[mikeash]

I don’t have the time or resources to interview all 235 million eligible voters in the US. I’ll have to rely on others to sample them. Any sample comes with the potential for bias or error so it needs to be done well. I see no reason to think that this four-minute video, whose description says it has interviews with people from Harlem, comes even remotely close. Am I wrong?

[daenz]

>Am I wrong?

You're conflating a scientific study on who does and does not have a valid ID with what people think about people assuming they have no ID because of their skin color. They're orthogonal concepts.

All of the black people interviewed in that video found it ignorant and offensive that people assume that because they're black, they likely don't have ID or know how to get ID, and the white liberals had no problem making broad, negative assumptions about black people, if it supported their political views. That's the point I'm trying to make.

[mikeash]

Were those people a representative sample? What was the sample size?

[blackflame7001]

You start off speaking for a group and end saying you’re only speaking for a percentage of that group. You just totally invalidated the basis of your argument from earlier

[mikeash]

Where was I speaking for a group?

[daenz]

I'll play along and pretend that you're a very unique individual who only considers peoples opinions as relevant when you know the exact statistical figures of how much to weigh them:

11/11 black people thought it was offensive, of a pop size of 37M, at a confidence level of 95% that gives a MOE of 30%, so as few as 70% of black people also think it's offensive at a 95% confidence.

[mikeash]

Only if those 11 people were randomly selected. Was that the case?

I’ll go ahead and answer that one for you: no, it was not the case. The odds of selecting 11 black Americans at random and ending up with all 11 living in Harlem are infinitesimally small.

[daenz]

I think you're forgetting what we're talking about here. We're not talking about the distribution of people with valid IDs, we're talking about the distribution of opinions that making a racist assertion is offensive to the people it is targeting. Common sense will tell you that there is very likely an even geographic distribution in the US. But I think you're being deliberately petty and contrarian because you don't like the content of the video.

[mikeash]

The fact that voter ID laws are often made to disenfranchise certain groups isn't racist, it’s just a fact. You’re talking about whether the targets think it succeeds in doing so, which is a different question, and a pretty irrelevant one. What matters is the intent, and whether it succeeds in that intent.

Common sense tells me that a political video consisting of eleven interviews with people picked off the street in Harlem is very unlikely to be representative of the nation except by accident. I haven’t watched the video and I don’t plan to. I’ve never seen a video link in an online argument that was worth watching and I see no indication that this one is any different.