Dr.SHIVA LIVE: MIT PhD Continued Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Even More Fraud. Calls for Engineering Systems Approach for Signal Detection Methods for Election Integrity. https://t.co/SpMHGEIKqA
— Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. Inventor of Email (@va_shiva) November 16, 2020
Time for “the math guy” to do something more productive with his life like counting them patties he needs to start flipping at McDonalds.
25 replies on “Dr. Shiva bodyslams some leftist youtuber masquerading as “Stand-up Maths!””
Dr. Shiva A. is a PHD MIT pattern analyst with 40 years of experience. He notes that his work involves identifying normal and abnormal patterns. He states that his kind of analysis requires much more knowledge than just using mathematics. He is very civil in his explanation of why the Stand up Maths guy is in error. I watched his videos and found his teaching easy to understand and very informative–and I am interested in how the pattern shows the probability of election fraud. IMO Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is a genius. God Bless him!
Within the first 30 seconds and the first graph that Stand-Up Math posted, he was already lying and misrepresenting the data.
He said that if you do the same analysis on Biden’s votes you get the same thing and that they simply cancel each other out. This is totally not true.
Using his own calculations, the horizontal part of the Biden graph showed a 20% surplus of votes for Biden. In the sloped region, it sloped down to -10% for Biden. Meanwhile, in the horizontal part of the Trump graph it showed only a 5% surplus for Trump while in the sloped region it went down to a -30% for Trump.
So, even if both graphs showed a similar “qualitative” type of behavior, it was plus 20 for Biden and plus 5 for Trump in the flat and -10 for Biden and -30 for Trump in the slope. So, the swapping of votes was three or four times more favorable for Biden than for Trump but, Stand-Up guy says they’re the same.
So right from GO, Stand-Up guy lies and misrepresents. He also conveniently changed the scale and shifted the y-axis on the plots to make them “look” the same even though they were very different. The swapping on Biden’s was mostly positive. The swapping on Trumps was mostly negative. And Stand-Up guy says they’re the same. This is all within the first minute.
As I’ve stated in other comments, Matt Parker is an honest and scrupulous mathematician. He was not lying at any point in his video. He may have made mistakes, but he will be the first to admit so when pointed out to him.
Matt is neither of the left nor the right, as far as I’ve been able to tell after at least seven years of watching him on YouTube. At the least, he never allows his politics to show through in his work. There is no justification for maligning him about this or, as far as I’m concerned, about anything else.
Not everything said by someone who you disagree with is a lie. As someone on the side of the good guys, I would hope you realize and admit that. We’re the honest ones, remember?
I’m willing to take your word for it with regards to Stand-Up-Math, but (and I’m speaking generally here) even though we are the good guys, we need to keep Bill’s oft quoted WW2 anectdote in mind and shouldn’t be afraid to jump in the mud when the situation calls for it. The John McCains and Mitt Romneys of the world have shown us what playing the impotent nice guy gets us.
Definitely. The whole notion of “don’t sink to their level” is invalid. The bad guys serve the wrong and in so doing have surrendered the right to have those they attack respond via the so-called “moral high ground.” It is moral and necessary to defeat the bad guys in such a way that they can never repeat their wrongdoing. If they’re trying to kill you or yours, wipe them out. (Screw “Just War Theory.” Just win.) If they steal from you, use all force necessary to make them pay back what’s been stolen. If they lie to you, crush them with overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that they’ve done so, no holds barred.
Make certain that you’re in the right, then respond at the level that fits the crime. But overwhelmingly so. Don’t be nice. Don’t forgive until justice has been done and they’ve proved that they can be trusted again. Move on from wrongs done to you, don’t carry them with you every day for the rest of your life, but remember.
Mike, this is not the way I want to get to know you so, I’m sorry, but you made a number of assertions in your comment to me that I believe to be unfounded.
Working backwards in your post, I did not say that everything said by someone I disagree with is a lie. What I did was select one particular thing that I consider to be a lie or a misrepresentation. I did not simply assert this position. I provided detail to explain why I believe it to be a lie or misrepresentation. Essentially, I explained that Stand-Up guy took two objects that were very different from each other and claimed that they were the same. I know that sometimes things can be different and yet still the same, depending on the context or relevance of the issue. However, in this case differences were quite relevant to the context of the issue yet he assured us that they were the same. I’m sorry, but in a purely objective sense, Stand-Up guy’s statement was a lie or at the very least, a misrepresentation. Plus, I gave testable reasons why I believe it to be so.
