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Notes -
In concert with the other top-level discussions of betting, how about a topic which will definitely be uncontroversial:
Will Trump survive his full term?
No, I’m not talking about assassination. Curve-fitting the 4/45 former Presidents killed in office, the 4/59 terms ended by assassins, or the 4/236 years with assassinations? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s time for actuarial tables.
The President is 78 years and 7 months old. This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.
But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke. He’s not a smoker, reducing various cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. He doesn’t drink, which further reduces his cancer and stroke risk but somehow raises his overall risk. Some of these factors, like cancer, are going to be mitigated by the planet’s best medical care. (You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.) Others are harder to screen or treat. I have no idea how to assess them holistically, and further data are welcome.
Still. 24% chance that this Presidency ends with conspiracy theories about stroke guns.
Fred Trump (Donald's father) live to 93 and Mary Trump (Donald's mother) lived to 88. Going back through the Trump family tree, many of his ancestors had higher than average lifespans. Considering Donald doesn't drink or smoke and that he walks and moves around very regularly, I find it highly doubtful that he kicks the bucket before his term is up.
It’s not probable, but still, President of the United States is by far the most lethal job you can legally have.
Statistically, there’s a nearly 10% chance you’ll be killed (not merely die; be killed!)
Trump would be safer working as a RedBull stuntman than working his current job.
Interesting way of looking at it. Now with that said, don’t you think the president of Haiti or some other third world country would be an even more lethal job?
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Watch this video of Trump powering through a round of Golf (and I do mean POWERING) and tell me you think this is a guy with failing health for his age:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Rb9b8rYhII?si=rFfmT-27t6uw2Mk1
Okay, don't watch the whole thing, it is an hour long, but skip to any random segment and see if it looks like he's having any physical difficulties.
I'd take the other side of any bet of Trump dying of natural causes in four years.
Yes he might experience a sharp decline, but the medical care on tap should stave off almost any plausible cause of death past his term.
In contrast, watch this video of Trump sound like a lunatic or of this video where he talks about "itchy" heaters. He's clearly suffered a pretty significant mental decline since 2016.
even taken out of the context of question or earlier part of this answer, he's explaining why he prefers gas heaters to electric ones which cause you to "itch" if you're sitting close to them, especially if they're radiating against naked skin
how is this evidence of mental decline at all? I can find a similar sort of clip from 2016-2020 and neither example is evidence of anything mentally deficient at all
It's his declining ability to make a coherent point. Age-related declines often exacerbate existing deficiencies, like what we've seen with Biden. Trump has always rambled and gone off script, but he used to at least be understandable without reading the tea leaves to understand what he means by "the Biden circles".
For further evidence, watch his debate performances in the 2016 primary, then watch his debate against Harris in 2024 right after. The dude has lost more than a decent step.
He is making a coherent point. The guy he's criticizing is pushing electric appliances while working to make electric more expensive and also those electric appliances are worse compared to their gas counterparts all in the context of a world where we're going to need vastly more electricity.
He is understandable. His rambling answer is coherent. This rambling statement is more coherent than half of current sitting US Senators could manage in recent confirmation hearings or in the face of even basic hostile questions from media. You can watch hours of Trump answering questions about all sorts of topics from hostile media in coherent ways.
edit: Talking about mental decline or health and speaking about Trump and Biden in the same category is just ridiculous. Biden was mentally deficient in 2020. He wasn't losing a step from 2016, he was already falling down the cliff. Biden rarely did any statements, even more rarely answered any questions from media, and when he did he had preplanned questions and answers written out on printouts for him to read off of to specific media people. Biden looked like he was focusing all of his mental energy on picking his feet up when walking so he didn't do the dementia shuffle.
In comparison to Trump, he's answered more questions total (and not preplanned screened ones) in his first week than Biden answered fake questions in his entire administration. Taking these sorts of comments and their intended implications from people, and I don't know if you were one, who were making excuses and covering for Joe Biden for five years is just over the top. If you weren't criticizing the obvious mental issues of Joe Biden in 2020 or his clear decline from even that low throughout "his" administration, I struggle to believe honest questions/concerns about Trump in 2025.
