Why political scientists are wrong 15% of the time

Abstract

An experimental study has shown that among situations when political scientists claimed that a political outcome was impossible, this outcome actually occurred in 15% of the cases. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this empirical fact. 1 Formulation of the Problem Empirical fact. A detailed study [5] has shown that among situations when political scientists claimed that a political outcome was impossible, this outcome actually occurred in 15% of the cases. Clarification. It should be noted that we are not talking about bizarre possibilities that everyone considers to be practically impossible – like aliens landing on the White House. If we include such bizarre options, then, of course, the percentage of actual occurrence would be much much smaller. The above research only dealt with outcomes which are realistic enough, so that at least some political scientists claim them to be possible. What we do in this paper. In this paper, we propose a possible explanation for the above empirical fact. 2 Analysis of the Problem Seven plus mins two law: reminder. It is known that we usually divide each quantity into 7 plus plus minus 2 categories – this is the largest number of categories whose meaning we can immediately grasp; see, e.g., [2, 3]. For some people, this “magical number” is 7 + 2 = 9, for some it is 7− 2 = 5. Consequences for estimating how possible are different events. As a result, in situations of high uncertainty, when we estimate how possible is an