I think the point is to make sure that Trump’s support does not grow beyond the tribal Republicans he already has. The more he fires up the base, the harder it gets for him to grow beyond that. He’s hit a solid limit, and unless he changes it’s going to look bad.
Now if you really want to cause a blowout at the polls, you don’t try to win Trump voters over, just discourage them enough that they don’t bother to vote in November. That hurts not only Trump, but the senate seat (if open in your state) and the representative race as well. Obama had to deal with unprecedented opposition in the legislature, just imagine what a veteran like Hillary could get passed with a friendly Congress.
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Yeah, but from the article:
The experiment attempts to prove the theory that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare by chance.
In other words, it’s total nonsense.
If they are simulating a trillion monkeys, what fraction of infinite monkeys is that? It’s zero, it’s none. It is as relevant to the question of infinite monkey as letting one literal monkey at one literal typewriter for one minute.
Even if we weight each key on the keyboard differently depending on how real monkeys would hit them, or we create a massive markov chain showing how likely a monkey is to hit each key given the last key, two keys, three keys or any finite number of keys they hit is, as long as the probability of any given key being hit never is not zero, we know that an infinite number of monkeys would “eventually” produce the results.
Side note: “eventually” means the length of time it would take one monkey to type out the desired result. We need either infinite monkeys or infinite time, not both.
Infinity isn’t just a big number. It doesn’t got a million, a billion, a trillion, infinity. It’s not like that at all. The “proof” of the infinite monkeys formulation is this: if we have a random process that produces a result with non zero probability, then the chance of that process producing that result when done an infinite number of times is 1. With infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters, it might be reasonable to guess that the chance of producing a result is 1 even if the probability of it being produced by a single iteration is zero. To say the monkeys wouldn’t do it is not to say that the probability of it happening is zero, it’s to say that it is literally impossible for a monkey to press those keys in that order.
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If you’re taking the single monkey option, you also need an infinitely monkey-proof typewriter.
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A favourite old joke:
How many apes does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Just one, but you need a shitload of bulbs.
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For some time now, I have thought that this is the real purpose behind any campaign, particularly for POTUS. Overwhelm everyone with attack ads (EDIT: or just an avalanche of ads in general*) to the point where most registered voters stay home, leaving the actual voting to the faithful on either side who are more predictable.
*I live in Maryland, which is pretty predictably blue (our current governor notwithstanding), but Virginia is a swing state, and shares a media market with both us and DC.
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It was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times?!
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This is such a great explanation. A lot of people don’t understand that next to infinity, the relative magnitude of any finite number is zero by comparison.
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So, now they’ve gotten someone to step up and take the blame. After all that handwaving about how it wasn’t really plagiarism, turns out it actually was! But it was an accident! And anyway Melania didn’t do it! I guess that was the one part of the speech she didn’t (ahem) write all by herself?
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The bullshit never stops being spun.
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Well, I’m a bit confused because the mysterious person said that she did not go over Melania’s speech very well. It makes it sound like Melania did write the speech, but this McIver person didn’t run it through turnitin.com.
And this Ms. McIver isn’t available to the media, so there’s speculation that she doesn’t even exist.
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Well I heard that she talked to Melania on the phone about people she admired, took some notes on Michelle Obama’s speech, and oops, how did those words get in there? Which just gives me more questions. Like, Melania admires Michelle Obama???
Also, I first heard the story on the radio and heard the speechwriter’s name as MacGyver. Very disappointed.
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That makes the Trump campaign’s refusal to accept her resignation even more baffling. It’s pretty easy to get rid of someone who doesn’t exist.
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Ah, but once you cut the ties with McIver, the media will try to find Ms. McIver is so they can speak with her. If she’s still on staff (and fictitious) the campaign can make her “unavailable.” The Trump camp thinks that the media will just leave it alone after so many days.
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I’m not convinced that McIver isn’t something from the Trump-sphere.
What’s that thing they use in movies all the time, when they don’t have a reason and need to make something up to chase… Mac something or other… McGee? McGillicuddy?
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Ms. McIver is on sabbatical with John Barron in the Bahamas.
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Don’t be silly; she’s with John Miller.
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Okay, now I heard more of McIver’s statement: Melania read some of Michelle’s speech aloud and McIver wrote them down (took notes), but assumed that these were Melania’s words. So McIver apologized for not being sure that the words were Melania’s when she wrote Melania’s speech.
Yeah, sure.
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