Gongol.com Archives: August 2024
August 22, 2024
Outlets like Five Thirty-Eight and The Economist are firing up their predictive models for the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election, especially as the anticipation of the major party conventions is giving way to the mythical shift in public attention that supposedly takes place every Labor Day. But even though the polls and models are nothing more than statistical projections, people want certainty. ■ Matt Glassman of Georgetown's Government Affairs Institute laments, "People keep asking me who's going to win the election and I keep saying it's a coin flip and then they say 'yeah, but who do you *think* is going to win' and I thought about explaining the coin flip prices in what I think but I've decided to just randomize saying Trump or Harris." ■ Americans generally loathe statistical thinking anywhere but in the realm of sports betting. Everywhere else, we congenitally expect certainty (even if it's false certainty) and assume (often correctly) that we'll find an ad-hoc way out of every situation. It's certainly not a new development: Look at how completely unprepared our forebears were for WWII. Our standing military was tiny, even as it was clear the world was burning. But after fundamentally ignoring the risk all the way through bedtime on Dec. 6, 1941, the issue was forced and America mobilized in a way that led to crushing industrial dominance. ■ Similar things could be said even dating back to the Revolutionary War. It's been well-documented that George Washington was anguished by the desperate lack of resources his Continentals faced in trying to defeat the British. We have always tended to believe more in destiny than in odds. ■ To this day, people want investment funds that guarantee a specific retirement age, weather forecasts that are precise to their neighborhoods, and products that never require maintenance. And even though it has quite often worked out for us in the end, it's worth pondering whether we would be a better country if we kept the optimism but squared ourselves better with uncertainty. There's a reason Eagle Scouts often stand out well into adulthood: "Be Prepared" is effectively a countercultural motto. Were we to do a better job of hoping for the best but weighting the odds in case of the worst, perhaps we'd be even better-off than we are today.
