Top 180 Nate Silver Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Nate Silver

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2. “Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.”

— Nate Silver

3. “Data Is Useless Without Context.”

— Nate Silver

4. “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.”

— Nate Silver

5. “The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

7. “When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg – when.”

— Nate Silver

8. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

10. “When the facts change, I change my mind,” the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said. “What do you do, sir?”

— Nate Silver

11. “Accountability doesn’t mean apologizing.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

15. “We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.”

— Nate Silver

16. “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.”

— Nate Silver

17. “There was “nothing new under the sun,” as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it – not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.”

— Nate Silver

18. “There’s always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.”

— Nate Silver

19. “A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.”

— Nate Silver

20. “The fashionable term now is “Big Data.” IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36.”

— Nate Silver

21. “I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It’s a really great problem to have.”

— Nate Silver

22. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

25. “If you hold there is a 100 percent probability that God exists, or a 0 percent probability, then under Bayes’s theorem, no amount of evidence could persuade you otherwise.”

— Nate Silver

26. “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.”

— Nate Silver

27. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

30. “Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.”

— Nate Silver

31. “If you correctly detect an opponent’s bluff, but he gets a lucky card and wins the hand anyway, you should be pleased rather than angry, because you played the hand as well as you could. The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

33. “Bayes’s theorem requires us to state – explicitly – how likely we believe an event is to occur before we begin to weigh the evidence. It calls this estimate a prior belief.”

— Nate Silver

34. “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.”

— Nate Silver

35. “I love South American food, and I haven’t really been down there. I really need a vacation.”

— Nate Silver

36. “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.”

— Nate Silver

37. “Wherever there is human judgment there is the potential for bias. The way to become more objective is to recognize the influence that our assumptions play in our forecasts and to question ourselves about them.”

— Nate Silver

38. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

40. “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.”

— Nate Silver

41. “What isn’t acceptable under Bayes’s theorem is to pretend that you don’t have any prior beliefs. You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a sign that you have many. To state your beliefs up front – to say “Here’s where I’m coming from”12 – is a way to operate in good faith and to recognize that you perceive reality through a subjective filter.”

— Nate Silver

42. “Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another. All languages contain words that have no direct cognate in other languages, even though they are both trying to explain the same universe.”

— Nate Silver

43. “If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal concern for the generations before us.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

45. “We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.”

— Nate Silver

46. “I have the same friends and the same bad habits.”

— Nate Silver

47. “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.”

— Nate Silver

48. “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.”

— Nate Silver

49. “The key to making a good forecast, as we observed in chapter 2, is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information. Rather, it’s having a good process for weighing the information appropriately.”

— Nate Silver

50. “There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.”

— Nate Silver