, posted an article analyzing how opinion poll results split by gender. See Election Update: Women Are Defeating Donald Trump. In it he averages the differences by gender found in numerous opinion polls and then applies that to estimate what the electoral college vote would look like if only women voted and if only men voted. He summarized these results in two images shown here:
There are lot of interesting things we could talk about embodied in these diagrams. But the news this past week has all been about a bizarre thing that happened next: Eric Trump took the men-only picture, removed the descriptive title, and tweeted it as proof that his father's campaign is "gaining momentum".
Riiight. They're gaining momentum... in the alternate universe where a scifi-like plague is wiping out the entire female population. ♫dooDOOdoodoo dooDOOdoodoo♫ You have just entered THE TWILIGHT ZONE!