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Maybe its just because I'm calibrated on Joe Biden, but that seems well within normal range for Trump even in his first term.
Back then he'd make the occasional "covfefe" tweet or ramble on a weird topic for a bit.
The hour long video gives me a stronger sense of his health than the little snippets, either way.
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Yup. The major plausible (natural) causes of death at his age are cardiovascular disease and cancer. His habits indicate he's a relatively low risk for heart disease, so I'd be a little surprised to see a heart attack or stroke out of the blue, but even with cancer there's commonly much less than a year between "no symptoms whatsoever" and "medical investigation reveals tumor(s)". In the cancer cases I've been close to, at most there's been a subtle weird symptom that perfect hindsight would have looked at sooner (declining aerobic stamina that turned out to be lung tumors, in a smoker who didn't exercise and so didn't realize the low stamina was unusual; constipation that turned out to be a huge prostate tumor, in someone who had a poor low-fiber diet and didn't think much of the problem until it got very bad). In other cases, sometimes the decline has been as sharp as someone feeling perfectly fine one minute, then knocked unconscious by effects of their big brain tumor the next minute.
Age adjusted cancer death rates have dropped in half over the past 70 years, but a lot of that was the reduction in smoking, so medically staving off 50% of cancer is probably an upper bound. Effectively curing nearly half of cancers is pretty awesome, but the other half are still a real threat. 24% would be an overestimate for someone in above-average health, but give me 10:1 odds instead of 4:1 and between cancer and assassination I'd take the "President Vance" side of that bet.
We need a younger bench of politically interested and competent people, for this among many other reasons. It'll be interesting to see if either party manages to pull that off. I would have guessed the Democrats had the best chance, expected due to voter demographic breakdowns and indicated when they elected AOC at 29, but this week Wired is whining about "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover" (not-the-bee link, so you don't give Wired ad dollars for that) and I guess it's not impossible that this could end up a culture war issue polarized in the opposite direction instead.
There's a huge store of untapped talent in nerdy young men who will work wonders for the low low price of not being the side that kicks them in the teeth and spits on them.
Maybe it's possible to set up a "neutral vs liberal" situation, where you get to draw from the entire talent pool that isn't part of the "queer black girls in STEM" internship and scholarship system. Find the Asian guy who still got into Harvey Mudd, or the 1600SAT white guy at Cowpoke State U. who won a competition to decipher ancient burnt scrolls, and be the first person to reward them for their abilities or give them a compliment that isn't low-key accusing them of stealing recognition from "marginalized groups."
(Does anyone have that old quote from the guy whose school tried to disqualify him from some award because they didn't want to celebrate a white boy when there was a perfectly good Marginalized one they'd rather give it to?)
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The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...
This sounds like one of the only ways in which Musk could become president considering his birthplace, Shadow President Musk.
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Sounds like the average American to me. Not actually joking - life expectancy already factors in the fact that most Americans are overweight/obese.
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Conspiracy facts.
Real talk, I seriously doubt that you could fire frozen shellfish toxin out of a gun and actually hit and penetrate the target. I suspect this thing is bullshit or a "goat ESP" tier CIA project Which is not to say that they didn't have another heart attack gun that actually worked...
Rock salt rounds can absolutely penetrate exposed skin, and halite has worse material properties than ice.
(this says nothing about accuracy)
Rock salt doesn't usually melt at room temperature.
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Supposedly there were other microtoxin assassination tools developed by the Soviets and British. An umbrella that shoots out very tiny spheres covered in deadly toxins. Shove the umbrella tip into someone to activate it and they are doomed.
This thing must have had a very short range and the scope is unnecessary. But in principle a close range toxin-laden sprayer is feasible.
