Lynxes, voter motivations, trusting your gut and parrots being 11-year olds
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Source: Shutterstock
Source: Blickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
Source: portugalresident.com
Voter demographics
You know how many Trump voters are stereotyped to be individuals who:
Feel disaffected, and “the establishment” don’t care about them no more;
Long for “the good old days” and feel like everything has gone downhill since; and
Feel like Trump can help them live that high again (e.g. “MAGA”)
Well, now someone has put some numbers to it, and did their statistical magic on data of 2 million American households. This paper claims:
...we find that low levels of evaluative, experienced, and eudaemonic subjective well-being (SWB) are strongly predictive of Trump's victory, accounting for an exhaustive list of demographic, ideological, and socioeconomic covariates and robustness checks. County-level future life evaluation alone correlates with the Trump vote share over Republican baselines at r = -.78 in the raw data, a magnitude rarely seen in the social sciences.
If you’re a “why use many word when few do trick” person, here’s a graphical representation of “the more unhappy you are, the more likely you are to vote for Trump” by county:
And if you want an even simpler graphical representation of the relationship:
Should you trust your gut?
Some people make life look so easy - these happy go lucky people just wing everything and things just seem to fall in place. Then there are people who are living computers who study, calculate and model everything so that nothing is left to chance, and use maths as a gigantic middle finger to tell life that they are the masters of their own destiny. But what if someone used the skills of the people in the latter category to tell you that trusting your gut isn’t too bad?
Here’s a summary of this paper:
Ideally, you would want perfect information to make your decisions;
But if that’s too costly (which often is), “natural selection will favour simpler mechanisms for controlling behaviour when faced with uncertain conditions”;
“Trust your gut: using physiological states as a source of information is almost as effective as optimal Bayesian learning”; and
The performance of your gut in situations where you have inaccurate knowledge about patterns (i.e. using past experience to infer a pattern to tell how the future might be) is more “robust” than a strategy that has perfect knowledge about current conditions (robust = less sensitive to imperfections in information).
And here are their results of the simulation:
Source: Andrew D. Higginson, Tim W. Fawcett, Alasdair I. Houston and John M. McNamara, 2018
The top left corner shows survival rates (the z-axis) assuming you have perfect knowledge of current conditions, and the top-right and bottom-left show the increased likelihood of survival in sub-optimal conditions using their models of relying on your gut.
Parrots teaching each other to swear
A Lincolnshire zoo reports that 5 of their parrots are teaching and encouraging each other to swear. They have been separated and removed from view.
It would be extremely funny if someone spun up 5 instances of chatbots and pointed them at each other and they all became lads.
Notes: None of my content is sponsored content. All opinions are my own. Nothing in this newsletter is investment, legal, business, medical, or life advice (my subtitle is “Your daily dose of nonsense”). Don’t be believing everything a random guy on the internet says.