Fighting Brandolini's Law with Sampling
9 comments
·July 15, 2025cladopa
andhuman
The graph is from 2007 onwards. So it doesn’t include when he was president.
aredox
You mistake average and dispersion.
That's why "data" is not "anecdotes".
ygritte
Donal Trump was actually not topmost liar at the time of sampling, but only 2nd place. Color me surprised.
alanbernstein
The "falsiness distribution" by itself is not capable of answering this kind of question. Imagine a politician who speaks just one statement, a "pants on fire" lie. They immediately reach the top liar spot.
The distribution also leaves out the significance and the reach of the statements.
Your statement is about as meaningful as the "fastest growing <whatever>" trick. E.g. growing from 0->1 user is infinite growth, so wins fastest growing immediately.
superxpro12
If this were ESPN or similar, they would say "min 50 games" or something to sort the outliers (heh).
prasadjoglekar
Well, "fact checkers" like Politifact are precisely what are considered biased themselves. Sampling from a biased dataset still shows the same bias.
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be...
You may be aligned with the alleged or real partisanship of Politifact, so to you there's no problem here. But team Harris and Buttigieg lost the election.
Hence these consequences (from Wikipedia):
In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
noelwelsh
This is a great example of the issue the blog post is addressing, namely:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The play book is:
1. Set an impossible standard (an undefined "unbiased" fact checker)
2. When impossible standard cannot be reached, throw toys out of the pram
Meanwhile, egregious levels of bullshit now go unchallenged.
littlestymaar
> In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, claiming that "fact checkers have just been too politically biased."[62][63
No relationship with the fact that Trump became president again in Jan 2025 with Zuckerberg giving money to his inauguration, obviously.
There is an obvious bias on the graph, that is a joke. According to that, Bill Clinton is the politician that lied the less!! Mr "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".