Probably coincidental but the message seems clear through multitudinous examples - Democrats, or at least certainly their political face, are innumerate.
Example 1 - My post yesterday about Senator Sanders arguing that a bill he supports should not go down in defeat simply because the majority of Senators and Congressmen oppose it.
Then, about the same time, there was the Administration and Democrat Congressional position that spending $3.5 trillion will cost nothing because maybe, somehow, there might be a tissue thin claim that they will raise taxes to cover the cost.
https://t.co/9TVP8oKAfG
— Justanass74 (@justanass74) October 1, 2021
There is no way you can get that kind of money and it will cost nothing to pay back you people are truly ignorant if you believe that
52 is smaller than 48 and spending $3.5 trillion costs nothing. New math indeed.
Then there's this piece from the New York Times, always a bastion of innumeracy. From The NYT's Partisan Tale about COVID and the Unvaccinated is Rife with Sloppy Data Analysis by Jeremy Beckham.
A widely shared article recently appeared in The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter titled “Red Covid,” authored by David Leonhardt. This article, presented as news reporting and not an opinion piece, argues that deaths from COVID-19 are “showing a partisan pattern,” with the worst impacts of the disease “increasingly concentrated in red America.” Given that this narrative perfectly flatters a liberal sense of superiority, it has predictably gained substantial traction on MSNBC and on Twitter.
One particular claim in the Times article caught my attention: that there is a clear and strong association on a county level between COVID deaths and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Specifically, the article alleged that those counties which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump had more than a four-fold greater mortality rate than those counties which decisively voted against Trump. If true, that would indeed be a striking observation.
But, as is often the case with epidemiological observations, the question is more complicated than two variables. There are three analytic errors that can lead someone to make false conclusions from what appears to be a meaningful association between two variables: bias, confounding variables, and random statistical error. In this case, the Times’ analysis failed to discuss significant confounding variables.
Age is a common confounder in public health research, and COVID-19 is no exception. The mortality burden of COVID-19 is not randomly distributed across age groups. Indeed, age appears to be the “strongest predictor of mortality” from COVID-19, with one’s risk of death increasing exponentially with age. According to CDC figures, the oldest populations experience a rate of death 570 times higher than the youngest populations. This is precisely why older populations were vaccinated first; we knew that prioritizing this population would have the most dramatic effect in curtailing hospitalizations and deaths. Yet the crude county-level analysis reported in The New York Times failed to adjust or account for age at all.
The NYTs does this all the time. Look for something that bolsters their flawed worldview rather than disinterestedly following the data for real answers to real problems.
When you take into account age as a confounding variable, is there even "a clear and strong association on a county level between COVID deaths and support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election?" In other words, the NYT been so busy trying to explain the phenomena, that they have completely skipped the step of proving the phenomenon actually exists.
It is like speculating about the source of a fire without having demonstrated that a fire actually occurred.
I guess innumeracy might be a core competence. Only through cultivated innumeracy can they sustain their flawed worldview. No measured reality, no cognitive dissonance.
UPDATE: The Babylon Bee on innumeracy among Democrat politicians.
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