Donald Trump, Leicester City, and Why Predicting the Future Is So Hard
Last summer, the great mass of the American political punditocracy scoffed at the possibility that Donald Trump would win a single state in the Republican race. Now he’s all but certain to win the party’s presidential nomination.
Also last summer, British bookmakers took bets at 5,000-to-1 odds that Leicester City, a historically weak English soccer team, would win the Premier League. The team has won, and it has reportedly cost the bookmakers 25 million pounds, or $36 million, the biggest loss on a single sports event in British gambling history.
Anyone can simply be unlucky. But there are systematic biases and errors our puny human brains tend to make repeatedly when we try to predict the future, some of which are evident in the biggest political and sports upsets of 2016.
It’s fine and well to make fun of people (including myself) who were sure that Mr. Trump had no shot at the presidency, or who offered overly generous odds to try to bring bettors into a betting parlor. It’s even possible that those projections were correct — that these outcomes really were highly unlikely but that randomness prevailed (even a million-to-one lottery ticket might hit).
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/upshot/donald-trump-leicester-city-and-why-predicting-the-future-is-so-hard.html
