[AKN #15] More election hot takes, RIP Alex Trebek
another krappy newsletter #15
Greetings homies,
This week, I am hardcore chilling in Northern California. Just kidding. By “hardcore chilling”, I mean I am “adrenally fatigued by the events of the last week”.
The non-stop election coverage left us stuck on Tuesday. So it has been six Tuesdays since I emailed you. Sorry I haven’t written. I am sure it is hard getting through Tuesday without me at this point.
In these newsletters, I like to subtly insinuate that I am better than paying attention to the mainstream news story of the day. However, this time I was not. Like everyone else, I spent the last week glued to my television screen listening to Jon King explain the nuances of recounts in states I have never visited.
Yesterday was the first day I didn’t wake up in a cold sweat checking on the status of Maricopa County’s vote tally.
So I am going to write about the election.
That’s right folks. It's an election post. There’s the clicker. No one would blame you.
To the newsletter.
This edition of another krappy newsletter is going out to 109 homies. Which is 3 more homies than last week.
Sup, homies? Feel free to reply to this email to say what’s up. I will answer.
If you think someone else in your life would enjoy receiving a weekly email from me about nothing, feel free to forward this email to them and have them push the button below:
A surreal election day
This is the most interesting national news year of my life by far.
The history textbook covering the years 1990 to 2020 in America is going to look like:
Chapter 1: 9/11
Chapter 2: The invention of the iPhone
Chapter 3: The election of Trump
Chapter 4-15: The Year 2020 (including exhaustive coverage of the founding of another krappy newsletter)
The culmination of this year was a presidential election billed as the “most important election of our lives.”
For the last six months, the importance of the election was beaten into us.
No where was safe. Work. Sports. Comedy. The grocery store cashier who recently watched an InfoWars piece on Hunter Biden.
But we were finally here. The day we pick who represents us.
Not even a virus would stop people from voting.
It is hard to not be optimistic on Election Day. It is an inspiring day.
We don’t get mad at voting. We get mad at voting results.
Which leads me to the next part of our story…
Happiness = Reality - Expectations
Somehow Kanye didn’t win. Maybe next time.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we came to find out that our predictions about the outcome were wrong. Again.
Mainstream media polls
Prediction: Biden will win in a landslide.
Reality: Biden won several swing states by a slim margin. To be determined if a recount is required. It took close to a week to resolve the initial winner with a month of court appeals ahead.
I highlighted some of my concerns with the polls in the post last week. A lot of my trepidation came down to:
The polls are not taking a representative sample of the voting base. Predictions are based on assumptions that you sampled the population appropriately. This was shown to be an inaccurate assumption in 2016 and most of the polls did not do enough to address that concern.
The prediction of a landslide did not match my lived experience. The parades and enthusiasm surrounding Trump’s candidacy warranted a second guessing of the prediction. Unfortunately, “the election will be close” became a taboo subject. You were not allowed to say it because it makes us uncomfortable. You didn't have data. All you had was anecdote.
Well. Now we have data…
What we learned after a week of counting votes:
Trump received the most votes of any Republican candidate ever. However, the overall uptick in voter turnout is what allows that to happen whilst still losing the election.
Shy Trump voters exist. Despite the media goon squad who tried to bully anyone who said they existed, it did not change the reality that there are a lot of people who fit this category.
Let’s stop and analyze what we may have learned from this election.
I will cover this in three parts:
Trump Support FAQ
Election Fraud Allegations FAQ
Have we defeated a monster just to unleash the beast?
1. Trump Support FAQ
Over the next few weeks, we will hear political pundits defending how the result was within the margin of error of their predictions.
But we should ask ourselves: what are the odds of two consecutive presidential election predictions underestimating support for the same candidate in the exact same magnitude and direction?
The same error in two consecutive election predictions points to a systemic issue with the inputs of the model (ie: polls). Not a statistical sampling error. It is obvious that the polls they use under sample Trump supporters.
But it cannot be understated how much groupthink there was around this time being different. Question the polls and you risk being excommunicated from the statistical intelligentsia community.
