Pessimism of the Intellect
October 30th, 2008 | Published in Politics, Statistical Graphics
My boss is a prominent political scientist and an Obama supporter. This afternoon, he was ribbing me for being a "pox on both your houses" ultra-leftist who only grudgingly acknowledges that electing Obama would be good for the left.
After our meeting had ended, I came up with a perfect encapsulation of my feelings about Obama, which has the added benefit of being an extremely nerdy joke. My point estimate is that it does matter whether Obama wins. But my confidence interval for how much it matters includes zero. In the spirit of Jessica Hagy, I present the argument in graph form:
