2024 Election Thread

[MGuy]

I would think "they are a rich former president" is a really good explanation for what would separate Trump from the average 80 year old American male but somehow there needs to be more explanation for what separate that kind of outlier from the average. This is one hell of a thing to double down on. I just had my step father die last year at well over 80 and can guarantee that he did not have presidential level, or even decent, health care provided for him. Makes this "if you're not too poor to live your basically just like a president" idea particularly funny to me.

[deaddmwalking]

It is impossible to satirize ddm's position of "presidents have normal health outcomes." A monument to his very well-informed view of the world.

I agree that presidents will have access to some of the best healthcare available to Americans. I also agree that modern presidents, in general, live longer than the general population. But when you look at people who are 80, you're already past the point of 'general longevity'.

Carter has lived a long time. He's 100 years old. I contend that his continued longevity is the same as any other 100 year-old and not longer because whatever benefit being president has is pretty insignificant compared to being 100 years old. That means that his 'expected life span' is 2 years and he has a 35% chance of dying in the next 12 months. You want to tell me I'm wrong because the man was president? That's the crazy position.

[Kaelik]

Hey uh, quick check, if Carter dies does it throw half the country into crisis and result in hundreds of people losing their jobs who are also the exact people who will decide if he is put on an iron lung?

This is such delusional shit. We can literally keep a dead guy's corpse "alive" for decades if we are willing to spend the money, and 100% of the people making the decision will decide to keep Trump alive until November/January if he wins.

[deaddmwalking]

Look, I think that Trump's likelihood of dying is basically the same as any other man his age, statistically. Unless he's hooked up to a hospital bed then a stroke or a heart attack are things that can happen and there's nothing that anyone will be able to do about it. While I don't think those things are particularly likely, I assert that they're just as likely to happen to him as, say, Bill Clinton. The fact that he's running for president is no defense against it.

Further, while 'politicians' might be longer-lived on average than the entire population, when you're looking at people that have already lived longer than the average you can't count that again. If heavy smokers all die by 70, you can't say that 80-year-olds will continue to live longer than smokers their age because there aren't any.

Further, any association with longer life for politicians is also easily explained by the lower mortality associated with educational attainment. For men without a high school diploma the expected lifespan is 69 while it is 83 for those with a college degree (and 85 for those with a graduate degree). But all of that is already reflected in the actuarial tables. By the time you get in the 80+ age group, you have less than half the non-high school graduates but you still have more than half the college graduates.

It'd be crazy to try to guess which individual in the pool is going to die next, just like it'd be crazy to try to guess which of 2 lithium-4 ions would decay in the next minute-and-a-half - but it's a sure bet that one of them will. Trump isn't going to get a Golden Throne whatever the Warhammer/MAGA fan-fiction community likes to pretend. So while the odds of Trump dying before the election are very small (less than 1% according to me, remember) the odds of him dying before the next presidential term are over are alarmingly high.

[MGuy]

The crazy thing here is that this is such an unnecessary thing to shoot yourself in the foot over. Acknowledging that a rich former president has access to means (in this case both health care and protection) well beyond the reach of the average citizen is really easy and is the very goal post dead put up. I already thought that it was weird that someone would need an explanation for what makes a figure like Trump an outlier, given the very well understood context we have, was weird but apparently even pointing that out isn't enough.

[deaddmwalking]

I agree that Trump has access to services that 'regular people' don't. I contend that it's included in the data.

If you think that there's ANOTHER assessment of his lifespan that we should be using for any type of analysis, that'd be something. The only thing proffered up to this point is something indicating that politicians live to on average, 85, while the actuarial data I'm looking at shows that 80 year-olds live to, on average, 88. If I'm not being generous enough with Trump's lifespan, an article saying that he should, on average, die 3 years earlier than the numbers I'm using is working in the wrong direction.

We can disagree about whether the figures I'm using are the best ones, but it's a pretty silly argument to make on this forum that you can't use math to figure out how likely something ought to be.

If we were placing an over/under on whether Trump dies before 87 or after 87, I'd take the under for sure. Consequently, I don't think that his wealth makes that big a difference. Ratan Tata just died earlier this month (net worth $291 billion), and I don't believe that Donald Trump (net worth $5.5 billion) is doing the types of things that will ensure he lives longer. Those things would include retiring from politics and practicing yoga.


Edit - For funsies I just looked at a list of billionaires that died in 2022. As a group they averaged 83 years old (26 total, including one woman, but even excluding her doesn't change the numbers). Just looking at U.S. billionaires, the average age at death was 84. While that's better than the 77.5 life expectancy of the general population, it looks like there's no way to translate vast resources into eternal life....yet.

