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That is actually an issue they've acknowledged and tried to address. People also tended to see percentages and think they reflected vote percents. To address t
by azernik 8y ago
That is actually an issue they've acknowledged and tried to address. People also tended to see percentages and think they reflected vote percents.
To address this, for the 2018 election cycle 538 started displaying their odds as numerical ratios (5 in 9, for example) to try to reduce the aura of certainty.
- dagw 8y ago538 started displaying their odds as numerical ratios Did that actually make things clearer to people? Speaking only for myself, I find ratios quite hard to works with and reason about. I certainly couldn't tell you instantly for example if 5/9 is more or less than 4/7 or how big the difference between the two are without first doing some mental arithmetic. Perhaps people in the US are more used to working with ratios since their measurement systems tend to be ratio based.
- nscalf 8y agoThat's the point though. It's meant to require a bit of thinking to digest the information. They didn't set out to make the information clearer and easier to understand, they set out to make the false positive of reading a percentage and considering it final results less frequent.