There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
There’s plenty of actions Trump could take that would make supporters view him as genuinely much worse than average. The below list is not exhaustive nor does it set a lower bound, it’s just examples.
Trump could personally shoot someone randomly walking down the street in the middle of Times Square
ICE could deport multiple confirmed US Citizens or deport one citizen willfully and knowingly.
Trump could explicitly defy a US Supreme Court order without any legitimate color of law.
ICE could shoot and kill a protestor who was not in any way hampering legitimate law enforcement activity and was instead merely protesting nearby.
Trump could withdraw all federal funding from a State that is fully keeping up with its legal requirements to get those funds and pull that funding for solely political purposes.
Support of Trump as not much worse than average is falsifiable for many Trump supporters. However, belief that Trump is much worse than average does not appear to be in fact falsifiable for a large majority of his detractors, including many detractors on this site
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
What you do is you say “given that, we are not doing politics here”.
But if you have to violate that rule, at least you could try to avoid biased tools and procedures.
There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
There’s plenty of actions Trump could take that would make supporters view him as genuinely much worse than average. The below list is not exhaustive nor does it set a lower bound, it’s just examples.
Trump could personally shoot someone randomly walking down the street in the middle of Times Square
ICE could deport multiple confirmed US Citizens or deport one citizen willfully and knowingly.
Trump could explicitly defy a US Supreme Court order without any legitimate color of law.
ICE could shoot and kill a protestor who was not in any way hampering legitimate law enforcement activity and was instead merely protesting nearby.
Trump could withdraw all federal funding from a State that is fully keeping up with its legal requirements to get those funds and pull that funding for solely political purposes.
Support of Trump as not much worse than average is falsifiable for many Trump supporters. However, belief that Trump is much worse than average does not appear to be in fact falsifiable for a large majority of his detractors, including many detractors on this site
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
What you do is you say “given that, we are not doing politics here”.
But if you have to violate that rule, at least you could try to avoid biased tools and procedures.