You can say that Stand-Up guy is not left or right. That is an opinion to which you are certainly entitled. You can also assert (without proof) that Stand-Up guy NEVER allows politics to show through his work. Again, you’re entitle to your opinion. But then you assert that there is no justification for maligning him. I have to draw the line there because I am entitled to my opinion also. Plus, I gave easily testable reasons why I believe Stand-Up guy did, indeed, lie or mislead.
You can also assert that Stand-Up guy is honest and scrupulous and that he was not lying at any point in his video. Again, an opinion to which I beg to differ and I gave detailed reasons, which are testable, to explain why I differ.
Finally, I’m not convinced that Stand-Up guy isn’t left or right. The reason I say that is because the video in question was Stand-Up guy’s attempt to dispute statistical evidence of election irregularities. Interestingly, his previous video (regarding Benford’s Law) was *also* an attempt to dispute statistical evidence of election irregularities. Coincidence? Stand-Up guy is just fine with all the irregularities. So I have my doubts.
By the way, I’m Paul. I’ve a PhD in theoretical atomic physics and more than 40 years experience in data anaylsis and software development. Nice to meet you.
Very well. But everything you accuse him of lying about, for example the surplus of Biden votes, he explicitly notes. He also invites counterarguments and that he will gladly accept being wrong if shown to be so, rather than trying to claim that he is incontrovertibly correct.
Also note that in another comment I supported that he made a fundamental error in his calculations, so I don’t just take his word on things. But nor do I assume he must be lying.
Again, Matt might be mistaken but I am certain he’s not lying. I have never observed anything about his character that indicates to me that he’s a liar. So we’re going to disagree about this.
My own bona fides are a 40 year career in infotech, primarily in software design but with significant work in data analysis. Nice to meet you, too. 🙂
Confession:
I wrote both of my comments *before* seeing Shiva’s 2nd video and after seeing only *one minute* of Stand-Up guy’s video.
However, the reason I stopped after only one minute of Stand-Up guy’s video is because, in that first minute, it was clear to me that his (Stand-Up guy) graphs supported Shiva’s position, yet Stand-Up guy presented them as disputing Shiva position.
Clearly, the left side of Stand-Up guy’s Biden plot represents about 20% of republican votes going to Biden. The right hand side of the Trump plot (which is the same as Shiva’s plot) shows (on average, since it’s sloped) about 20% of republican votes going to Biden. Yet Stand-Up guy presented those two plots as being the same and claimed that Biden’s votes exhibited the same behavior as Trumps. But the graphs clearly show a bias – a strong bias – in favor of Biden.
I had to stop there because I couldn’t stomach a whole video of intellectual gymnastics trying to prove that up is down when right from the start it was clear that Stand-Up guy’s data supported Shiva.
Anyway, I have to plead ignorance for the majority of Stand-Up guy’s video. I just can’t stomach to watch it. So that’s my full-disclosure confession.
I shall repeat myself … (reference https://billwhittlecom.wpenginepowered.com/dr-shiva-has-a-critic/#comment-23940)
Actually, Matthew Parker is a reputable mathematician, who I, like Michael Piz, have been listening to for several years. Let me be very clear, I voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020; however, brazen declarations without substance do not a valid argument make.
Like Dr. Shiva and his colleagues, I am also an engineer with more than 25 years of software development and data analysis experience, and I can definitively state that Mattt’s simple algebraic assessment of the the artificial gradient modification demonstrates the fallacy in Dr. Shiva’s analysis: the correlations between raw data (x-axis) and normalized data (y-axis) are not definitive proof of fraud. This is a common statistical error in my experience. In fact, as Matt Parker derived, the following equation
(y-x)=(m-1)x+b
can be further manipulated to apply any arbitrary slope by changing the “1” to a variable as follows:
(y-x)=(m-a)x+b
Thus, the slope of Dr. Shiva’s “correlation” can represent any line in quadrant 1 and 4 of the x-y plane by varying “a” from negative infinity to positive infinity.
If you don’t believe me, then you need to find someone, whom you trust, with a fundamental understanding of basic highschool-level linear algebra and curve fitting techniques.
Do I believe that election fraud did not occur? The answer is unequivocally, “NO.” However, the election data analysis by Dr. Shiva and his colleagues is flawed, and its promotion as unassailable truth is equally fraudulent.
In short, I have not yet seen any data and/or analysis that proves that the fraud, which I believe occurred, actually occurred. However, my beliefs and suspicions are not valid forms of proof … and neither are anyone else’s.
You (and anyone else with your background and expertise who isn’t a hack) have my apologies if you took any offense to my original post. That said, did you get the chance to listen to Dr. Shiva’s response? If so, what do you think of it?
I apologize for the delay, but I had other priorities today.
First: Nothing about your post was offensive. I was merely attempting to point out that there are different and valid observations that draw different conclusions from the same data.