The ricin-injector umbrella was very much real (one of the scientists involved in the investigation taught me at Cambridge) and used by the Bulgarians to assassinate Georgi Markov in London. A KGB defector later told us the unsurprising fact that the Soviets built it for the Bulgarians.
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I picked "stroke" for this exact reason.
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The chemicals are making the frogs gay, too.
Back in college I read an article in the student paper about research from the school showing that agricultural runoff is feminizing male fish. It's a real problem.
Years later I hear Alex Jones clips about the chemicals turning the frogs "bisexual". I get he is right in a larger sense, but he means "intersexed".
Yes, atrazine causes hermaphroditic mutations in amphibians. I'm aware of the actual reality, but I think Alex Jones saying "they're turning the frogs gay" is close enough to the truth to excuse its inaccuracy in favor of the sheer shock value.
Also, I enjoy demonstrating that I know what atrazine is, that I know what it does to amphibians, and I still prefer the AJ description.
As for bisexual, hermaphroditic, transsexual, intersexed, gay, well. The leftists have deliberately conflated all of these, and lumped them together. That's what makes the quip work.
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Degree of veracity aside (a small motte in a giant bailey) Alex Jones essentially doesn't care about pollution or about frogs, or about gays. His call to action isn't that we should lobby our governments to fund environmental monitoring agencies, it's that we should send him $200 for a one month supply of proprietary pressed corn starch pills. If anything the gayer the frogs get the more money he can make.
Yes, Alex Jones is selling overpriced gold and supplements. But are the frogs, in fact, gay?
Do you care about pollution or frogs? I do, and I don't want my drinking water to be polluted with atrazine.
Me too but the conspiracy theory isn't about pollution or frogs. The conspiracy theory is that I wouldn't be gay if the government would leave me alone.
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Trans, really.
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Trump also drinks lots of coke, which interviews with centenarians indicate has life extending properties.
This is true, and @j0nahfun on Twitter explained the virility-enhancing properties as well:
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The question that falls out of this is 'What would an inherited JD Vance presidency look like?'
I think JD would roughly follow the mandate of Trump, but I don't think he would be as bombastic and aggressive in his negotiations. This would effectively lower the amount of change in America as a result of the presidency.
I think we’d see more technocratic social conservatism but probably also more immigration.
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The deepest. Yuge.
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Income has a large (and shockingly linear) correlation to life expectancy. I checked that data vs other sources, but the linked graph is pretty and seems accurate. Not sure how it effects the yearly mortality other than decreasing it in Trumps case.
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I'm still waiting for the mea culpas for all the people on this very forum who said that Trump was old and demented like Biden. (If you were one of those people, it might be worth considering how you arrived at that conclusion.)
In any case, I wouldn't rely on actuarial calculators. People who are near death often look and act like it. Obviously the odds of Trump kicking over from a coronary event are non-zero, but the calculators are a crude estimate and crucially include people who are already dying of diabetes, cancer, etc.. The 6% of 78 year olds who die every year include a lot of people who are already on their death bed or have terminal cancer, etc... The death rate for a healthy individual is much, much lower. Plus, Trump is almost certainly on statins.
So 24% is a naive and bad estimate. My guess is that we could train an AI to do a much better job than antique calculators just by watching a video of someone speaking for a couple minutes.
I'd give equal odds to him being assassinated as to dying from natural causes, say roughly 8% each.
Those seem like pretty plausible numbers. I agree that he’s definitely not in the bottom 6% of health. He’s not even close on weight; he’s like 60th, 70th percentile. So not the highest risk for cardiovascular. And I expect screening to rule out all sorts of possible stealth risks.
I wonder what the actuarial tables look like for sudden death. I don’t know how I’d search for that.
