Nate Silver famous 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.
-- Nate Silver

#Differences #Self #Serenity

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

#Risk #Marketing

Success makes you less intimidated by things.
-- Nate Silver

#Marketing #Intimidated

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

#Ideas #Marketing #Details

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.
-- Nate Silver

#Marketing #Probability #Uncertainty

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

#Data #Funny Things #Judgment

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.
-- Nate Silver

#Baseball #Data #Competition

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

#Real #Mean #Skills

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

#Team #Thinking #Missions

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

#Two #Way #Different

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
-- Nate Silver

#Wells

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
-- Nate Silver

#Writing #Stuff #Way

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

#Heart #Doctors #Risk

Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.
-- Nate Silver

#Political #Noise #Doe

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
-- Nate Silver

#Data #Scientist #Statistician

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

#Google #Marketing #World

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

#Motivation #Inspiration #Race

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

#Baseball #Games #Polls

We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.
-- Nate Silver

#Speak

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

#Winning #College #Swings

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

#Enemy #Progress #Quests

To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,
-- Nate Silver

#Gay #Kind #Sexually

I don't think you should limit what you read.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Limits #Should

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Problem #Really Great

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

#Hey #Realizing #Minors

Voters memories will fade some.
-- Nate Silver

#Memories #Voters

I think punditry serves no purpose.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Purpose

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

#Mistake #Missing #Problem

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.
-- Nate Silver

#Light #People #Information

Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
-- Nate Silver

#Opportunity #Remember #Congress

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Reputation

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
-- Nate Silver

#Trying #Want #Influence

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

#Real #Answers #World

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
-- Nate Silver

#Things Happen

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

#Thinking #People #Feels

I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Blunt

If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.
-- Nate Silver

#President #Tvs #Events

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.
-- Nate Silver

#Trying #Tricky

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.
-- Nate Silver

#Election #Boring #Midterm Elections

I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it's a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.
-- Nate Silver

#Names #Choices #Quality

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.
-- Nate Silver

#Heart #People #Desire

It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
-- Nate Silver

#Littles #Analysis #Strange

You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.
-- Nate Silver

#Want #Treats #Persons

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

#Commitment #Views #Objectivity

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

#Too Much #Way #Hot

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

#Book #Luxury #Printing

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
-- Nate Silver

#Games #Curves #Kind

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.
-- Nate Silver

#Believe #Omen

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

#Self #Marketing #Noise

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.
-- Nate Silver

#Years #Broken #Presidential

I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.
-- Nate Silver

#New York #Paper #Week

I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.
-- Nate Silver

#Vacation #Needs #Need A Vacation

I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Should #Articles

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

#Thinking #Space #Dozen

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

#Choices #Arbitrary #Example

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.
-- Nate Silver

#Cartoon #Onions #Analysis

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
-- Nate Silver

#News #Entertainment

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

#Thinking #Views #People

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

#Data #Tvs #Agendas

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
-- Nate Silver

#Race #Election #Stills

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.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Acting #Degrees

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.
-- Nate Silver

#Habit #Bad Habits

I've just always been a bit of a dork.
-- Nate Silver

#Dork

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

#Average #Data #Play

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

#Pessimistic #Economy #Economist

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

#Twilight #Cat #Years

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

#Views #Evil #Levels

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

#Way #Different #Needs

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

#Thinking #Behavior #Should

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.
-- Nate Silver

#Rooms #Overcoming #Tough

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
-- Nate Silver

#Keys #Information #Limiting Yourself

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Information #Outlook

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

#Baseball #Data #Creative

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

#Thinking #Yesterday #Glory

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

#Doe #Symbolic #Deserve

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

#Believe #People #Different

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

#Needs #Problem #Predictions

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

#Drama #Character #Fate

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

#Thinking #Risk #Age

Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.
-- Nate Silver

#Baseball #Games #Economy

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.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Kind #Predictions

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

#Bullshit #Discipline #Looks

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.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Opposites #Facts

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

#Ideas #Printing #Luther

You get steely nerves playing poker.
-- Nate Silver

#Nerves

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

#Way #Want #Predictions

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

#Baseball #Football #Play

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
-- Nate Silver

#Noise #Signals

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.
-- Nate Silver

#Computer #Busy

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

#Snapshots #Sample

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
-- Nate Silver

#People #Appreciate #Ephemeral

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.
-- Nate Silver

#Thinking #Possibility