[Thaluikhain]

Trump nearly caught a bullet not that long ago, and there've been one or two attempts since then. Another attempt isn't that unlikely. This is not true for most people in his age and wealth bracket.

(This is a weird conversation even for this forum)

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

The 'longer life span because you're a politician' is already covered by the 'you're still alive at 80, so you're clearly not part of the group that dies young because you're poor'.

See now this entire last page is you not understanding that even THIS line is FUCKING WRONG.

Also it now demonstrates you not only fail statistical math, and discrete math, you ALSO fail at fucking basic set theory and set intersection.

For fuck sake go back and retake high school math.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think that Trump is likely to be the target of another assassination attempt before the election - or at least not one that has any chance of success. I have little doubt that MAGA supporters sometimes carry guns to his rallies just like they do when passing through TSA, but I think the security has been increased. Ultimately, I don’t think that people wishing him dead is any more likely to cause his death than choking to death on a well-done steak - especially in the short time-frame between now and the election.

There's a probability that Trump dies before the election. I calculate it at ~0.66%. I'm willing to admit that it could be a smidgen higher or lower but I think that’s pretty much in the ballpark.

If anyone here thinks that I'm wrong (and they do) they should provide their estimate and how they reasoned to it. At least I'm being transparent. I stand by my number.

At the very least people should say clearly if I'm too high or too low. If assassins are a real threat I'm too low; if a security detail and good Healthcare is more protective than I account for I'm too high. But it's literally impossible for me to be wrong in both directions simultaneously. At least be consistent!

[Thaluikhain]

At the very least people should say clearly if I'm too high or too low. If assassins are a real threat I'm too low; if a security detail and good Healthcare is more protective than I account for I'm too high. But it's literally impossible for me to be wrong in both directions simultaneously. At least be consistent!

It is possible for you to be wrong both about things that would increase the odds of him dying, and of things that would decrease the odds, but to an (at least somewhat) unknown degree, such that is is not clear if you are too high or too low, but likely are incorrect.

[deaddmwalking]

Yes, it's possible I'm incorrect and that there is another, better methodology to employ to estimate the probability. It's also possible that coincidentally that better methodology would arrive at exactly the same answer and I got the right answer the wrong way.

But fundamentally it is possible to estimate the odds of something happening. For the purposes of the game, we do this all the time. I think that applying probabilistic estimates to this question is relevant and interesting. It's lovely that a lot of people want to say I'm wrong, but that is just Playground 'nuh-uh to infinity' unless people are willing to hazard a guess.

It's clearly more than 0% (people do die) and it's clearly pretty low. For those who care about gambling odds that would be another way of looking at it. At 126 to 1 the they calculate the odds at about .79%. I don’t know what methodology they use and I presume that they're building in a 'return' so that would potentially be another data point indicating it's less than 1% but more than half of one percent. If you're letting people wager money and you may end up paying out bigly, you would expect that they'd be pretty confident in their number.

[Kaelik]

Look, I think that Trump's likelihood of dying is basically the same as any other man his age, statistically. Unless he's hooked up to a hospital bed then a stroke or a heart attack are things that can happen and there's nothing that anyone will be able to do about it.

There are in fact things people can do about heart attacks and strokes to keep people alive.

Trump isn't going to get a Golden Throne whatever the Warhammer/MAGA fan-fiction community likes to pretend.

I encourage you to look up what actually existing medical technology is like in the US for keeping people alive after organ failure.

Edit - For funsies I just looked at a list of billionaires that died in 2022. As a group they averaged 83 years old (26 total, including one woman, but even excluding her doesn't change the numbers). Just looking at U.S. billionaires, the average age at death was 84. While that's better than the 77.5 life expectancy of the general population, it looks like there's no way to translate vast resources into eternal life....yet.

If the people deciding whether a braindead billionaire is kept alive as a corpse would lose all their money on their death, they would be propped up.

But in fact, mostly people benefit from billionaires dying so there's no incentive by any party to keep him alive while braindead for two more months.

This is really fucking easy to understand. They are not going to turn off the fucking machine and flatline Trump on November 2nd, they are going to fucking wait until the election is over to do that and he loses, or until January 21st if he wins.

Yes, it's possible I'm incorrect and that there is another, better methodology to employ to estimate the probability. It's also possible that coincidentally that better methodology would arrive at exactly the same answer and I got the right answer the wrong way.

Yeah, here's a better method: Guess how likely he is to be assassinated, instead of saying "apparently zero percent" and then, that's your whole fucking number, because he's not going to die of stroke, or heart attack, or cancer, or any other method of organ failure until after the election, because they will simply keep him the fuck alive.