Live view of everyone trying to bring up a polling concern before the election:
Why are we under sampling Trump voters?
There are two main issues:
The polls do not capture a representative sample of the people who actually vote.
The pollsters view themselves as National Geographic and the the conservative population as animals. Rather than taking more pragmatic steps like actually talking to people, they doubled down on the methods that failed to capture the full Trump support in the 2016 election.
A lot of the polling issues are covered well in the following article (thanks OM for the find). I have highlighted some gems from the article below:
Bias in the pollsters conducting the analysis:
This industry is dominated by left-wingers. And a big, big problem is they’re trying to profile the voting behavior of people they don’t understand and may even despise.
Bias in the survey responders answering the polls (ie: oversampled Biden voters):
Highly educated voters are often eager to answer a pollster’s call, Baris finds, so it’s easy for time-pressed pollsters to oversample them.
“They are dying to tell you what they think. They want to enlighten you,” he said. “The other people just want to have their dinner and go to bed. It takes more finesse and more time to get to them.”
Falsification of preferences
Even if you do capture a representative sample of people, you are not capturing a representative sample of how they will actually vote.
I touched on this concept two weeks ago, but a brief reminder:
Falsification of preferences: people carry both a private set and public set of beliefs
A lot of Trump supporters recognized that having their opinion about who should run the country was dangerous to say in public. They say nothing or tell people they will vote for Biden (public opinion), but when election day comes, they will vote for Trump (private opinion).
Why are Trump supporters not comfortable telling you what they think?
There are repercussions to people finding out that you support Trump. The mechanism that delivers these repercussions is called “cancel culture”.
The idea is that people who have an opinion that is outside the list of “approved” opinions suddenly find it harder to get a job.
A common reframe from the left on cancel culture is that it does not exist. To address that concern, here are two great articles on cancel culture and how it does exist:
The cultural rules around hot button issues are ever-expanding. It’s as if a daily script went out describing what’s acceptable, and those who flub a line—or don’t even know a script exists—are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how benign their intent. Naturally, people are deciding the best course is to shut up. It makes sense to be part of the silenced majority when the price you pay for an errant tweet or remark can be the end of your livelihood.
If you’re looking for common characteristics among those of us who get targeted for cancelation, it isn’t money or privilege. Rather, many of us simply have an inability to mumble slogans we know aren’t true. Over time, we become exasperated with dishonest propaganda that masquerades as social justice, and we speak out. It’s a habit rooted in the truth-telling, whistle-blowing impulse that, not so long ago, progressives applauded.
Additionally, if you will entertain me for a second, does it matter if you think it exists?
As long as someone believes it exists, the effects are the same. If someone believes they will lose their job for their opinion, they will change what they say.
Why did they vote for him?
We have about seven days until the left stops caring about understanding conservatives so I am going to strike while the iron is hot!
This is the best explanation I have seen on Republicans thoughts and fears as delivered from a centrist Democrat (Thanks AY for the find.)
Reading it will catch you up on the conservative mindset right now. Which I think is important moving forward.
Some highlights on Republican concerns in terms of Democrat lead leadership:
I see fear of socialism and the entire country looking like Democrat-led cities being major drivers.
Democrats are seen as incompetent politicians with victim mentality angling to tax tax tax with little oversight.
Oh also the dogma of woke left social views, lack of consideration for other POVs, and a brainwashed group think mentality.
2. Election Fraud Allegations FAQ
The craziest part of this election cycle was the large scale visibility of how bad we are at counting things quickly. I can not get over the fact that we can send people to space, but counting millions of ballots in 48 hours is outside of our wheelhouse. Total embarrassment.
With all of that said, we are a country that believes in the presumption of innocence, meaning innocent until proven guilty. So yes, it is insane for someone (especially the President) to not accept the election results. Especially without any actual evidence of fraud…
But let’s work through the thought experiment to understand if this holds any water.
Why do people believe there was fraud?
In my mind, people were primed to believe this for two reasons:
In a close election with a polarized population, the loser is going to be cognitively primed to believe in a conspiracy theory as to why they lost. This is the same effect that happens when I see Cal lose a football game. Had to be the refs! If only they called pass interference! If only I wore the right socks today!