Assassination risk is a whole different ball game. He’s probably more hated that any president since…Nixon? But that’s only loosely coupled with actual assasssination attempts. It’s also not a good predictor of defensive measures. Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…
I would sincerely hope so. It keeps getting glossed over in these discussions, but I still haven't seen anything remotely like an adequate explanation of the events surrounding the Butler assassination attempt, and barring some extremely rigorous explanations or an ironclad paper trail detailing how the Secret Service has been an elaborate bluff all along, "the secret service intentionally attempted to allow an assassination of a presidential candidate" seems to me the the most likely explanation.
I’d put money against it being intentional. You’d need 1) a conspiracy in the SS which 2) acts once and only once and 3) gets lots of people fired but not charged with treason.
No, I think they probably hit a common failure mode in project management. It’s easy to skimp on testing scenarios which are rare, even if they’re really critical. Presidential assassins are rare, and FPOTUS assassins even more so. I would bet they got complacent and didn’t do the kind of training or testing they’d need to actually secure the site.
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I’ve seen some pictures of Trump’s detail lately and they definitely look like real secret service agents, unlike the motley crew from last summer.
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Humans make errors. Occam's razor is our friend here--no need to go the conspiratorial route when evidence doesn't exist for it.
citing occams razor in the domain of politics is foolish when being pretending to be retarded is the ultimate way to get plausible deniability.
That is irrational when a perfectly good explanation exists for why it was human error. If you think it was something else, the burden of proof rests with you to make that case with evidence.
Until then, its hitchen's razor for me.
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I'm still waiting. The evidence as I understand it is that the Secret Service sniper had the assassin in his sights and not only allowed him to fire multiple shots, but only fired after a non-sniper engaged the assassin and disabled his rifle.
He thought the guy could very well be a local cop -- how stupid would he feel if the headline was "trigger happy SS agent brains local cop during Trump speech". Career ending.
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That is because that building was supposed to be under the care of the local police, it was actually their headquarters.
It was not clear who that person was until shots were fired. And communications were sorted out.
Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity/ineptitude.
So from my watching some of the hearings with the SS head right after the assassination attempt, I absolutely believe that this could be explained by stupidity/ineptitude. But all your point does is move things back a step. Why did the SS believe that the roof of that building was secured by the local police, when it evidently wasn't? Part of the SS's responsibilities in collaborating with local law enforcement is to make sure that the local police are given responsibilities that they're capable of fulfilling. Evidently, the local police weren't capable of securing the roof of that building, and SS was ignorant of this. This seems like gross incompetence to me, but I can understand the perspective that this level of incompetence is so high as to make it reasonable to suspect actual malice.
Cross department communication has always been an issue. It is also how 9/11 slipped through our intelligence agency's fingers. There were individuals that knew that something was up, but they were disregarded by their superiors, or had difficultly communicating in a clear way cross-departmentally what was going on.
To answer your question, SS thought that building was secured by the local police because that building was the local police's staging ground and HQ. They assumed (very bad decision in hindsight), that the local police's HQ would be locked down by them and it wasn't.
Local police departments make routine errors pretty frequently on a variety of assignments and they made a big one here. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
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That's terrible advice when there's lots of malice around (like there is now).
Ok then make the case, with evidence, of why it was some sort of malicious conspiracy.
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Huh. I thought the rifle was destroyed by one of the sniper’s shots.
This is one of those things which SHOULD have continued to get public attention, but has been swept under the rug since November, if not earlier.
My understanding is that the rifle was destroyed by a shot from one of the local police officers on the ground.
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This is kinda what I think, too - although of course the actuarial tables are interesting, Trump seems very active and I think he's unlikely to just tip over. Plus, he seemed to handle the first term fairly well.
I will say that I did get the impression that he was older during the debates. But I wouldn't be surprised if he makes it to 90.
Looking at his family members might be interesting:
Now, the internet assures me that lifestyle, not DNA, is the most important part of longevity, so this is a dodgy guide at best. But it seems to me that Trump already survived his version of the bird flue and isn't likely to die of alcoholism. He inherited his father's spot at the top of the Trump empire - if he takes after his mother and father (and grandmother) he'll be golden.
Can't get better than that if you seek longevity.
