One of the more annoying things about the US election;as if it were at all possible to list all the annoying things in one sopt is the inability of journalists to understand basic statistics. Consider the
graphic below which I snipped from the site FiveThirtyEight
Most are interpreting this as a lock for the Clinton campaign, after all it has to be because 69.9% is larger than 30%. In talking about probabilities it is often instructive to use examples that people might be able to relate to. Imagine you were playing a game of Russian Roulette. Its a simple game were you load a single round into a revolver and spin the chamber, you then point the gun at your head and pull the trigger. You have a 1/6 chance of blowing your head off. Lets assume that you are playing a more advanced version were you load two rounds separately into the gun and spin the chamber. The odds of blowing your head off is now 2/6 or 33% – this roughly equates to the chance above of a Trump victory.
The question you need to ask yourself is do you feel confident enough on the basis of this change in probability to pull the trigger. My guess is you dont, even if a 66% chance of not blowing your head off is higher than a 33% chance of blowing your head off.
Lol!
I was pretty miffed when I found out I’d missed Robusta too!
Especially since I’d lost a little trying to get on the other expensive Arabacia bastard thing!
Oh well, such is life…
Yes, we all trust the statistics don’t we..
Just a minor point. Your chance of surviving two rounds of Russian roulette is (5/6)**2 = 0.6944. So it is an even closer comparison.
Or put a different way – if we ran the election 10 times (dear god), Trump would win 3 times. Seems like this is one of those times (dear god again).