Familes Belong Together

In Washington, D.C., today, 35,000 demonstrators braved 96-degree temperatures to march on the White House and send a crystal-clear message: Families Belong Together. There were 30,000 participants in New York, 60,000 in Chicago, more than 70,000 in Los Angeles, and huge turnouts from Orlando, Florida, to Austin, Texas, to Boise, Idaho. We were everywhere.

More than 750 cities. One message. This is what it looks like when a nation speaks with one voice.

The past few weeks have been excruciating. We've learned about unspeakable abuses being perpetrated in our name. And at the same time, the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim Ban, which keeps yet more families separated. A Supreme Court retirement means fundamental rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community—among others are now on the line for a generation.

And for the thousands of parents and children in cages, not knowing if they'd ever see their family members again, it was, and remains, infinitely worse.

But today was a ray of hope.

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP prediction was for a 6 hour period beginnig at 11:00 Eastern time (the event is rather US-centric, though I believe people around the world are interested.) The result is a generally positive trend in the data, with a terminal accumulation of a bit more than one stamdard deviation. More than twice the average across the formal database.

Interpretation

The following graph is a visual display of the statistical result. It shows the second-by-second accumulation of small deviations of the data from what’s expected. Our prediction is that deviations will tend to be positive, and if this is so, the jagged line will tend to go upward. If the endpoint is positive, this is evidence for the general hypothesis and adds to the bottom line. If the endpoint is outside the smooth curve showing 0.05 probability, the deviation is nominally significant. If the trend of the cumulative deviation is downward, this is evidence against the hypothesis, and is subtracted from the bottom line. For more detail on how to interpret the results, see The Science and related pages, as well as the standard caveat below.

Standard caveat

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every success might be largely driven by chance, and every null might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.