NATO Plus currently has five members -- Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and South Korea. The group works toward boosting global defence cooperation
It’s nice that we can talk about statistics, I really like the subject. Please note that what I wanted to imply is that China is, in the short term, sacrificing economic equality and other goals typically sought by socialism, in favor of maximizing the chance of success against a world that wants to destroy communism.
Now, that set aside, I like to be skeptical of such analyses, for a few reasons that I will outline.
Low statistical power
Accompanying these correlation analyses with an adequate error analysis usually reveals that the sample is too small to yield any significant results. Countries’ different population further complicates this.
Confounding factors
Unfortunately, many statistical analyses in the field, even done by professionals, fail to take this into account. E.g., the “economic freedom index” publishes a report where the value of the indicator is shown to be positively correlated to higher standards of living (presumably to influence the reader’s opinions). Upon closer inspection, one realizes that some of the values used to compute the index depend themselves on economic stability, and recalculating the index without them removes the correlation entirely.
Arbitrary definitions
Not only are these indices based on non-linear scores or arbitrarily weighted operations between incompatible magnitudes, but sometimes they are even defined in vague or subjective terms. E.g., “are deputies elected by fair elections”, rather than being answer as some quantitative measure of transfer of entropy, is simply left to opinion. Furthermore, for the question of whether all citizens have equal voting rights, the US gets 0.81 out of 1, while China gets 0.00, despite the laws of both countries setting basically the same restrictions on voting.
Your comments on “such analyses” are not only (intentionally?) false and misleading, they have in part nothing to do with what I said. You have either really no idea about the subject or you are acting in bad faith by applying the same hypocritical double standards as in many other of your posts. Such a conversation doesn’t make sense.
Fair. It’d be helpful if you’d point out the falsehood in my comment. Or the reason why these don’t apply to the specific analysis you suggested. Or the double standards in my comments.
It’s nice that we can talk about statistics, I really like the subject. Please note that what I wanted to imply is that China is, in the short term, sacrificing economic equality and other goals typically sought by socialism, in favor of maximizing the chance of success against a world that wants to destroy communism.
Now, that set aside, I like to be skeptical of such analyses, for a few reasons that I will outline.
Low statistical power
Accompanying these correlation analyses with an adequate error analysis usually reveals that the sample is too small to yield any significant results. Countries’ different population further complicates this.
Confounding factors
Unfortunately, many statistical analyses in the field, even done by professionals, fail to take this into account. E.g., the “economic freedom index” publishes a report where the value of the indicator is shown to be positively correlated to higher standards of living (presumably to influence the reader’s opinions). Upon closer inspection, one realizes that some of the values used to compute the index depend themselves on economic stability, and recalculating the index without them removes the correlation entirely.
Arbitrary definitions
Not only are these indices based on non-linear scores or arbitrarily weighted operations between incompatible magnitudes, but sometimes they are even defined in vague or subjective terms. E.g., “are deputies elected by fair elections”, rather than being answer as some quantitative measure of transfer of entropy, is simply left to opinion. Furthermore, for the question of whether all citizens have equal voting rights, the US gets 0.81 out of 1, while China gets 0.00, despite the laws of both countries setting basically the same restrictions on voting.
Your comments on “such analyses” are not only (intentionally?) false and misleading, they have in part nothing to do with what I said. You have either really no idea about the subject or you are acting in bad faith by applying the same hypocritical double standards as in many other of your posts. Such a conversation doesn’t make sense.
Fair. It’d be helpful if you’d point out the falsehood in my comment. Or the reason why these don’t apply to the specific analysis you suggested. Or the double standards in my comments.