Santorum blames gay marriage for bad economy

[Wisconsin+17]

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Agreed. I'm just doing quick and dirty here. I don't believe I've actually drawn any conclusions from these numbers...

Which states do you think would make good controls? How about Alabama, Minnesota, Arizona and Pennsylvania?

[Wisconsin+17]

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Absolutely nothing.

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Oh damn. Hope you're alright.

[Wisconsin+17]

A New Hope.

I'm an Alec Guinness Kenobi.

[Wisconsin+17]

You were supposed to bring BALANCE to the Force.

You were the Chosen one!

I just love the character. First time I watched it I really felt that there was a character that gets me.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Is it possible to do it year by year? We can adjust for the variance.

[Wisconsin+17]

It's a more neutral approach. Rather then making 2004 'special', we assign equal value to all years.

Your approach is more clumpy, mine less so. More data points = less variance.

Yes, trendlines are really handy.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Not saying it isn't, or that you are pulling something shady

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This is how I would do it if I were doing it myself, and then overlay them on top of each other.

This would be fantastic.

[Wisconsin+17]

Alcon, let me guess - you trained in social sciences?

[Wisconsin+17]

Well, my stats training is in Physics.

Feel free to run the analysis with the years together if we can do both of them.

I'm expecting that with the other method that we'll see convergence.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Ok, now what would happen if you toss out the high MA and the low MA numbers? The US numbers should be ok. Tossing out high low is how we 'correct' for the variance in the MA numbers.

[Wisconsin+17]

I was thinking about this. It might be more useful to chart the slopes rather than the absolute values, and then plot all the slopes of all 50 states on top of them.

That should give us a pretty good approximation as to what is going on with each states. It should show up as to whether or not MA is an outlier.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Now we have a much more reliable sample. We haven't gotten to the point yet where we can say that this isn't due to random factors.

What's the standard deviation of the 100 averages (pre + post)?

[Wisconsin+17]

No need to do the other analysis. We're getting good data here. If it's a bell curve, I'm happy with it.

[Wisconsin+17]

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That's just about what we'd expect from a random sample. Sorry. There's nothing to indicate that there's any structural reason for the change beyond noise.

I thought it might be Iowa + Nevada. Interesting.

Thanks for doing all this. Sorry we got nothing definitive out of it.

[Wisconsin+17]

Interesting. Wisconsin, Virginia and Arkansas. Not the ones I would have expected to see. 

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Yes, but we've also shown that this isn't statistically significant.

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Well, what I'm seeing is that marriage rates in general are declining across America. This reinforces my opinion (and Santorum's), that this is an overarching negative trend. 

Two, the rise in the ratio of marriage/divorce that we see in MA seems to be ephemeral. It took the lowest divorce rates recorded for any state in the US to bring that number to about par for the US. If we see another year like the last one, I suspect that MA will actually trend negative in that ratio.

So no, there's nothing here that would convince me to re-evaluate my position.

[Wisconsin+17]

Maybe this could be published somewhere? I'm sure someone would be interested in this.

[Wisconsin+17]

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If you showed me marriage rates going up - I'd see things differently. This was actually a really depressing study.
 

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Statistically significant is the point here. I'm not sure why I should give weight to something that hasn't been shown to be statistically significant. Like I said, the best roll of the dice in 2006 still doesn't pull it up to the point where it would be statistically significant.

I think we can conclude from here on that the picture isn't going to improve.

Honestly, I thought your conclusion was rubbish as soon as I saw the actual data series for MA. That pretty much sealed it for me. Sorry.

[Wisconsin+17]

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That, or it shows to be statistically significant in this survey here. It wasn't, so yeah, I'm unconvinced that this is anything more than noise. You said it so yourself.

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Spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin.

Sorry, no. It's not statistically significant. It's about 1 standard deviation off the norm, and when you've got 50 states, and MA is about at the 1/3rd level, yeah, ok.

Given a truly random sample, how many would we expect to see at 1 standard deviation? 1/3rd? Gosh, that was easy.

Even if this were statistically significant, you would have to explain why the other 20 or so states with a greater improvement than MA are significant as well, and account for MA.

See what I'm saying here? That it isn't statistically significant just says, ok, so it's up, but it's not up enough to make a difference from what we could see randomly.

You see this all the time. I was asked to do a survey of boy/girl ratios at birth. In the UK you'll see some isolated high ratios, but when you have that many samples, you would expect to see outliers at a specific rate. Which is what we see here.

I bet if we made the cutoff '07 this behaviour disappears.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Again, you've misunderstood.

Gay marriage is a symptom, not a cause. The overall decline of marriage predates gay marriage and that decline is precipitating demand for gay marriage.

Demonstrating to me, quite objectively, that marriage has undergone substantial decline in the US, in all 50 states isn't going to deter someone from this hypothesis, quite the contrary. It is going to reinforce the connection between marriage declines leading towards demand for gay marriage.

Now, I'm happy you are attempting to argue my thesis, but please get it right. Gay marriage is a symptom, not a cause.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Continued declines indicate that gay marriage does nothing to help the situation.

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Again, we've dealt with this argument before. Why permit it? What benefit does it bring?

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So would removing restrictions on consanguinity.

[Wisconsin+17]

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To disprove the thesis that gay marriage is a symptom of marriage declines, yes, this is what it would require.

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Unless your thesis is that the two are somehow related, I'm not sure what this non sequitor has to do with the topic at hand.

[Wisconsin+17]

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You seem to be treating this like it's a referendum on gay marriage. That's why you aren't understanding the thesis.

The thesis:

Gay marriage is a symptom of marriage declining in America.

Your proof:

Marriage declines in America followed up by gay marriage.

You argument seems to be:

Massachusetts has a statisically insignificant slowing of the decline of marriage, ergo gay marriage is a public good and ought to be instituted across america.

What you seem to think my argument is:

Gay marriage is bad because it causes marriage decline.

If I've misunderstood you, let me know.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Well, that's the root of the problem.

My argument is not "gay marriage is the cause of the bad stuff". No, gay marriage is the symptom, not the cause. The declines in marriage came first, gay marriage came second. The evidence that you've shown here reinforces this thesis, ergo my comments that to disprove the thesis would require you to show marriage increasing, because that would break the chain.

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Well, you're wrong. That's why I posted exactly what the thesis.

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Why am I against it? Because I'm Catholic and my faith teaches that homosexuality is sinful. So if you feel it's worth your time to argue with me otherwise, feel free. But don't say I didn't warn you.

As for interracial marriage - nobody chooses to be black (or white, or whatever). People choose to engage in homosexuality. The analogy between the two simply doesn't hold up.

I can't go online and look at your picture and say - hey - you're gay. But I can do the same with you if you are black. That's an important distinction. 

[Wisconsin+17]

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What's the first thing you do when someone you see has fallen down and hurt themselves and appears to need emergency first aid?

[Wisconsin+17]

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Are you here to argue with me or yourself?

IF this is how it's going to be I'm outta here.