Electoral College Decision Tree

Re:Electoral College Decision Tree by roywiggins on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:13PM (#24876088)

The votes coming down to a dead heat doesn't mean that, the day before, they were equally likely to win. Suppose there were 100 possible futures. In 90 of them, Alice wins, by a little or a lot. In 8 of them, Bob barely wins, and in 2, Bob wins comfortably. Maybe this is determined by rigged dice or something, to make it strictly mechanical: there's 100 possibilities, and we know what they are and how they're distributed.

Just because you end up in the 9/100 future doesn't mean that the "real" probability was 50%. It's weak evidence that Bob's win scenarios mostly didn't involve blowouts.

It's like barely winning a sprint against Usain Bolt: maybe he had an injury midway through. Doesn't mean that he and I were equally likely to win.

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Re:Electoral College Decision Tree by bryanlarsen on Saturday October 24, 2020 @03:05AM (#24877491)

The "score" was 1,405,280 to 1,382,536. That was the count in Wisconsin. Looks like a virtual tie to me.

That's the information we have, and it's real, so it's much more valid than any poll which poorly samples a few thousand people.

Maybe it was a fluke result. But that's unlikely because the other Midwestern states had similar results. But a fluke in which direction? You don't know, so it's even odds in both directions.

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