Nate Silver
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.Collection: Learning
We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.
A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.
Voters memories will fade some.
When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
You get steely nerves playing poker.
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
I'm a pro-horserace guy.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.
I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
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.
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.
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.
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.
We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.
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.
Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.
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.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.
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.
Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.
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.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
I think punditry serves no purpose.
I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.
Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.
I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'