But fundamentally it is possible to estimate the odds of something happening. For the purposes of the game, we do this all the time. I think that applying probabilistic estimates to this question is relevant and interesting. It's lovely that a lot of people want to say I'm wrong, but that is just Playground 'nuh-uh to infinity' unless people are willing to hazard a guess.

This is a fun game people like to play where they pretend they are doing Real Math and everyone else is doing Vibes. But actually, if you say 1% because of acturaial tables and someone else says 10% chance of assassination and 0% chance of anything else, it's literally not the case that it stops being 'Playground nuh uh to infinity' Because then when he dies, you say "I said 1% and you only said 10% so both of us were estimating this as unlikely" and then when he lives both parties say "I said he was most likely going to live." and you have accomplished literally nothing to elucidate any disagreement by having two people putting different small non zero chances of something happening.

[deaddmwalking]

Are you saying that you think there is a 10% chance of an assassination?

I think that some things, like a brain aneurysm, can cause death sufficiently fast that there's nothing that the people on the Trump jet can do before it's game over - assuming that the whole jet doesn't crash! Try keeping what's left from a jet crash on life support.

We can have a vibes conversation, but for your assertion that he'll be hooked up to an incubator he would first have to have a (would be) fatal incident. So maybe instead of answering the question 'how likely do you think it is that Trump dies in the next two weeks' you could answer instead 'how likely does something happen where Trump can only survive with extraordinary measures'? Betting it's somewhere in the less than 1% chance range.

[Kaelik]

I think that some things, like a brain aneurysm, can cause death sufficiently fast that there's nothing that the people on the Trump jet can do before it's game over.

No, if you wanted him to have a functioning brain and serve as president, there are a small set of things that might prevent that. But if you want him to not be declared medically dead until after the election, a brain aneurysm isn't going to cause any problems. They will just keep his heart pumping in his braindead corpse until they can officially pull the plug in november/january.

[deaddmwalking]

I think you're giving Trump's team far too much credit. I also think you're assuming that whatever happens to cause him severe problems happens at a time and place where his team will be alerted.

If something were to happen there's every chance that we get a 'Covfefe' Tweet after midnight and his security detail isn't worried that he's been in the bathroom for a full twenty minutes.

[PseudoStupidity]

Just popping in to say it's basically impossible to give Trump's team too much credit. They were able to secure the single most powerful office in the world with a deeply unpopular candidate, and are once again just inches away from securing that office. Obviously there are many competent people involved, or you think the Democrats are somehow even more incompetent than Trump and his team. However, believing the Democrats are less competent would make me question why you're voting for them. I just think they're evil and don't give a shit since things go roughly the same way whether or not they win.

[MGuy]

This whole thing has not gotten any less ridiculous. This man does not even consider a difference between what very old people at an age above 80 might be dealing with vs what a specific 80 year old man with the ease of access to the best preventative and emergency care in the world would have. My step father died last year at over 80 and I can guarantee that he did not have the resources Trump does. I could also guarantee that if he did, he'd have lived considerably longer. Hell my aunt died earlier this year (at over 80) in a way that she wouldn't have if she'd had access to the resources even a moderately wealthy coattail hanger of Trump's has. It is not hard to understand why having a fuck ton of people paid to worry about your health makes you live longer than the average. It also should go without saying that when you're a former president you're unique even among the well off. There are factors, beyond the numbers, that affect a president that are far, far, far, removed from an average citizen and it manifests both in their resources and the number of people working toward the end of that person not dying.

I'm not sure how ddm is going to beat the bot allegations at this rate. This could be considered yet another deep dive into the kind of reasoning he has that makes him unable to understand how much people are struggling right now. As far as his calculations go being 80 means you're somehow in the same category as a president.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

My step father died last year at over 80 and I can guarantee that he did not have the resources Trump does.

IMPOSSIBLE! DDM has already established that the set of people who have survived to over 80 is the same as the set of people that live longer because they are rich and contains no members of the set of people that die younger because they are poor. How after all could it be possible to die younger because you are poor AND live to be over 80? Dead DM knows, that is clearly impossible and as far as he understands it the statistical data he is working with DEFINITELY reflects that everyone alive over 80 has identical circumstances and outcomes.

I really have to insist, to me the bot allegations tie in closely to the innumeracy allegations. These are the sorts of mistakes a bot makes with math, because these are the sorts of mistakes you make if you can quote math but do not understand what you are quoting, like a bot.

[deaddmwalking]

If billionaires are dying at age 84 (and it appears that they are) then it appears that Trump is a normal person as far as actuarial tables go.

That's just how they work.

