Best 87 quotes of Nate Silver on MyQuotes

Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

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

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.

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

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.

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won't make for punchy headlines.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

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 that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

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

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.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

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

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

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

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

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 have different ways of interpreting history.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

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.