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We are exactly two months away from Election Day and just days away from the official start of election season. It’s going to be two months of new polls, forecast gyrations and, in a word, uncertainty.
At this point in an election cycle, back at FiveThirtyEight, I’d sometimes feel that a therapist might be better suited to hosting the podcast, because the job became, to some extent, helping people reckon with the unknown.
One way we did that was by trying to quantify uncertainty and put it in historical context — looking at, for example, the average error or the largest error in past elections. And I think that’s plenty useful.
But after more than a decade in the data journalism trenches, I can tell you that numbers will soothe the soul only so much. At a certain point, we just have to get comfortable with not knowing.
And that’s what we’re doing on today’s podcast, in the final calm before the storm. My guest is journalist Simone Stolzoff, author of How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers.
