JoshNorton:
We can make the numebrs say all sorts of things
Yes, but yours don't work for two reasons:
Seems like 5 of those 13 are no longer in office, so we're down to
16 percent of Pennsylvania state senators confirmed Masons today.
You're making two assumptions here. First, that
only freemasons left office, and all of the non-freemasons stayed in office. This is unlikely.
With 50 total Senators, 13 of whom were freemasons, if 5 freemasons left, and if the ratio is the same...that would imply that roughly 14 of the
non-freemasons also left office over those five years. Or to put it another way, 19/50 of the Senators were no longer in office after five years, and
five of those who left happened to be freemasons. Second, you're not accounting for the fact that all of those Senators who left were replaced by new
Senators, and there's no reason to think that none of the replacements were freemasons.
Since 26% had been Senators up to that point, it seems very unlikely that between 2003 and 2008 only freemasons would leave, and that absolutely no
freemasons would step in to office to fill the 19 vacancies.
Either way, it's all speculation. We have a confirmed figure for 26% as of 2003. If we want a 2008 figure we should probably try to find it rather
than making up numbers.
there's still a disparity between 3% and 20%
...so even assuming that over five years only freemasons leave and no freemasons step in...you still conclude that there are nearly seven times as
many freemasons in the Pennsylvania Senate as you'd expect from even distribution?
Who's side are you arguing for again?
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MOFreemason:
In my local district of over 1,000 members...we don't have a
single local, state, or national politician presently serving.
A counterexample does not contradict a trend. What you're describing probably shouldn't come as any surprise. I'm suggesting that "a lot of
politicians are freemasons" not "a lot of freemasons are politicians."
For example, if you say that "Wow! A fifth of the entire world's population is Chinese! That seems like a lot!" and I then reply with, "I have
over 1,000 people living in my hometown, and none of them are Chinese," my response is really very silly. Both can be true. There's no conflict
between the statements.
we don't have a single local, state, or national politician presently serving.
How many politicians do you think you have living in the area near you? According my my local city hall website, we have a population of 50,000, one
mayor, one mayor pro tem, and three council members. From the numbers we've seen to date, of the groups we've looked at, anywhere from 15-30% of
politicians are freemasons. So if the ratio hold true for local politicians, we'd expect probably one of them to be a freemason. But this obviously
isn't a large enough sample group to mean anything.
Another way to look at it, of our 50,000 people, 5 are politicians. So one in ten thousand people in my city are politicians. You're saying that of
your sample group of one thousand, none are. Ok. But for even one politician to appear in your sample group, he would have to be
ten times as
likely to be a politician as a non-freemason.
Again, sample groups of this size aren't meaningfull.
