Top 180 Nate Silver Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You get steely nerves playing poker.”

— Nate Silver

52. “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

53. “Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

56. “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

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

— Nate Silver

58. “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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

61. “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

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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Nate Silver

80. “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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

83. “Voters memories will fade some.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

85. “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

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

— Nate Silver

87. “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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

90. “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

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

— Nate Silver

92. “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

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

96. “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

97. “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

98. “Any one game in baseball doesn’t tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn’t tell you that much.”

— Nate Silver

99. “Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn’t believe they applied to him.”

— Nate Silver

100. “A forecaster should almost never ignore data, especially when she is studying rare events like recessions or presidential elections, about which there isn’t very much data to begin with. Ignoring data is often a tip-off that the forecaster is overconfident, or is overfitting her model – that she is interested in showing off rather than trying to be accurate.”

— Nate Silver