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Notes -
In concert with the other top-level discussions of betting, how about a topic which will definitely be uncontroversial:
Will Trump survive his full term?
No, I’m not talking about assassination. Curve-fitting the 4/45 former Presidents killed in office, the 4/59 terms ended by assassins, or the 4/236 years with assassinations? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s time for actuarial tables.
The President is 78 years and 7 months old. This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.
But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke. He’s not a smoker, reducing various cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. He doesn’t drink, which further reduces his cancer and stroke risk but somehow raises his overall risk. Some of these factors, like cancer, are going to be mitigated by the planet’s best medical care. (You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.) Others are harder to screen or treat. I have no idea how to assess them holistically, and further data are welcome.
Still. 24% chance that this Presidency ends with conspiracy theories about stroke guns.
Fred Trump (Donald's father) live to 93 and Mary Trump (Donald's mother) lived to 88. Going back through the Trump family tree, many of his ancestors had higher than average lifespans. Considering Donald doesn't drink or smoke and that he walks and moves around very regularly, I find it highly doubtful that he kicks the bucket before his term is up.
It’s not probable, but still, President of the United States is by far the most lethal job you can legally have.
Statistically, there’s a nearly 10% chance you’ll be killed (not merely die; be killed!)
Trump would be safer working as a RedBull stuntman than working his current job.
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Watch this video of Trump powering through a round of Golf (and I do mean POWERING) and tell me you think this is a guy with failing health for his age:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Rb9b8rYhII?si=rFfmT-27t6uw2Mk1
Okay, don't watch the whole thing, it is an hour long, but skip to any random segment and see if it looks like he's having any physical difficulties.
I'd take the other side of any bet of Trump dying of natural causes in four years.
Yes he might experience a sharp decline, but the medical care on tap should stave off almost any plausible cause of death past his term.
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The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...
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Sounds like the average American to me. Not actually joking - life expectancy already factors in the fact that most Americans are overweight/obese.
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Conspiracy facts.
Real talk, I seriously doubt that you could fire frozen shellfish toxin out of a gun and actually hit and penetrate the target. I suspect this thing is bullshit or a "goat ESP" tier CIA project Which is not to say that they didn't have another heart attack gun that actually worked...
Supposedly there were other microtoxin assassination tools developed by the Soviets and British. An umbrella that shoots out very tiny spheres covered in deadly toxins. Shove the umbrella tip into someone to activate it and they are doomed.
This thing must have had a very short range and the scope is unnecessary. But in principle a close range toxin-laden sprayer is feasible.
The ricin-injector umbrella was very much real (one of the scientists involved in the investigation taught me at Cambridge) and used by the Bulgarians to assassinate Georgi Markov in London. A KGB defector later told us the unsurprising fact that the Soviets built it for the Bulgarians.
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I picked "stroke" for this exact reason.
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The chemicals are making the frogs gay, too.
Back in college I read an article in the student paper about research from the school showing that agricultural runoff is feminizing male fish. It's a real problem.
Years later I hear Alex Jones clips about the chemicals turning the frogs "bisexual". I get he is right in a larger sense, but he means "intersexed".
Degree of veracity aside (a small motte in a giant bailey) Alex Jones essentially doesn't care about pollution or about frogs, or about gays. His call to action isn't that we should lobby our governments to fund environmental monitoring agencies, it's that we should send him $200 for a one month supply of proprietary pressed corn starch pills. If anything the gayer the frogs get the more money he can make.
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Trans, really.
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Trump also drinks lots of coke, which interviews with centenarians indicate has life extending properties.
This is true, and @j0nahfun on Twitter explained the virility-enhancing properties as well:
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The question that falls out of this is 'What would an inherited JD Vance presidency look like?'
I think JD would roughly follow the mandate of Trump, but I don't think he would be as bombastic and aggressive in his negotiations. This would effectively lower the amount of change in America as a result of the presidency.
I think we’d see more technocratic social conservatism but probably also more immigration.
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The deepest. Yuge.
