Just in time before the holiday ends . . . A correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous points us to this:
Apparently this was written by our former ambassador to the United Nations. I googled and her bachelor’s degree was in accounting! They teach you how to take averages in accounting school, don’t they?? So I’m guessing this particular post was written by someone less well-educated, maybe a staffer with a political science degree or something like that.
But what really gets me is, who eats only 1 hot dog on July 4th? No burger, no chicken, just one hot dog?? Is this staffer on a diet, or what?? Also, get it going, dude! Throw in a burger and some chicken breasts and you can get that inflation rate over 100%, no?
Meanwhile this person’s eating an entire watermelon? The wiener/watermelon ratio at this BBQ is totally wack. I just hope these staffers are more careful with their fireworks tonight than they were with their shopping earlier today. What’re they gonna do with all those extra watermelons?
Mmmm…delicious condiment. I can’t eat just one.
Isn’t Nikki Haley going to run for President in 2024?
https://www.reddit.com/r/columbiasc/comments/vrgo37/nikki_haley_discusses_july_4th_possible_2024_run/
We desperately need a commander-in-chief who is comfortable with numerical data.
Paul:
Given that Haley has an accounting degree, I doubt she wrote that post, and I could well imagine she didn’t read it either. Politicians are busy and don’t have time to read everything written under their names, nor necessarily should they. So my guess is that these sorts of posts are prepared by staffers with too much time on their hands, people who are admirably restrained in their hot dog consumption but eat much more watermelon than any normal person.
In this blog, it is customary to criticize researchers who take credit for what underlings do right and who simultaneously criticize researchers who blame underlings when errors are found. Forgiving Haley because she is assumed to know better because of her accounting degree, might be appropriate closer to the Christmas season. However, we are currently in mid summer and we will undoubtedly hear much more from her as 2024 approaches.
I do not know how busy she is but suppose the statement, “Politicians are busy and don’t have time to read everything written under their names, nor necessarily should they” were amended to:
“Heads of labs are busy and don’t have time to read everything written under their names, nor necessarily should they.”
Why should there be more leeway for a politician than for a head of a lab?
But Paul this the one case I’ve seen where correcting the math clearly wouldn’t change the conclusions, right? :) You can remove the total line entirely and get the point from the data alone. Also publishing political fodder and scientific research are different levels of responsibility. It’s hard to imagine any politician approving every “publication” or statement by a campaign, but it’s not that hard to imagine a lab leader reading at least the abstract of every published paper that h/her name is on.
Paul:
I agree that Haley should take responsibility for this post and apologize. I just doubt she wrote it.
I suspect that a staffer on her team is is having a really, really bad day.
And it’s getting 10% worse with each passing hour…
There are a lot of good responses from twitter readers about things like taking a weighted average to get an accurate estimate, which would handle things like the number of hot dogs and the fraction of a watermelon if you included the cost times number of units consumed. What gets to me is that even the smallest increase (+ 8.2%) is actually a lot for a single year. These are not completely bogus numbers, either:
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Frankfurters/price-inflation
Hot dog price inflation is 7.03% according to this website, which is a lot for a single year. If you include from the beginning of the pandemic them the 15% is pretty reasonable as an estimate.
Inflation is a real political problem. What annoys me is that “hyperinflation” of 60% would be an actual disaster but also make partisan points make a lot less sense, as we should pull together in a crisis. Moderate inflation way above the 2% target is a good political point that should be discussed and it is a point that a government (e.g., the federal reserve, the executive branch, congress) have levers they could use.
Why waste a good talking point by turning it into an absurd lie?
> Why waste a good talking point by turning it into an absurd lie?
when did anyone in American politics do anything else? Literally my whole life this is the essence of the american political bullshit. You probably have to go back to the middle of WWII or something to get a different take.
+1
Huh? Traditionally, isn’t wartime considered a localized peak of government-backed propaganda and BS? I don’t think going back to the middle of any historic time of war would result in less BS.
I have no idea, not having lived through it or specialized in the history of it. But my impression is that people during WWII were simply on board with the program and hence didn’t need to be told that for example Hitler was actually a pretty good guy and it would be ok if he won, or that Italy was crushing us and would win soon if we didn’t work harder or that Japan was actually run by the Rothschild’s and on the edge of the flat earth and all we needed to do was take over their space laser program and push them off the corner of the world… These days the BS goes to 11.
I’m probably wrong… Cue WWII flat earth Japano-Jewish space laser propaganda posters in 3…2…1
I think in this case, we don’t really need to lazily speculate. Google “us world war 2 propaganda”–the amount of unchecked BS propaganda circulating at that time was stunning. Maybe when you’re done defending assault rifles and promulgating NRA talking-points, you can spend some time looking at some of the ridiculous crap that circulated during WWII.
Unanon said: “when you’re done defending assault rifles and promulgating NRA talking-points…”
You should do a little research project and figure out how many people were killed in the US since 1/1/2000 by:
a) people wielding box knives
b) people wielding assault weapons
I guess the box knives get a bit of a head start because assault weapons were banned until 2004, so you could convert that to an annual rate excluding the first four years for assault weapons.
Unanon – now I feel bad bcz you might think choosing 1/1/2000 is cherry picking. :( So maybe start both at 1980 and exempt the period of the assault weapons ban for assault weapons. But here’s another idea: how has the murder rate changed in the US since the assault weapons ban ended? Has it gone up or down? Is there any evidence that assault weapon legality / illegality correlates with the rate of murders?
I love me a good hotdog on a slice of bread with 1 condiments
& 1 watermelon
When obvious errors like these come up I always wonder if they’re intentional. Like maybe Haley or whoever wrote this knew the math was BS but also didn’t care because they thought their readers wouldn’t care or notice. They would just notice the 67% which is a huge number and be very upset.
Anon:
Could be. But there are lots of really non-quantitative people out there, and it stands to reason that some of them would be low-level political staffers whose job it is to put things on the social media accounts.