Nate Silver Quotes
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.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
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.
We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.
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.
Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.
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.
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.
I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
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
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.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
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.
Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
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.
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
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.
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.
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.
