Fact Checking Crazy Statements

I have not hidden that I am not a fan of election season and we are in the middle of it right now. One problem we have this year is all of the crazy statements being made. I try to stay politically neutral in this blog as I try to focus on technical issues and so I will try not to pick a side and just explain what I am seeing. Recently I have noticed that both sides of the US Presidential Election are making crazy statements. While the news tries to fact check some of the statements, they are definitely biased. Fortunately we all have the ability to check the validity of things being said.

As a child I used to make all sorts of crazy statements that seemed true in my mind but probably crossed the line with actual facts. I would say things like, "I just rode my bike faster than anyone has ever gone before." I doubt I am alone with such hyperbole but children are allowed such liberties. Politicians running for office should not be allowed to make similarly crazy statements. A quick Internet search would show that the record for the fastest person on a bicycle is 183.93 miles per hour and set by a woman in 2018 on the Utah Salt Flats. I don't think my 7-year-old self came close to that number even though I rode down a hill. Whenever you hear someone say something like crime rates and inflation are both down, it is easy to run your own Internet query and see if it is true. Doing so will allow you to see how the statistics have been manipulated and you may discover that you disagree with the politician's comment.

The problem with doing your own fact checking is that it takes more time than accepting statements as facts. Most people don't want to go through the effort and politicians know that. So does the media. Unfortunately a lot of the fact checking done by the media is wrong. When a politician says something crazy like, "This policy enacted by my opponent is causing birds to fly upside down," the media instantly dismisses the statement as an outright lie. Have they bothered to check the validity of it? Nope. It just sounds so outlandish that they dismiss it and nobody bothers to correct them even if it is true. I have discovered that a number of crazy statements thrown out by this year's presidential candidates sound utterly stupid and sensationalized but have more merit than mainstream media wants to admit. I only wish more people would do such research.

Ultimately there is a bias we all have called, "Confirmation Bias." In a nutshell it says that no matter what facts we are presented, we will use the data to strengthen our current belief. If we favor a particular candidate, we twist negative stories about him or her to reinforce why we like the person. My guess is that any fact checking results in strengthening of your current belief about a candidate. So if you have made up your mind as to whom you are voting for this year, fact checking is a waste of time.

Who's Lying? The Democrats or the Republicans?

It is election season and I really hate election season. It means you are guaranteed to have your evening news hijacked by political reports and meaningless stories about politicians criticizing each other. Last night I went to watch the evening news and caught the tail end of President Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention. I'm glad I could catch it as I wanted to see if he did better than during his debate with Trump over a month ago. It's nice to see he can still read a teleprompter.

Unfortunately one of his comments is in direct opposition to to what former President Trump said during his Butler, Pennsylvania rally right as someone attempted to assassinate him. According to comments after the event, the former president said he turned his head to highlight a slide on illegal immigration causing the bullet to miss his head except for a small part of his ear, saving his life. Trump was attempting to show how illegal immigration has skyrocketed under the Biden administration. However last night, President Biden claimed that illegal immigration is at its lowest level since even before he took office.

So who is right? Is one lying? Or are they both telling the truth. The cynic in me says that any politician is incapable of telling the truth. So are they both lying? This prompted me to look at the numbers. Unfortunately you have to go to two different websites to get the statistics. The first place I found gave illegal immigration statistics all the way back to 1990. Unfortunately it only has numbers on a yearly basis but we can use them to compare how the Biden administration has done. The second site is the US Border Patrol website and they have numbers on a monthly basis for part of the current year and the full 3 years before that. I probably could have poked around on their site and gotten numbers back to 1990 but this keeps it simple. As the years are fiscal years, that means they run October through September and don't represent a calendar year. Fortunately if you adjust the component filter to only show just U.S. Border Patrol, the numbers match those on the first website. We can do an apples-to-apples comparison and not be misdirected, as some statisticians are prone to do.

The last year of President Trump's administration was 2020 and we had a fiscal year (FY) total of 405,306 illegal immigrants caught and/or expelled, known as "encounters." That seems to be a pretty low number. However if you look at FY 2017, you see that our country had the lowest number of illegal immigrants at only 310,531. I don't think that is a great number but it does represent years of decline for illegal immigration.

Now let's go back to Biden's statement from last night that illegal immigration is lower than when former President Trump was in office. It is important to remember that in June of this year, the President realized what an important issue this is and his administration started cracking down on it as seen by the dramatic fall in numbers. While it is true that numbers for July 2024 show a sharp decline for a single month, we still have over 1.4 Million encounters for FY 2024 with two more months to go. It doesn't take a math expert to realize no matter how few encounters happen in August and September, the total will never be below 405,306.

So former President Trump is using yearly numbers to make his case and President Biden is relying on a really good single month to make his. Technically they both can be telling the truth. I'll let you decide who is more correct. My guess is that if you are a liberal, you will side with the current president. If you are a conservative you will side with the former.

Why Are College Text Books So Boring?

I was busy minding my own business today when one of my coworkers engaged me in a very important conversation. He mentioned that there are some changes happening in the group that will require me to study up on my probability and statistics knowledge. There are one or two things that I remember about the subject from my days in college, most importantly that the O-ring failure on the Space Shuttle Challenger was a major topic of discussion. We also learned that lotteries are a tax for people that are bad at math.

Knowing that I will head into work on Monday with a need to know something more than basic definitions, I pulled out my old stats textbook and started going through it. What a bore. There must be some subliminal memories it stirred up because I immediately wanted to take a nap. Oh how I fondly remember sleeping in various rooms throughout the university's library. My particular favorite room was one with several fireplaces and overstuffed leather chairs, but I digress.

My coworker is also in the process of refreshing his probability and statistics knowledge. He recommended a different book and I have to say that it looks infinitely more interesting. I cannot yet recommend it because I have yet to see the entire book, however it does look promising. My coworker is enjoying it so much, he even has gone through and done the math examples in the first half of the book.

This has me asking the question: Why are college text books so boring? Maybe it is just the classes I had to take, but there are very few text books that I ever enjoyed reading. There is one that does come to mind though and it fits nicely with the theme of my Blog: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It was suggested reading for one of my Electrical Engineering classes and took me two days to read. Sometimes professors do get it right but I believe that is more rare than common.