Nate Silver weighs in

Nate Silver has launched his general election forecast page. He gives Hillary about an 80-20 chance of winning. He has a long discussion post about it here. I found this last paragraph interesting, where he relates a 20% chance of winning to a baseball game:

A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chancethat the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about risk. Let’s say your favorite team is in game 7 of the World Series, down by a run in the top of the eighth. The game is insanely late on the east coast as they always are, and you have to do something important early the next morning, like interview for a job or operate heavy machinery. Do you turn the TV off? No, of course not, you stay tuned.

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