Top 180 Nate Silver Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.”

— Nate Silver

52. “You get steely nerves playing poker.”

— Nate Silver

53. “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.”

— Nate Silver

54. “Poker is so volatile that it’s possible for a theoretically winning player to have a losing streak that persists for months, or even for a full year. The flip side of this is that it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realizes that he isn’t much good.”

— Nate Silver

55. “People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.”

— Nate Silver

56. “Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

58. “If you aren’t taking a representative sample, you won’t get a representative snapshot.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

60. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

62. “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.”

— Nate Silver

63. “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.”

— Nate Silver

64. “Not only does political coverage often lose the signal – it frequently accentuates the noise.”

— Nate Silver

65. “The most basic tenet of chaos theory is that a small change in initial conditions – a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil – can produce a large and unexpected divergence in outcomes – a tornado in Texas. This does not mean that the behavior of the system is random, as the term “chaos” might seem to imply. Nor.”

— Nate Silver

66. “The most basic tenet of chaos theory is that a small change in initial conditions – a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil – can produce a large and unexpected divergence in outcomes – a tornado in Texas.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

68. “Essentially, the frequentist approach toward statistics seeks to wash its hands of the reason that predictions most often go wrong: human error.”

— Nate Silver

69. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

71. “The leap is into the Bayesian way of thinking about prediction and probability.”

— Nate Silver

72. “A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.”

— Nate Silver

73. “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.”

— Nate Silver

74. “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

— Nate Silver

75. “Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine – but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.”

— Nate Silver

76. “I’ve become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I’m actually doing and what I actually deserve.”

— Nate Silver

77. “To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, ‘Hey, celebrities are just like us.’”

— Nate Silver

78. “This is an example of an out-of-sample problem. As easy as it might seem to avoid this sort of problem, the ratings agencies made just this mistake. Moody’s estimated the extent to which mortgage defaults were correlated with one another by building a model from past data – specifically, they looked at American housing data going back to about the 1980s.”

— Nate Silver

79. “People still don’t appreciate how ephemeral success is.”

— Nate Silver

80. “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be.”

— Nate Silver

81. “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.”

— Nate Silver

82. “Nobody saw it coming. When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

84. “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.”

— Nate Silver

85. “An admonition like “The more complex you make the model, the worse the forecast gets.” is equivalent to saying “Never add too much salt to the recipe.” How much complexity-how much salt-did you begin with? If you want to get good at forecasting, you’ll need to immerse yourself in the craft and trust your own taste buds.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

87. “I don’t think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the ‘experiment.’”

— Nate Silver

88. “Voters memories will fade some.”

— Nate Silver

89. “Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.”

— Nate Silver

90. “Most of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation – our ingenuity and our industriousness, our arrogance and our impatience – stem from our unshakable belief in the idea that we choose our own course.”

— Nate Silver

91. “I’ve just always been a bit of a dork.”

— Nate Silver

92. “In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.”

— Nate Silver

93. “Like a baseball umpire, an intelligence analyst risks being blamed when something goes wrong but receives little notice when she does her job well.”

— Nate Silver

94. “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.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

96. “We’re living in a world where Google beats Gallup.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

98. “Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information.”

— Nate Silver

99. “You will need to learn how to express-and quantify-the uncertainty in your predictions. You will need to update your forecast as facts and circumstances change. You will need to recognize the wisdom in seeing the world from a different viewpoint. The more you are willing to do these things, the more capable you will be of evaluating a wide variety of information without abusing it.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver