Nate Silver Quotes

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

I prefer more to kind of show people different things than tell them 'oh, here's what you should believe' and, over time, you can build up a rapport with your audience.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times. And so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in it's entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or thirteen-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next 'Twilight' movie.

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

People don't have a good intuitive sense of how to weigh new information in light of what they already know. They tend to overrate it.

Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.

I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.

Shakespeare's plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.

To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.