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Notes -
I think it has some use if you’re in a position to be doing long term planning either because the campaign is promising things that will help or harm your group, or because the change in regulations promised will affect a business project. If Trump is going to end a subsidy for solar panels then maybe the fact that he’s way up in the polling would change how you do business. Or maybe you’re trans and worried about your rights in your home state. Or you’re gay and looking to adopt. There are some people who for various reasons need to plan based on who wins in 2024.
For the vast majority of people, the winner of any election will only affect you on the margins. It’s just human history. Unless a regime was specifically looking to harm a group of people, for the most part, life goes on with very little change. If you woke up tomorrow and you were under a Maoist dictatorship, unless you owned a big corporation or challenged the regime in some way, you could live very comfortably. The basics of life don’t change that much. There will still be jobs, schools, sporting events, and people will still get drunk on weekends.
On a related note, but different domain, I saw these two threads this morning (...maybe NOAA's advertising budget has been kicked into gear because they have some bureaucratic fight going on...). To the extent that people have some form of equities at risk, accurate probabilistic models can help people properly allocate their assets/risk... and may even allow some folks to make a boatload of money in trying to allocate appropriately at a high level of abstraction. I recall listening to a podcast with a guy who made literal billions of dollars by making huge bets on insurance markets in one of the hurricane seasons not long after Katrina (I can't remember his name off the top of my head now, but IIRC, it was someone who people would plausibly recognize). He did so by trying to have the most accurate weather prediction possible.
Political outcomes feel a bit less directly-related to outcomes than the much more direct hurricane-to-damage relation, because "probability of president" probably needs to be mixed with "probability of Congress" and "conditional probabilities of those results ending up with the gov't taking Action A". Right now, there is still debate on whether we can do any part of that chain, which makes it difficult to intuitively feel a connection.
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