So, my last two posts were clearly pretty poor predictions. Biden won exactly 306 EVs, as I predicted, but I was overly optimistic on the other counts. Biden won 7 million more votes instead of 14, the Senate is 50-50 instead of 52-48, and Democrats lost 13 seats in the House instead of gaining 8 seats. Back in March of 2020, I said I expected the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic to be between 25,000 and 30,000. But as of this writing (5/10/21) the official toll is around 600,000, and the total number of excess deaths is approaching 1,000,000. So why was I so far off on each?
In the case of the election, I think the issue was garbage in, garbage out. Polling was off, and since I am not a professional pundit with my own polling firm, my predictions were mostly reflecting the information I saw around me, which was garbage. In the case of the pandemic, I think the issue was motivated reasoning. I just could not bring myself to type in larger numbers, since I found the idea too horrible and too improbable. How could my country, a technically advanced democracy, screw up 50-year old public health protocols that bad? I was motivated by national pride to alter my prediction from what some simple calcualations gave.
Anyway, hopefully I will learn two lessons.