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Income has a large (and shockingly linear) correlation to life expectancy. I checked that data vs other sources, but the linked graph is pretty and seems accurate. Not sure how it effects the yearly mortality other than decreasing it in Trumps case.
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I'm still waiting for the mea culpas for all the people on this very forum who said that Trump was old and demented like Biden. (If you were one of those people, it might be worth considering how you arrived at that conclusion.)
In any case, I wouldn't rely on actuarial calculators. People who are near death often look and act like it. Obviously the odds of Trump kicking over from a coronary event are non-zero, but the calculators are a crude estimate and crucially include people who are already dying of diabetes, cancer, etc.. The 6% of 78 year olds who die every year include a lot of people who are already on their death bed or have terminal cancer, etc... The death rate for a healthy individual is much, much lower. Plus, Trump is almost certainly on statins.
So 24% is a naive and bad estimate. My guess is that we could train an AI to do a much better job than antique calculators just by watching a video of someone speaking for a couple minutes.
I'd give equal odds to him being assassinated as to dying from natural causes, say roughly 8% each.
Those seem like pretty plausible numbers. I agree that he’s definitely not in the bottom 6% of health. He’s not even close on weight; he’s like 60th, 70th percentile. So not the highest risk for cardiovascular. And I expect screening to rule out all sorts of possible stealth risks.
I wonder what the actuarial tables look like for sudden death. I don’t know how I’d search for that.
Assassination risk is a whole different ball game. He’s probably more hated that any president since…Nixon? But that’s only loosely coupled with actual assasssination attempts. It’s also not a good predictor of defensive measures. Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…
I would sincerely hope so. It keeps getting glossed over in these discussions, but I still haven't seen anything remotely like an adequate explanation of the events surrounding the Butler assassination attempt, and barring some extremely rigorous explanations or an ironclad paper trail detailing how the Secret Service has been an elaborate bluff all along, "the secret service intentionally attempted to allow an assassination of a presidential candidate" seems to me the the most likely explanation.
I’d put money against it being intentional. You’d need 1) a conspiracy in the SS which 2) acts once and only once and 3) gets lots of people fired but not charged with treason.
No, I think they probably hit a common failure mode in project management. It’s easy to skimp on testing scenarios which are rare, even if they’re really critical. Presidential assassins are rare, and FPOTUS assassins even more so. I would bet they got complacent and didn’t do the kind of training or testing they’d need to actually secure the site.
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I’ve seen some pictures of Trump’s detail lately and they definitely look like real secret service agents, unlike the motley crew from last summer.
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Humans make errors. Occam's razor is our friend here--no need to go the conspiratorial route when evidence doesn't exist for it.
citing occams razor in the domain of politics is foolish when being pretending to be retarded is the ultimate way to get plausible deniability.
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I'm still waiting. The evidence as I understand it is that the Secret Service sniper had the assassin in his sights and not only allowed him to fire multiple shots, but only fired after a non-sniper engaged the assassin and disabled his rifle.
He thought the guy could very well be a local cop -- how stupid would he feel if the headline was "trigger happy SS agent brains local cop during Trump speech". Career ending.
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That is because that building was supposed to be under the care of the local police, it was actually their headquarters.
It was not clear who that person was until shots were fired. And communications were sorted out.
Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity/ineptitude.
That's terrible advice when there's lots of malice around (like there is now).
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Huh. I thought the rifle was destroyed by one of the sniper’s shots.
This is one of those things which SHOULD have continued to get public attention, but has been swept under the rug since November, if not earlier.
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This is kinda what I think, too - although of course the actuarial tables are interesting, Trump seems very active and I think he's unlikely to just tip over. Plus, he seemed to handle the first term fairly well.
I will say that I did get the impression that he was older during the debates. But I wouldn't be surprised if he makes it to 90.
Looking at his family members might be interesting:
Now, the internet assures me that lifestyle, not DNA, is the most important part of longevity, so this is a dodgy guide at best. But it seems to me that Trump already survived his version of the bird flue and isn't likely to die of alcoholism. He inherited his father's spot at the top of the Trump empire - if he takes after his mother and father (and grandmother) he'll be golden.