The median life-expectancy for men in the US is 77.5. Once you're past that point you're already 'exceptional'. I'm sure someone has actuarial tables that are based off of getting a college degree or other factors that might explain an exceptional life-span, but the chart doesn't worry about why people live - it just tells you that among people of age x, y number of them will be dead before x+1. Among 80-year-olds Trump is not exceptional. He is a fat, out-of-shape and facing obvious cognitive decline. Which is to say he'll probably be dead in 8 years, but his odds of dying this year are pretty small.

As for competence, I don’t think much of Trump's team. I don’t think he's unpopular either. I think that he and his supporters recognize that demographic change is working against their preferences, so they are actively anti-democratic. A lot of people would like to end Democracy before they lose the levers of power. Trump has promised to do that, and I, for one, believe him. I think many of his supporters believe it, too - in fact they're counting on it.

As for the election, I expect Harris to win by a surprisingly large margin. I'm not extremely confident of that. I think Clinton would have won if the race appeared closer - I think too many people felt comfortable throwing their vote to a protest candidate confident that it wouldn't make a difference. I don’t think it will break out that way this time.

I also think arguing probability and life-expectancy is a welcome distraction from doom-scrolling.

[Kaelik]

God fucking damn it, please stop bot posting. No one needs to understand acturial data, but if you don't understand it stop posting about it.

Fuck, what I said about acturial data, but also about elections.

LMAO.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

If billionaires are dying at age 84 (and it appears that they are) then it appears that Trump is a normal person as far as actuarial tables go.

So lets follow your reasoning here.

Of the set that is billionaires, there is a subset of billionaires that die at 84 THEREFORE since Trump is in the first set and MIGHT be in the second set he IS "a normal person as far as actuarial tables go"...

Fuck you, fuck you you innumerate garbled nonsense spouting...

That's just how they work.

NO IT ISN'T. That isn't even tangential to how they work you...

The median life-expectancy for men in the US is 77.5. Once you're past that point you're already 'exceptional'.

First off all no, being past the median doesn't make you "exceptional" and secondly fuck you you just said he was "normal". FUCKING PICK ONE THING.

Among 80-year-olds Trump is not exceptional. He is a fat, out-of-shape and facing obvious cognitive decline. Which is to say he'll probably be dead in 8 years, but his odds of dying this year are pretty small.

YOU JUST CALLED HIM EXCEPTIONAL. WE ALL SAW IT. ONLY A BOT WOULD FORGET THAT THIS QUICKLY.

As for the election, I expect Harris to win by a surprisingly large margin. I'm not extremely confident of that.

PICK ONE THING. You either have confidence to "expect" a large margin, OR you are not confident of victory at all, you don't get to be fucking BOTH. This isn't darts, you don't miss a 60 by a small margin and hit a 1 instead.

I think Clinton would have won if the race appeared closer - I think too many people felt comfortable throwing their vote to a protest candidate confident that it wouldn't make a difference. I don’t think it will break out that way this time.

High turn out doesn't favor Democrats anymore. Democrats threw out and spat on every demographic in their coalition except YOU and drunk Republican Soccer moms, for the last 20+ years, the result seems to be that high turn out favors Republicans now.

Congrats on your strategy of relying on a new left leaning generation of ethnically diverse youth that were going to vote your party into forever victory then when they turned up refusing to give ANY left, young, or ethnically diverse people ANY concession on ANY policy EVER.

[Kaelik]

Look phone lobster you don't understand. Hillary Clinton only lost Michigan because 170k safe Democratic voters who definitely wanted Clinton to win but were so confident she was going to win that they threw away their vote by voting for GARY JOHNSON.

Everyone knows that libertarians are widely known to be safe democratic voters who vote for dem candidates when they aren't protest voting.

[deaddmwalking]

Trump is a normal 80 year old. But it is because he's exceptional that he even made it to 80. If he hadn't been born rich he would almost certainly have died already.

There's a limit to what exceptional circumstances can do. While average men die at 77.5, average billionaires die at 84. Being rich is helpful to living a long life but it's no guarantee of immortality.

The original question is how likely is Trump to die before the election. The odds-makers put the chance at about 0.79%. I argue that the odds are lower than that (making it a bad bet). It appears everyone agrees that the chance is lower than the odds makers say, but that my estimate is too high. Nobody else has offered an estimate, so I don’t know what difference we're talking.

If you think my estimate of 0.67% is too high, but your estimate is 0.65%, I think you're doing the Den thing and focusing on the smallest differences as completely intractable.

[Kaelik]

If someone is asked "how likely is Trump to win the election" and you answer "I think it's about 50/50, because God spoke to me and said 'on election day flip a coin, I will decide who wins based on your coin flip'" being '"right" about the chances isn't very meaningful.

People are making fun of your process because it's dogshit, regardless of what they think the actual chances are.

[deaddmwalking]

Glad to hear you agree with my estimate even though you think I got there incorrectly.