Second, full disclosure: I have not reproduced any of the analysis that has been presented by either Dr. Shiva or Matt Parker — rather I am commenting solely upon the presentations as given.
Third: I make no aspersions about Dr. Shiva’s qualifications; however, his second video reminds me of the beginnings of a playground pissing contest.
Finally: Like many claim of Matt Parker, I may be a “hack” because, aside from being a U.S. taxpayer, I have no financial stake in this discussion. 😉
OMG! Dr. Shiva is hard to take in this second round. Most of the following assessment reflects my distaste for how this man communicates with other intelligent, highly-educated people.
TLDR; Please forgive the rambling nature of the text below
In Dr. Shiva’s second video, he makes many assertions about the “art” of signal detection and he attempts to discredit critiques of his work based solely upon his “experience in the field” as a contrast to others’ lack of said experience. This is a disingenuous argument that is based solely upon an attitude of condescension, and I find such bases to be intellectually offensive. In fact His second presentation reminds me of a strutting peacock with feathers in full display (bah!), which made it very difficult to listen to it all. Such intellectual offenses often cause me to disregard an entire presentation, but I persisted for the sake of review.
The most significant take-away from Matt Parker’s rebuttal is the point that Dr. Shiva did not originally present the same “signal detection” methods (Dr. Shiva’s term) applied to both major candidate’s vote counts in the four analyzed counties. This represents what I interpret as information suppression, upon which I place no assumptions of either good or bad intent, just obfuscation.
To me, the most significant take-away from Dr. Shiva’s first presentation is the identification of how the vote tallies are stored as doubles (i.e., double precision floating point numbers). This is a red flag, because a vote tally does not require a fractional (e.g., decimal) portion.
In Dr. Shiva’s second presentation, he emphasized the weighted race feature of the voting machines. He also emphasized an R-squared analysis, which was provided by a different contributor. Neither of these features were NOT initially presented as the fundamental basis for the conclusions of first presentation. I find this to be a technical flaw in his first presentation. In my opinion, he should have started his whole discussion with the technical information and methodologies he provided in the second video.
Conclusions:
There are lots of extraneous words (i.e., EKG anaologies, personal election campaign experience, etc.) and hand waving, and Dr. Shiva spend too much time repeatedly disparaging any critiques as uneducated and childish. BAH!
In short Dr. Shiva’s failure to completely communicate his analysis and subsequent conclusions are, in his mind, a justification to condescend others while presenting the missing information. In the academic environment, this is the pure definition of an “ass.”
In my opinion, a scientist or engineer should be his own strongest critic, and Dr. Shiva displays insufficient humility to qualify as such. Rather than continually condescending critical reviews of his original presentation, Dr. Shiva should have acknowledged that it was insufficient and humbly presented the additional detail of the second — especially the R-squared analysis near the end.
In spite of his denials, he is an arrogant MIT professor who thinks he is more intelligent than all of the approximately 10 million viewers he originally targeted. This “feature” makes him very difficult to heed. BAH! This is also one of the undesirable features of Donald Trump.
Other than repeatedly disparaging his critics, changing his story from the first presentation to the second and describing some obvious potential for fraud as features of the voting machines, he has not proven any election fraud in this analysis. However, he has provided some interesting data behavior and some good “Path Forward” recommendations at t=1:13:30 that are worth further investigation.
Dr. Shiva’s hubris was extremely difficult to ignore during this second video. In spite of any technical merit apparent in the second presentation, I think I will now go vomit.
Thanks for the detailed analysis! It was very insightful and I appreciate you taking the time to post it.
One thing I’ll add is that I’m willing to cut Dr. Shiva some slack on his snarky comments about mathematicians. He was extremely respectful in his first video and the math guy’s video is not only full of condescending remarks, but various commentators and twitter users came back to him with typical Internet bilge all while maintaining a thin veneer of intellectualism by speaking in the name of mathematics. I’m not one who subscribes to the notion that someone simply needs to “sit there and take it” when their name is getting dragged through the mud. I wish Dr. Shiva could have spoken less broadly with his own personal attacks, but I get where he’s coming from.
Fair enough.
Obviously, I didn’t sense the same level of snarkiness or obnoxiousness in Matt Parker’s commentary as I did and Dr Shiva’s reply. (EDIT: Perhaps this is because I perceive Matt Parker’s intentions to add the entertainment and humor to math discussions; whereas, Dr. Shiva does not.) I also did not read any other commentaries about Dr. Shiva’s first video.
People can be nasty, but retaliating in kind does not add to one’s credibility in a technical discussion. In fact, the opposite can be true — consider my initial reactions as an objective listener in which I wanted to do nothing more than turn Dr Shiva’s video off. If that’s a typical reaction, then one’s audience will obviously diminished.