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Yeah, there's a very decent change he simply drops dead of natural causes at some point in the next 4 years. Given that many of his most ardent supporters are conspiracy-mongers, there's a good chance they'll say his death was "organized by the deep state" or something like that, actuarial tables be damned. A lot of it will depend on the optics: if he just randomly dies in his sleep with minimal warning like Scalia did, conspiracies will fly. If instead his illness is known beforehand, then there will be less of that.
The problem is that as a strongman, he'll want to avoid mentioning any illnesses if possible. He couldn't get away without mentioning he had COVID, but he could plausibly sweep other chronic issues under the rug if they don't impact his physical appearance. Thankfully, Trump is a buffoon who hires people who gladly leak things as a matter of palace intrigue, so there's a decent chance that any long-term illnesses will be known, I hope.
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Based on the SSN actuarial tables, it's a cumulative chance of death of 22.42%.
Sure, but that’s including the morbidly obese(trump is fat, but not morbidly obese), those with serious preexisting conditions, heavy smokers, etc. A basically healthy 78 year old has a much lower chance of death.
I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts. Presumably the unhealthier you are the more likely you are to die early, which would imply that the older you get the fewer people are left your age who made bad lifestyle decisions Healthwise. I have no idea how that shakes out in practice though, maybe you don't see that effect happening until you get into the 80s or 90s.
The point is that a lot of people who die each year already look like they are about to die and Trump doesn't.
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That’s what I was looking at. Number of lives at 83 over number at 79 should be percent surviving.
How’d you figure?
I was not as clever as you and simply took the probability of surviving each year from ages 78-81 and multiplied them. That gave me a combined probability of survival to age 82 of 77.58%.
I guess the entire difference is down to if you should index by 78 or 79 then. The table is on "Exact age," so I guess @netstack was right to use 79. He even rounded down from there to "about 24%" from 24.6%, so it probably is about right interpolating. As the comments above point out, additional factors probably are more important at that level of accuracy already though.
I actually have to deal with these tables for work, and you'd calculate by 78 or their stated age. At least that's how the professional economists do it for expert reports. If you graph it it's easy to see why — the probability doesn't follow a set function but wanders based on extrinsic factors and random variation. For example, a newborn's chances of dying in the next year are the equivalent of a 50 year old man's. But it drops sharply after one year and continues dropping until age 8, when it starts permanently rising. There's then a jump around age 16, probably due to driving (and poorly at that), etc. In other words, it's derived from actual data. And the actual data can't be granular down to the day because it would be a nightmare to calculate and would probably end up wonky because of limited sample size (how many people aged 17 and 301 days die in a given year?) So they base the data on anyone who is a given age, even if they may be nearly a year apart. So if you're 78 and 240 days then your probability is what it is for 78, full stop, no rounding up. On your 79th birthday you use the higher number.
A probability density function does not have to be transcendental to be able to integrate for a cumulative probability. I have no way of knowing what convention you use for work, and there might be good reasons to use a left hand rule numerical integration for your application, but there is nothing magically more correct about a left hand rule integration. Probability of death is strictly increasing by the time you reach 78. If you use the left hand rule to integrate over a region where a function is monotonically increasing, you will systematically underestimate the area under the curve.
With respect to the Social Security Actuarial Life Tables, it is in fact meaningful to talk about regions between nodes. The numbers in the table are not raw population deaths. In fact part of the methodology for producing the table in the first place is reconciling five year central death rates and exact age one year probabilities. Once you have meaningful nodes 365 days apart you are not dealing with a sampling problem if you want to estimate a value at 301 days—you are dealing with an interpolation problem. They do anticipate people using the table for intra-node calculation. From the methodology notes:
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I was also surprised the number was that large, but also got 24.6% both taking the ratio of "Number of lives" and the complement of the product of the complement "Death probabilities."
Interestingly, in the notes they include cause-specific ultimate rates of reduction, so you could exclude the violence category if you are only considering health related causes.
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