First off I’d like to get a thank you out of the way for Tango, MGL, and all of the other regulars that have helped me change the way I look at some things.
Veterans Campaign (?)
I recently heard some adds on the radio about a group looking to help veterans get elected regardless of which party they find themselves affiliated with. The premise being that congress used to be predominantly made up of veterans and congress used to function better so we should strive to go back to that. There is obviously more to it, but that was the 30 second sales pitch. After hearing this a couple of times I though to myself wait a minute, of course there were more veterans it was all men. Men are still disproportionately more likely to have served. Then the next one hit me. Over a 30 year period we had three major conflicts were a draft was instituted. Take this together and of course you are going to have a lot more veterans serving. Correlation does not equal causation and something something Bayes.
http://www.veteranscampaign.org/
Poynter Study
Poynter just put out a study on trust in the media and their truthfulness. I see some of the same problems that were exploited for political gain with favorability with the ACA. People would ask do you favor / support the ACA. One group of people would say yes because they thought it was about right or at least better than the status quo. One group would say they are against it because it is government over reach. One group would say they are against it because they thought it didn’t go far enough. But on a lot of surveys you were only given a binary choice. I think Poynter is running into some similar problems here with their broad questions. Those that watch CNN and trust CNN might say they distrust the media because Fox News exists. The same could be said by a Fox News viewer because of CNN.
https://poyntercdn.blob.core.windows.net/files/PoynterMediaTrustSurvey2017.pdf
Because of this site and the people who frequent here I look at these things and see some of the follies in the methodology.