For the last four years, the media has been all in on selling the idea that the presidential election could be gamed (ie: Russian interference scandal). It is difficult to put that back in the box. You cannot expect to play the Star Spangled Banner over the top of people’s voices raising concerns about this year’s result because the outcome favors your candidate of choice. In fact, it may come off as biased to others for you to dismiss their concerns outright.
Does election fraud exist?
I would assume yes. It makes intuitive sense to me that in a sample of 150+ million votes you can find some cases of fraud if you look close enough. This probably takes the form of someone filling out a dead relative’s ballot or something. I would assume that we will hear about some scandal like this soon.
More importantly, we will need to determine if it is fraud that actually mattered. “Mattered” meaning: did it exist at a level that could shift an election?
Does election fraud exist in statistically significant/election moving levels? What would it look like?
I find the existence of election moving fraud far fetched.
I envision two models of what theoretical large scale voting fraud scandals would look like:
Physical ballot fraud. Thousands of fake ballots and no one spilling the beans seems completely impossible. What is the minimum number of people who would need to be involved to carry out fraud like this? This number seems way too large to keep this secret. You would definitely have some snitches.
Election system hacking. In my mind, the only realistic election moving fraud that could take place would be hacking the vote counting systems. Maybe a foreign intelligence agent or a rogue computer programmer? I could see this as plausible. But highly unlikely. Should be easy to verify though. Do the counts in the software match the counts of the physical ballots?
Neither of these seem particularly likely with the evidence we have today.
Is there any actual suspicious data?
The only thing that raises an eyebrow to me so far is voter turnout being at such a record high.
Here is a control chart showing voter turnout at presidential elections over the last 100 years or so:
The voter turnout this year was way outside of two standard deviations. Meaning it is unlikely. But is it really a fair comparison to put the 2020 election up against the previous elections? No.
It was well known that we would have record turnout this year due to an intensely political year with vastly expanded access to mail-in voting. We would expect an obvious mean shift in voter participation due to the increased voter base/access to vote so comparing the two is not exactly valid.
More interesting analyses would be looking at the turnout in different swing states like say the ones Trump won vs lost. Show me voter turnout across the board. It should all increase proportional to one another to some degree. If you see irregularities there, you can look into them more deeply and debunk or verify them.
Where do we go from here?
Trump suggesting that the process is fraudulent without any actual evidence is dangerous. But I have full confidence in the system.
So my advice: Let everyone in! Open the kimono and show all. Live stream the recount on TikTok and show everyone it is a lie. If this is executed well, we have a good chance of bringing people back into the fold.
The new administration is championing unity and bringing people together. A clear way to do that is to transparently address this “scandal”. It would be a great olive branch.
3. Have we defeated a monster just to unleash the beast?
As I watched the carnage of the election play out in front of me and the subsequent dunking on Trump supporters, I thought of Beowulf and the following passage by Jordan B. Peterson:
In the epic poem Beowulf, the Spear-Danes, led by King Hrothgar, find themselves threatened by a terrible male monster, Grendel, a man-eating demon. Every night Grendel tears more Danes limb from limb and feasts on their corpses.
Bad as Grendel and his ilk might be, there is always the possibility of something even worse lurking behind. It is for this reason that the poem presents a further caution. When the hero, Beowulf, kills Grendel (which seems to be a praiseworthy act), the mother of the monster enters the scene, outraged at her son’s death.
What does this mean? Precisely this: If the hero arrives, and slays the monster of order (the dark and pathological manifestation of the social structure itself, the Tyrannical King, the symbolically masculine, in its negative guise) then the monster of chaos is likely to make her presence known. Even pathological order may be keeping a substantive degree of chaos at bay. If Grendel was a monster—and he certainly was—then his mother is the mother of all monsters, and Beowulf’s heroic action, culminating in the destruction of his murderous foe, has merely called forth something worse.
Time and time again throughout history we see the vanquishing of a foe that leads to something worse.
