Marking beliefs to market
Back in August, I wrote
Trump’s lead isn’t sampling error. He has an eleven percentage point lead in the poll averages, with sampling error well under one percentage point. That’s better than the National Party has ever managed. It’s better than the Higgs Boson has ever managed.
Even so, no serious commentator thinks Trump will be the Republican candidate. It’s not out of the question that he’d run as an independent — that’s a question of individual psychology, and much harder to answer — but he isn’t going to win the Republican primaries.
Arguably that was true: no serious commentator, as far as I know, did think Trump would be the Republican candidate. But he is going to win the Republican primaries, and the opinion polls haven’t been all that badly wrong about him — better than the experts.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I didnt realise the Higgs Bosun was just a ‘winner of an election’, and even then only a slight lead over the others
9 years ago