Talk:Mierscheid Law

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http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%AF%B8%EC%96%B4%EC%83%A4%EC%9D%B4%ED%8A%B8%EC%9D%98_%EB%B2%95%EC%B9%99

HELP. Have a problem with korean caracters. --Braunbaer 21:45, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 2005?

How did this law hold up in the 2005 election? --Jfruh 18:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)


according to http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1454782,00.html , total German production was roughly 46% in 2004; according to http://www.advfn.com/news_german-steel-producers-see-2005-domestic-production-flat-on-limited-capacity_9433044.html , 2005 was expected to be the same. I have not been able to find either specific numbers for 2005 or West German production, but if these two links presetn valid info and there is a small amount of steel production not being done in the west of Germany (presuming "Western Germany" in the law does not refer to the former, preunification state), it seems that the law held reasonably true. I will look for more info.--128.186.13.112 17:51, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
http://www.stahl-online.de/english/business_and_politics/companies_and_markets/steel_companies_germany.htm shows the distribution of German steel production plants, and indeed, a large portion of them are in the former "western federal states"--i.e. former West Germany. This still requires a lot of assumption, and it would be nice to find a source that has already gotten and compared the numbers, but it seems that this law may have held true in 2005.--128.186.13.112 18:07, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
2005 failed [1]. --Braunbaer 21:20, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Verifiability

I'm a bit worried about verifiability. There's no references (apart from stating that it has been published), only one inbound link, and talks about being written by a hoax person. Googling seemed to come up with a fair few wiki copies. Andjam 14:31, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

There's also a couple of interwiki versions, especially the German one, but still ... Andjam 14:36, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not a hoax. [2], [3], [4] ---Sluzzelin 22:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
is IS an HOAX, but you could say it is an "official" german hoax. 194.76.29.2 09:42, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually, while the person who supposedly found this law is a hoax, the law itself works out reasonably well, better maybe than a lot of the more seriously scientific approaches to vote forecasting in Germany. So is "hoax" the right term for the Mierscheid Law? 62.117.17.217 19:44, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Yes, because whether it is consistently accurate or not, it was started purely as a joke, and at the time was not based on any fact. It goes hand-in-hand with correlation does not imply causation. If Bigfoot turned out to be real, all of those forged photos in the past would still be hoaxes. 68.228.14.125 06:51, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

This article really needs to do a better job of explaining that the Mierscheid Law is just a funny coincidence and indeed a hoax. The law is simply not statistically significant, and is actually quite absurd. While it's possible there could be some non-causative correlative link (for example, higher industrial production both leads to greater support of the SPD and greater steel production), this seems quite unlikely, and isn't even really supported by the data. The fact that this law is not particularly old, and that various people have proposed "corrections" to fix the law only proves that it obviously is meaningless. Anybody can invent laws to fit old sets of data whatever their relation. There is no evidence this law has future predictive power, and in fact, when applied to 2005 elections it failed.Eebster the Great (talk) 03:37, 7 May 2008 (UTC)