Nate Silver Quotes

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

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

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

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Voters' memories will fade some.

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

To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.

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

Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.

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.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

You get steely nerves playing poker.

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

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

I think punditry serves no purpose.

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

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.