Best 87 quotes of Nate Silver on MyQuotes

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

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

Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.

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

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.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.

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.

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.

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

We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it's kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

If political scientists couldn’t predict the downfall of the Soviet Union—perhaps the most important event in the latter half of the twentieth century—then what exactly were they good for?

In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.

The promise that attracted me to move is the idea that you can come to New York and be surrounded by the people who are the best at what they do in many different fields. On that front, I think it delivers. Working your way around the city you really do run into a disproportionate number of really interesting people. That’s almost what you pay your taxes for, even if you think it’s a little crazy to pay that much to live here.

...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.

When we advance more confident claims and they fail to come to fruition, this constitutes much more powerful evidence against our hypothesis. We can't really blame anyone for losing faith when this occurs

Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.