>>12879003 (pb)

Post links Q hit piece article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/opinion/democracy-qanon.html

which in turn cites:

https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/

This study is such crap piled on crap that I thought it worth examining one nugget closely.

Carefully read the NYT quote in first image. If you have even a basic knowledge of probability, it should seem bizarre.

Is it even remotely plausible that more than 60% of MAGA supporters are "white, Christian, and male"?

Of course not. It is LUDICROUS.

So perhaps the NYT reporter misquoted? (Many of them are illiterate and innumerate, so a reasonable hypothesis.)

Nope! The words are taken directly from the "magastudy" website. See second image.

https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/demographics-group-affinities/

Now let's examine the underlined sentence.

Any competent reader of English will grasp what this asserts: that over 60% of MAGA supporters are "white, Christian, and male".

It ASSERTS that over 60% of MAGA supporters fall into ALL THREE CATEGORIES.

Does the data from the study support this, by even the most convoluted reasoning? NO.

The authors of this academic research neglect to provide any actual data, so we must look at their pictures and try to extract it.

Rather than eyeballing, I used the measure tool in GIMP and got the following results:

White: 84%

Christian: 66%

Male: 62%

Now here is a crucial question: is there any reason to suppose that these are correlated values (in the US in general or within the target population or the study pool)?

Nothing jumps out to me. If anything, I'd surmise that non-white MAGA supporters tend to be more Christian (on average) than white supporters. But think this out for yourself. The upshot is that these seem to be statistically independent characteristics. And so you must multiply the percentages to determine what portion of the study pool has all three:

84% x 66% x 62% = 34%

So that's the answer: 34% of the MAGA supporters in the study were white, Christian, and male.

Not 60%. These esteemed academics overstated the result by 76%! [Math: (60%-34%)/34%)]

Why?

Maybe there are stupid, and can't read and write English properly.

Maybe there are stupid, and don't understand basic probability.

(You might think it impossible that academics with relatively elite positions could actually be that stupid, but you might be underestimating just how easy it is do to the sort of "research" these two do using the "right" combination of software tools. To think that someone who knows how to use such tools actually knows how to do "science" is akin to thinking that someone knows how to write by virtue of knowing how to operate Microsoft Word.)

Or maybe they aren't quite that stupid. Maybe they are simply liars.

Maybe they wrote the given sentence knowing perfectly well that it conveys a falsehood.

Such people disgust me.

You can find other examples of stupidity and/or mendaciousness if you review the study website.