That poll putting Trump ahead of Biden in all the major battleground states sure looks terrifying, but there’s never been an election more clouded by the unknown than this one.

A week after Halloween and the scary monsters are still abroad in the land.

Scary polls!

Scary plans!

Boogedy, boogedy!

It was a great weekend for intellectual doomscrolling, to say nothing of galloping paranoia. First, The New York Times comes out with a poll that shows the president is trailing Fulton County (Ga.) Inmate No. PO1135809 in all the major battleground states.

  • @zalgotext
    link
    38 months ago

    That 40% chance of rain could even mean “40% of the city will be rained on”.

    Right, that’s exactly what it means, by my understanding. A weatherman can’t predict the chances that a particular individual will experience precipitation, but that’s what the average person immediately thinks when they look at a weather forecast.

    What a weatherman can do though, is predict how much of a particular area may experience precipitation, based on measurable things like cloud pattern shape and size, wind speed and direction, geography, etc. Once you realize that, it’s actually kind of intuitive that precipitation chances are reported as “percent of an area that will experience precipitation”, and not “percent chance that I will experience precipitation”.