this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
745 points (98.7% liked)

Microblog Memes

10960 readers
2477 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

RULES:

  1. Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
  2. Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
  3. You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
  4. Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
  5. Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
  6. Absolutely no NSFL content.
  7. Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
  8. No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.

RELATED COMMUNITIES:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The SAVE Act passed the House on Feb. 11, 2026 by a vote of 218-213 and is now in the Senate awaiting a vote. Voting is expected to take place next week, according to Thune. If and when it passes the Senate, it will go to the president for a final signature.

Will SAVE Act Prevent Married Women from Registering to Vote?

By Hadleigh Zinsner

Posted on February 28, 2025

Q: Is it true that under the SAVE Act married women will not be able to register to vote if their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate?

A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted.

FULL ANSWER

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 5 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

People who receive and respond to polls are also a subset with biases.

[–] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

That's true, but also a group that has a real and vested interest in getting the answer RIGHT. That helps.

[–] ChristerMLB@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

yes, but pollsters will try to account for that in their models

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

So do the bookies setting odds and the people betting. People don't win money by getting their bets wrong.

For every mathematician who beat the lottery there are millions who did not.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

That's not how bookies set odds! They do it based on what people bet, so if 10 people bet against something and 20 bet for it, the same account each, the odds will be 2:1, reduced a bit so the bookies makes a profit. This guarantees that the bookies make money.

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

How is that any different from what I said? The simple ratio is an automatic adjustment for Bias.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

OK bear with me, I'm going to lay out an example to make sure we're really on the same page:

Suppose I am a horse racer in a two-horse race and have been paid to lose, so I know that the odds are 100% on the other guy. 100 people place bets of £1 each on each of us, believing we're equally matched, so there's £50 on me, £50 on the other racer. The bookies will now be offering evens odds - less their take - on each of us. Suppose now that another 100 people, tipped off by the racer fixer, place bets of £1 each on the (known) winner, so there's £150 on him, £50 on me. While this is going on, the bookie adjusts the odds so that what they offer is more like 3 - 1 for the winner.

The odds the bookie offers change in accordance with the bets placed by the punters, even though the actual odds of the race never changed. This was due to the the bias of the punters. If we re-ran the experiment but the punters instead for some reason believed I was likely to win, the bookies odds would reflect that biased belief - a bias that would then be incorrect rather than correct.

So, assuming you do agree with all that, where do we actually differ? My point is that while, sure, "people don't win money by getting their bets wrong", you can't rely on the people betting to be correct. "But FishFace" you may say, "you can rely on people in aggregate to be as accurate as it's possible to be! You can't beat the market!" And I'd agree with that too, so here is the crux: the people placing bets are not "the people in aggregate". The people placing bets may have some bias not reflected in the population as a whole. The bookies cannot correct for this: it only evens out the risk so the house always wins. If the bias is like people acting on a tip-off about a fixed race, they'll be more accurate than the general population. But if the bias is, for example, smart people being less likely to gamble, and smart people being more likely to think a particular outcome is likely, you might end up with bookies' odds being less accurate than the general population.

There's another confounder, which is the concept of emotional hedges where people bet not according to whom they think will win, but so that they get some money if their preferred outcome fails to materialise. Bookies' odds just fold this into all the rest of the bets to produce odds. But if for example a lot of people in favour of this bill emotionally hedged, the odds would say it has lower chances of passing than it actually does.

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

If you were paid to throw the race and half the betters knew it then either the odds are correct for favoring your opponent or you're about to have your legs broken.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Guessing you didn't read the rest. Have a good day.

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

My response being many times more concise than yours does not make it shallow.

Really stupid analogy to start with by leaning on a premise of everything being rigged.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 7 hours ago

So the fact that you have nothing to say about the second scenario I laid out is not because you didn't read it, but because you, what? Didn't understand? Couldn't come up with a useful reply?

None of these options leave you in a good light.

[–] ChristerMLB@piefed.social -1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)