We take out Saddam and reap Isis.
We cancel Charlie Sheen and get Ashton Kutcher in Two and a Half Men.
Not saying we should have let Trump win because something worse may happen without him in office. But I wonder if we are being naive by acting as if we vanquished evil this week.
The question is really: with his loss, what comes next for our country?
Who is the beast that we have unleashed?
My guess: Division.
Post election, we have already seen a movement towards greater division amongst the two diametrically opposed sides of our country.
Consider the following statement that will most likely be true about the electorate:
For 4 years we've had 40+% of the public believing we have an illegitimate president who was produced by a corrupted process. Now, whatever happens, we're looking at 4 more years of 40+% of the public believing we have an illegitimate president produced by a corrupted process.
- Robert P. George
Right driven division:
I am not sure if America has ever had an irrational actor as a lame duck president. But this should be an interesting experiment.
It is obvious that this election is being used as a launching off point for a Trump media empire. Trump TV or something. This network will not be dedicated to unity.
He will also be going nowhere. He will maybe even run for office again in 4 years. He will still be on Twitter until some self righteous Twitter employee bans him and sets half the country into a rage.
You also have his son calling for the government to declassify everything.
I don’t think he is going to declassify the mild fun stuff like “You won’t believe that JFK wasn’t wearing pants in this photo!” Probably be more focused on driving division into the American public.
Left driven division
As much as I have seen the leadership of the party call for unity, I see the followers not listening.
Couple examples:
The Russell conjugation the media uses when talking about protests.
Left protests over the summer that resulted in buildings being looted and burned down. Media interpretation: “mostly peaceful protests.”
Right protests this week that were literally just people shouting at a building. Media interpretation: “very angry, possibly armed group of people.”
This could erupt into a violent outbreak, but it becomes self fulfilling violence if we keep treating Trump supporters like outsiders and stoking the public to prepare for conflict.
Elected leaders (such as America’s self elected meme overlord) calling for names to be recorded:
Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the futureJust so we are clear, no one should be doing that. I am not sure if you were like “oh wow that sounds like a great idea AOC!” If you were, I would invite you to read a book. Never in the history of ever has keeping a book of enemies of the state lead to the unity you are claiming you desire.
Why does division matter?
With the current level of polarization combined with social media, the stage has been set for a war starting meme. Like actually. WWI had the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand. We will have a Franz Ferdinand meme.
In one of the best articles I have read this year, Mike Solana covers how we are emotional creatures with god like technology sitting on the precipice of the meme heard round the world.
Social media has hijacked our innately wired tribal mentality to overwhelm our sense making apparatus. Making us highly more likely to believe information that is not true.
Ubiquitous mobile internet dramatically increased our immersion in media, but ubiquitous social media dramatically increased the speed at which ideas travel and, perhaps more significantly, deeply socialized the dynamic. We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our sense of truth to tribal identity, and that is a powerful, fundamentally emotional connection. It’s also now operating at the scale of a planet.
This leads to the very real possibility that some large group of people acts in unison on some piece of misinformation.
The danger, at every scale, is large numbers of people acting rapidly and emotionally on information they just received. The information will almost certainly, by the very nature of new information, be incomplete or inaccurate. Individuals are now routinely targeted by massive, online mobs, sometimes millions strong, after doctored or incomplete information is shared with the malicious intent of evoking such reaction.
We do not understand the danger that a divided yet ultra connected society poses to our world.
Now more than ever, we need a leader that can unite us.
RIP Alex Trebek
In honor of the man that made it cool to be a nerd, here is a compilation of him saying the word “genre.” RIP to a legend.
Peace out,
K. Rapp
Kevin, this is an amazing newsletter, and the citation of Beowulf is terrific. No one vanquishes anything - we have to work very hard in a disciplined and kind way to restrain our ugly, our demons. No one owes you anything, but we have to remember that we owe each other everything - and that is how a republic and a democracy work well. We have forgotten what good looks like, but ugly is right near us - it is the easier one to leverage, and that is where we are, in the name of short-term gain.
Damn this was meaty. Really enjoyed it!