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Just before Trump was elected, Scott wrote a great piece called Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative. In it he talks about how the race between Trump and Hillary was very close, close enough that random fluctuations in opinion or random events like the weather could be the deciding factor in the race. He argues that people shouldn't change their worldview based on whatever the outcome is. I believe I see so many people falling into this trap though. It didn't take long after Trump won for people on all sides to start talking as if it was always inevitable, like "Trump won because he inspired people more and riled up his base, Clinton was an uninspiring candidate playing too safe" or "Trump's victory was inevitable because of the deep history of racism in the country", etc. I feel like (though I'm not sure I can think of examples off the top of my head) even Scott might fall into this trap a little bit.
People even took the victory as an indictment of MSM, since most sources said that Trump had something like a 1% chance of winning. I believe this is illogical, though, because even if he did have a 1% chance of winning, it could have been that 1% chance that caused him to win. It's not like whoever has the highest percent chance at the time of the election is declared the winner.
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election. I think that Scott's article has a good lesson, and it'd do most people good to try to remember it more, before taking the events which have transpired as an indication that only those events could have ever transpired.
Not necessarily. The same logic could hold if the odds were given as a million to one against, or more. At some point, when a predictor says that something is N-to-one unlikely to happen, and it happens anyway, you have to ask whether it's more likely that the N-to-one chance happened, or the predictor was overconfident and the odds were less than N-to-one against.
That's fair. I think you are right that the MSM was probably off here in their estimates either because they underestimated Trump, they wanted desperately to believe that he had no chance, or they wanted to try to influence others in some way to fan the flames of a culture war. Maybe I didn't communicate it well in my post above, or maybe I should have left that one point out of my post. I meant it as a more general point, I guess. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people talk about election probabilities in this way that does not really make sense from a mathematical perspective.
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