That’s actually a really bad article and I wouldn’t lend it any credence. It’s pretty clearly written by somebody who has a pretty firm bias and a lot of those sentences are ones that I’d be horrified by if they came out of a respected peer.
1) The premise is faulty. Anything that’s true is true, conspiracies do exist, they’re just rare.
2) This isn’t technically a ‘conspiracy theory’, in fact it’s something that could have been done by a tiny number of people without anybody else knowing or being involved. (even just one who does a bit of travel!) So there’s no need to keep huge secrets or anything.
3) One can’t just assume that ‘adjusted’ means ‘cherry-picked’. That’s not a viable default state, one should understand the purpose of the adjustment and context (something the author didn’t bother doing) A large fraction of the data I work with is ‘adjusted’ in one way or another.
4) Consistent variance is one of the ONLY things we can use to look for this sort of hidden correlation, that’s a key point and is ignored in the article despite making up about 30% of the study.
5) No, our polls aren’t worse than the third world countries we investigate for voter fraud. Where did THAT come from?
(I could go on…it’s SUPER lazy and responsible thought processes were not used when writing it)
This particular scenario may not be true, but they didn’t actually address it in any meaningful way. The article has no value in this context and I’d be skeptical of any future work from the author (Joshua Holland). This might be an outlier on his side, but that sort of ‘takedown’ usually indicates somebody who’s happy not to be reasonable and thoughtful in their analysis.
This is why I’m interested in those who’ve actually analyzed the raw data from another direction or independently, or who have studied this analysis with a professional detachment. We’ve got lots of wonks who’ll just see one side or the other without bothering to get to the root.
