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Notes -
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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