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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.
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%?
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.
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.