Nate Silver Quotes

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

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

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.

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

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

I don't think you should limit what you read.

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

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.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

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

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.