Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 percent likelihood Gingrich would stage an historic upset.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen since . . . ummm, I dunno, how bout this? It actually gets worse because Easterbrook then invokes game theory. What next? Catastrophe theory? Intelligent design?
P.S. Maybe I should explain for readers without an education in probability theory. Let’s suppose “wipe the floor” means that Obama gets 55%+ of the two-party vote, and let’s suppose that “an historic upset” means that Obama gets less than 50% of the vote. Now try to draw a forecast distribution that has 90% of its probability above 0.55 and 10% of it’s probability below 0.50. It’s a pretty weird-looking distribution, huh?
I will publicly offer Easterbrook a bet, conditional on Gingrich getting the nomination, that Obama receives between 50% and 55% of the two-party vote. My bet is based on Easterbrook’s implicit odds of infinity to 1. To keep it simple, I’ll set up the bet as follows: if Gingrich gets the nomination and Obama receives between 50% and 55% of the vote, Easterbrook gives me $1000. If Gingrich gets the nomination and Obama receives more than 55% or less than 50% of the vote, I give Easterbrook $0. That sounds fair to me!
A good classroom example, maybe? In statistics, political science, or journalism. (In the latter, it could be part of the ever-popular class on “How to get paid for writing about something you know nothing about.”)