Nate Silver Quotes

#1. Nate Silver is now forecasting Oscar winners. The only area of life in which he has no expertise, ironically, is life itself.

Norman Chad

#2. For the first time in our history, the winners of the White House Turkey Pardon were chosen through a highly competitive online vote. And once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it. The guy is amazing.

Barack Obama

#3. If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.

Nate Silver

#4. The ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

Nate Silver

#5. Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

Nate Silver

#6. I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.

Nate Silver

#7. Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.

Nate Silver

#8. Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.

Nate Silver

#9. The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

Nate Silver

#10. In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.

Nate Silver

#11. Success makes you less intimidated by things.

Nate Silver

#12. Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.

Nate Silver

#13. I'm a pro-horserace guy.

Nate Silver

#14. People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#18. A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

Nate Silver

#19. The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be.

Nate Silver

#20. 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.

Nate Silver

#21. When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.

Nate Silver

#22. 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.

Nate Silver

#23. The litmus test for whether you are a competent forecaster is if more information makes your predictions better.

Nate Silver

#24. 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.

Nate Silver

#25. First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#28. 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.

Nate Silver

#29. What makes him successful is the way that he analyzes information. He is not just hunting for patterns. Instead, Bob combines his knowledge of statistics with his knowledge of basketball in order to identify meaningful relationships in the data.

Nate Silver

#30. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.

Nate Silver

#31. 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 noise or signal.

Nate Silver

#32. I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

Nate Silver

#33. 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.

Nate Silver

#34. If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#36. All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

Nate Silver

#37. The fashionable term now is "Big Data." IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#39. You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.

Nate Silver

#40. Data Is Useless Without Context

Nate Silver

#41. If political scientists couldn't predict the downfall of the Soviet Union - perhaps the most important event in the latter half of the twentieth century - then what exactly were they good for?

Nate Silver

#42. A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

Nate Silver

#43. 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.

Nate Silver

#44. I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.

Nate Silver

#45. Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.

Nate Silver

#46. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

Nate Silver

#47. I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

Nate Silver

#48. The story the data tells us is often the one we'd like to hear, and we usually make sure that it has a happy ending.

Nate Silver

#49. I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.

Nate Silver

#50. The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Nate Silver

#51. He does not depend on insider tips, crooked referees, or other sorts of hustles to make his bets. Nor does he have a "system" of any kind. He uses computer simulations, but does not rely upon them exclusively.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#53. Voters memories will fade some.

Nate Silver

#54. Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

Nate Silver

#55. 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.

Nate Silver

#56. I've just always been a bit of a dork.

Nate Silver

#57. Herd immunity - the biological equivalent of a firewall in which the disease has too few opportunities to spread and dies out.

Nate Silver

#58. I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#60. People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

Nate Silver

#61. In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

Nate Silver

#62. If you compare the number of children who are diagnosed as autistic64 to the frequency with which the term autism has been used in American newspapers,65 you'll find that there is an almost perfect one-to-one correspondence (figure 7-4), with both having increased markedly in recent years.

Nate Silver

#63. 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.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#65. We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Nate Silver

#66. There was "nothing new under the sun," as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it - not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.

Nate Silver

#67. Wherever there is human judgment there is the potential for bias.

Nate Silver

#68. I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.

Nate Silver

#69. If you're keeping yourself in the bubble and only looking at your own data or only watching the TV that fits your agenda then it gets boring.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#73. Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

Nate Silver

#74. When we advance more confident claims and they fail to come to fruition, this constitutes much more powerful evidence against our hypothesis. We can't really blame anyone for losing faith when this occurs

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#76. When catastrophe strikes, we look for a signal in the noise - anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.

Nate Silver

#77. Sometimes the only solution when the data is very noisy - is to focus more on process than on results.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#79. I know it's cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about,

Nate Silver

#80. Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.

Nate Silver

#81. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be.

Nate Silver

#82. Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#84. 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.

Nate Silver

#85. A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

Nate Silver

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

Nate Silver

#87. To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'

Nate Silver

#88. Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

Nate Silver

#89. 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.

Nate Silver

#90. You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Nate Silver

#91. What a well-designed forecasting system can do is sort out which statistics are relatively more susceptible to luck; batting average, for instance, is more erratic than home runs.

Nate Silver

#92. 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,

Nate Silver

#93. The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.

Nate Silver

#94. 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.

Nate Silver

#95. Successful gamblers - and successful forecasters of any kind - do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence.

Nate Silver

#96. To my friends, I'm kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,

Nate Silver

#97. Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.

Nate Silver

#98. We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it's kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.

Nate Silver

#99. Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

Nate Silver

#100. 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.

Nate Silver