Can't get better than that if you seek longevity.
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Yeah, there's a very decent change he simply drops dead of natural causes at some point in the next 4 years. Given that many of his most ardent supporters are conspiracy-mongers, there's a good chance they'll say his death was "organized by the deep state" or something like that, actuarial tables be damned. A lot of it will depend on the optics: if he just randomly dies in his sleep with minimal warning like Scalia did, conspiracies will fly. If instead his illness is known beforehand, then there will be less of that.
The problem is that as a strongman, he'll want to avoid mentioning any illnesses if possible. He couldn't get away without mentioning he had COVID, but he could plausibly sweep other chronic issues under the rug if they don't impact his physical appearance. Thankfully, Trump is a buffoon who hires people who gladly leak things as a matter of palace intrigue, so there's a decent chance that any long-term illnesses will be known, I hope.
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Based on the SSN actuarial tables, it's a cumulative chance of death of 22.42%.
Sure, but that’s including the morbidly obese(trump is fat, but not morbidly obese), those with serious preexisting conditions, heavy smokers, etc. A basically healthy 78 year old has a much lower chance of death.
I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts. Presumably the unhealthier you are the more likely you are to die early, which would imply that the older you get the fewer people are left your age who made bad lifestyle decisions Healthwise. I have no idea how that shakes out in practice though, maybe you don't see that effect happening until you get into the 80s or 90s.
The point is that a lot of people who die each year already look like they are about to die and Trump doesn't.
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That’s what I was looking at. Number of lives at 83 over number at 79 should be percent surviving.
How’d you figure?
I was not as clever as you and simply took the probability of surviving each year from ages 78-81 and multiplied them. That gave me a combined probability of survival to age 82 of 77.58%.
I guess the entire difference is down to if you should index by 78 or 79 then. The table is on "Exact age," so I guess @netstack was right to use 79. He even rounded down from there to "about 24%" from 24.6%, so it probably is about right interpolating. As the comments above point out, additional factors probably are more important at that level of accuracy already though.
I actually have to deal with these tables for work, and you'd calculate by 78 or their stated age. At least that's how the professional economists do it for expert reports. If you graph it it's easy to see why — the probability doesn't follow a set function but wanders based on extrinsic factors and random variation. For example, a newborn's chances of dying in the next year are the equivalent of a 50 year old man's. But it drops sharply after one year and continues dropping until age 8, when it starts permanently rising. There's then a jump around age 16, probably due to driving (and poorly at that), etc. In other words, it's derived from actual data. And the actual data can't be granular down to the day because it would be a nightmare to calculate and would probably end up wonky because of limited sample size (how many people aged 17 and 301 days die in a given year?) So they base the data on anyone who is a given age, even if they may be nearly a year apart. So if you're 78 and 240 days then your probability is what it is for 78, full stop, no rounding up. On your 79th birthday you use the higher number.
A probability density function does not have to be transcendental to be able to integrate for a cumulative probability. I have no way of knowing what convention you use for work, and there might be good reasons to use a left hand rule numerical integration for your application, but there is nothing magically more correct about a left hand rule integration. Probability of death is strictly increasing by the time you reach 78. If you use the left hand rule to integrate over a region where a function is monotonically increasing, you will systematically underestimate the area under the curve.
With respect to the Social Security Actuarial Life Tables, it is in fact meaningful to talk about regions between nodes. The numbers in the table are not raw population deaths. In fact part of the methodology for producing the table in the first place is reconciling five year central death rates and exact age one year probabilities. Once you have meaningful nodes 365 days apart you are not dealing with a sampling problem if you want to estimate a value at 301 days—you are dealing with an interpolation problem. They do anticipate people using the table for intra-node calculation. From the methodology notes:
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I was also surprised the number was that large, but also got 24.6% both taking the ratio of "Number of lives" and the complement of the product of the complement "Death probabilities."
Interestingly, in the notes they include cause-specific ultimate rates of reduction, so you could exclude the violence category if you are only considering health related causes.
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