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Nate Silver [1978-0] American

Rank: 101
Writer, Statistician

Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections. He is the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News.

Learning, Politics, Funny, Knowledge, Truth

Quote	Tags	Rank
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.	Knowledge	101
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.	Learning	102
Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.		103
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.		104
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.		105
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.	Politics	106
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.	Truth	107
We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.		108
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.		109
I have the same friends and the same bad habits.		110
If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.		111
We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.		112
You get steely nerves playing poker.		113
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.		114
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.	Politics	115
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.		116
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.		117
I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'		118
People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.		119
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.		120
Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.		121
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.		122
When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.	Funny	123
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.		124
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.		125
People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.		126
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.	Learning	201
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.		202
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.		203
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.		204
Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.		205
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.		206
Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.		207
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.		208
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.		209
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.		210
Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.		211
Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.		212
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.		213
Success makes you less intimidated by things.		214
If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.		215
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.		216
There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.		217
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.		218
I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.		219
I've just always been a bit of a dork.		220
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.		221
I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.		222
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.		223
You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.		224
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.		225
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.		226
If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.		301
I think punditry serves no purpose.		302
I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.		303
I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.		304
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'		305
People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.		306
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.		307
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.		308
I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.		309
I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.		310
I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.		311
In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.		312
You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.		313
I don't think you should limit what you read.		314
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.		315
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.		316
We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.		317
A lot of things can't be modeled very well.		318
Voters memories will fade some.		319
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.		320
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.		321
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.		322
I'm a pro-horserace guy.		323
I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.		324
I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.		325

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