Nate Silver's Quotes

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.

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

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

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

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

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

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

Voters memories will fade some.

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.

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

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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

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

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

Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.

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

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

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

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

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

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

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

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

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.

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

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

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

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.

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 the time nothing happens in a day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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