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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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