Hey! I love me some ZH. But I think if you want to venture there then you have to be prepared to filter out the nutty stuff. Of course, that's true of everything.
I agree that it is bad practice to not start graphs at 0, and I agree that the ZH graph did indeed distort the magnitude of the effect. I also applaud you for your firm commitment to statistical communication best practices. However, to be fair a LOT of people commit this sin, and some will even be willing to explicitly justify the practice, precisely because it exaggerates the effect. In that case, it's not fair to pick on poor little ZH.
Even though the ZH graph distorts the actual effect, it's nonetheless true that there really was a remarkable increase in the number of voters in 2020, and it's not statistically consistent with the variation observed between the turnouts for the other elections.
Amazed that ZH would be so obviously deceptive. Tinkering with y-axis scaling is one of the oldest and widely used tricks. Darrell Huff complained about it in 1954 ("How to Lie with Statistics"), and you can still see it everywhere (Fox seems especially enamored).
Entropy at Zero Hedge, you were right to call it out. Warning: ALL media outlets, mainstream and online, right, left and center, now play visual tricks with data.
I saw links to Zero Hedge on other alt and indie news sites over the years and it just always had a certain aura of "delivering the goods" vs 100% analytical thoughtfulness... something that also gradually alienated me from a ton of stuff that spoke to me as a tender undergrad!
Funny timing on this post as I’ve also struggled with on and off following of ZH (it’s so damn easy to fall into the trap of going on there to get dopamine of some alt financial news you can’t get anywhere else) and just recently decided I can no longer follow them because of the constant bearishness. Question is though, where else do you get financial news? Only news app on my phone is WSJ (digital minimalist here) so I read that but it’s so sterile and doesn’t scratch the itch I’m looking for on in depth analysis. I despise short form newsletters like Morning Brew that give you 1 paragraph of a finance news story but I just haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for, which would be a long form newsletter of someone’s market/finance takeaways are, that actually knows what they’re talking about. Sort of like the Money Stuff newsletter but with less focus than on funny situations and legal matters. Any recommendations you’ve found?
Yeah Cody I’m with you, WSJ is great. Haven’t really found an alternative to ZH as far as alternative long form blogs/newsletters go. Exec Sum is a good newsletter. They too are short form but they often have links to really high quality stories from alternative sources.
Mainly just observing and using first principles at this point given the rampant bias
Hey! I love me some ZH. But I think if you want to venture there then you have to be prepared to filter out the nutty stuff. Of course, that's true of everything.
I agree that it is bad practice to not start graphs at 0, and I agree that the ZH graph did indeed distort the magnitude of the effect. I also applaud you for your firm commitment to statistical communication best practices. However, to be fair a LOT of people commit this sin, and some will even be willing to explicitly justify the practice, precisely because it exaggerates the effect. In that case, it's not fair to pick on poor little ZH.
Even though the ZH graph distorts the actual effect, it's nonetheless true that there really was a remarkable increase in the number of voters in 2020, and it's not statistically consistent with the variation observed between the turnouts for the other elections.
Fair points. I’m curious to see the turnout data once all the votes have been counted
Amazed that ZH would be so obviously deceptive. Tinkering with y-axis scaling is one of the oldest and widely used tricks. Darrell Huff complained about it in 1954 ("How to Lie with Statistics"), and you can still see it everywhere (Fox seems especially enamored).
Lack of patience is often indistinguishable from lack of integrity.
Entropy at Zero Hedge, you were right to call it out. Warning: ALL media outlets, mainstream and online, right, left and center, now play visual tricks with data.
Entropy is the perfect way to think of it indeed
I saw links to Zero Hedge on other alt and indie news sites over the years and it just always had a certain aura of "delivering the goods" vs 100% analytical thoughtfulness... something that also gradually alienated me from a ton of stuff that spoke to me as a tender undergrad!
Substack is supposed to be an antidote but the bias is rampant here too 😕
Funny timing on this post as I’ve also struggled with on and off following of ZH (it’s so damn easy to fall into the trap of going on there to get dopamine of some alt financial news you can’t get anywhere else) and just recently decided I can no longer follow them because of the constant bearishness. Question is though, where else do you get financial news? Only news app on my phone is WSJ (digital minimalist here) so I read that but it’s so sterile and doesn’t scratch the itch I’m looking for on in depth analysis. I despise short form newsletters like Morning Brew that give you 1 paragraph of a finance news story but I just haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for, which would be a long form newsletter of someone’s market/finance takeaways are, that actually knows what they’re talking about. Sort of like the Money Stuff newsletter but with less focus than on funny situations and legal matters. Any recommendations you’ve found?
As for politics, The Free Press is hands down the best long form source
Never heard of that. Will check it out!
Yeah Cody I’m with you, WSJ is great. Haven’t really found an alternative to ZH as far as alternative long form blogs/newsletters go. Exec Sum is a good newsletter. They too are short form but they often have links to really high quality stories from alternative sources.
Mainly just observing and using first principles at this point given the rampant bias