Nate Silver Quotes
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Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
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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.
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A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
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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.
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In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.
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To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'
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In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
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To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.
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I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
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Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.
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I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.
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Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.
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Success makes you less intimidated by things.
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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.
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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.
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Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.
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People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
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I've just always been a bit of a dork.
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Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
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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.
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A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
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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.
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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.
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The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.
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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.
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Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
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When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.
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I have the same friends and the same bad habits.
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The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
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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.
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