Submitted by ADefiniteDescription t3_yor0ro in philosophy
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivpi738 wrote
Reply to comment by Shufflepants in The ethics of voting for the 'lesser of two evils' by ADefiniteDescription
a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.
but he won twice.
you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.
Shufflepants t1_ivpjdxv wrote
>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens
No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.
You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.
If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.
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