I’ve been following Matt Parker for years on both Numberphile and Stand-Up Maths and he’s an honest, intelligent guy who knows more about math and how to present it to non-experts than just about anybody.
I am certain that he presented his numbers as he best saw them and not with any political agenda. I have no idea what his politics are because I have never seen or heard him bring them up.
Disagree with his mathematical conclusions if you will but personal attacks are entirely unwarranted.
I probably shouldn’t have issued any personal attacks, but I’m getting so sick and tired of being told “nothing to see here” by the lying and dishonest media that I ended up lumping him in with the rest of the riffraff. If he truly is stand up guy, he has my apologies.
While yes he is a stand up guy from what I’ve seen, just to clarify, the title of his channel I don’t think is “Stand-up Maths” because of that. He does some like math comedy stuff so I believe his title is in reference to stand up comedy and not him being a “stand up guy” in the typical moral sense.
Yes, that’s always been clear.
To be fair, Matt wasn’t exactly lacking in unwarranted insults and snarky attitude, either. That was the reason I struggled to get through his video. Not that I really fault anyone for doing it. People, including the highly educated, tend to default to tribalism when they think they can one-up their “opponents.”
I also quite enjoy Matt Parker and have followed him for a long time, but I think he made a mistake in his math in that video. Between the 15-16 minute marks he breaks down the equation for a slope.
y=mx+b
But then he says that Dr Shiva’s y line is actually y-x. So he (Matt) subtracts an x from both sides…
y-x=mx+b-x
Which he then solves for y as y=(m-1)x+b and shows how that can create a negative line.
but if he’s substituting y for y-x shouldn’t he have only put the -x on one side?
Using a different letter to make this clearer.
z=mx+b and z=y-x
then it should be:
y-x=mx+b
And solving for y yields
y=(m+1)x+b
which would mean instead of a downward sloping line, you would expect a stronger upward line.
I commented on his video asking about why he subtracted x from both sides, but I’ll be surprised if I get a response (not because I expect Matt Parker to avoid the question, but there were 7811 comments on the video when I made mine, and I expect it’s hard for him to read, let alone reply to, every comment).
I think you’re correct about that. But what might be more important is that all that part of Matt’s analysis shows is that if you plot two different sets of data (x,y) and (x,z) where the x values are the same in both cases and y and z are different (i.e. the original y values in one case and the y – x values in the other), the plots will have different slopes.
Well duh, right?
(Yeah, I know it won’t be obvious to everyone. That’s OK, I’m only talking about people who have a decent understanding of math, not those who have difficulty with it.)
(P.S. Brits, it’s math, not maths. Silly limeys. 😉)
Matt is absolutely correct, though, that subtracting percentages as in Dr Shiva’s video is the wrong thing to do. I’d have to go back and watch again to figure out if Matt’s alternative is the right thing to do but, whatever the right thing is, Dr Shiva’s method is mistaken.
I’d also like to add that when I originally commented here I hadn’t seen Matt’s video. In that comment, I was defending him based on years of seeing his other videos and my impression of him based on that. Now that I’ve seen the video in question here, I can say that Matt completely lives up to my estimation of him. He is in no way whatsoever taking a partisan position and he makes no political comments at all. More importantly, he advocates for exactly the correct approach, which is to analyze your own work to look for faults and to present it with the expectation that others will do the same, and to welcome that analysis no matter which way it goes. That’s simply the honest, scientific way to do things and Matt has always adhered to that.
I agree with everything you state here — especially the “Silly limeys” bit.
Matt subracted the “x” from both sides of the algebraic equation so that the equation’s solution is unchanged. This is a simple algebraic trick to put the unaltered equation into a different form.
That algebraic trick is what you do to simplify an equation, yes. (and I did something similar once I had the y-x=mx+b) part of the equation, but I think his use of it where he did it was a mistake. if the vertical graph is y-x instead of y, only the left side of the equation should have gotten a -x, as this is a substitution of one variable for another (set of variables), instead of simplifying the equation. I did enough math (and then some!) in high school and college to know how to substitute the values from one equation into another, and it looks to me like that was what Matt meant to do, but he then got into reflex and added a -x on the other side of the equation when he shouldn’t have.
Which is why I asked him about it, but again, not really hopeful of a response. If I do happen to get one, I’ll share it here.
That’s how I saw it, too.
The algebric trick is also used to transform an equation in a way that does not change its solution(s). I believe the point that Matt was attempting to make is summarized in the follow graphic (assuming the attachment feature still work here), which plots (y-x) versus x after the rearrangement is done. I leave it to you to interpret the graphic’s information.