Top 180 Nate Silver Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A lot of things can’t be modeled very well.”

— Nate Silver

103. “Laplace’s Demon:.”

— Nate Silver

104. “When you draw up a player, scouts have a feel for what they want to see,” Sanders told me. “Prototypical standards. Dustin went against the grain in some of those areas, starting with his size.” When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg – when.”

— Nate Silver

105. “Political experts had difficulty anticipating the USSR’s collapse, Tetlock found, because a prediction that not only forecast the regime’s demise but also understood the reasons for it required different strands of argument to be woven together. There was nothing inherently contradictory about these ideas, but they tended to emanate from people on different sides of the political spectrum,11 and scholars firmly entrenched in one ideological camp were unlikely to have embraced them both.”

— Nate Silver

106. “I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don’t really have control over.”

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

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

— Nate Silver

109. “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.”

— Nate Silver

110. “I think there’s space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.”

— Nate Silver

111. “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

112. “You don’t want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.”

— Nate Silver

113. “In complex systems, however, mistakes are not measured in degrees but in whole orders of magnitude.”

— Nate Silver

114. “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

115. “I was looking for something like baseball, where there’s a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That’s when I discovered politics.”

— Nate Silver

116. “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.”

— Nate Silver

117. “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail.”

— Nate Silver

118. “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood, as though this will make them go away.”

— Nate Silver

119. “There is a “water level” established by the competition and your profit will be like the tip of an iceberg: a small sliver of competitive advantage floating just above the surface, but concealing a vast bulwark of effort that went in to support it.”

— Nate Silver

120. “Technology is beneficial as a labor-saving device, but we should not expect machines to do our thinking for us.”

— Nate Silver

121. “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.”

— Nate Silver

122. “The answer as to why bubbles form,” Blodget told me, “is that it’s in everybody’s interest to keep markets going up.”

— Nate Silver

123. “I guess I don’t like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.”

— Nate Silver

124. “Not only does political coverage often lose the signal – it frequently accentuates the noise. If there are a number of polls in a state that show the Republican ahead, it won’t make news when another one says the same thing. But if a new poll comes out showing the Democrat with the lead, it will grab headlines – even though the poll is probably an outlier and won’t predict the outcome accurately.”

— Nate Silver

125. “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. Statistical inferences are much stronger when backed up by theory or at least some deeper thinking about their root causes.”

— Nate Silver

126. “Things like Google search traffic patterns, for instance, can serve as leading indicators for economic data series like unemployment.”

— Nate Silver

127. “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.”

— Nate Silver

128. “In science, dubious forecasts are more likely to be exposed – and the truth is more likely to prevail. In politics, a domain in which the truth enjoys no privileged status, it’s anybody’s guess.”

— Nate Silver

129. “The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is. We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being. We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are much cruder than we realize. We abhor uncertainty, even when it is an irreducible part of the problem we are trying to solve.”

— Nate Silver

130. “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

— Nate Silver

131. “The daily consumption in South Korea, which has a fairly meat-heavy diet, is about 3,070 calories per person per day, slightly above the world average. However, the obesity rate there is only about 3 percent. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, by contrast, consumes about as many calories as South Korea per day,6 but the obsesity rate there is 79 percent.”

— Nate Silver

132. “Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.”

— Nate Silver

133. “Remember, the Congress doesn’t get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.”

— Nate Silver

134. “If there’s a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn’t.”

— Nate Silver

135. “As John Maynard Keynes said, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

— Nate Silver

136. “I lived the poker dream for a while, and then it died. I learned that poker sits at the muddy confluence of the signal and the noise. My years in the game taught me a great deal about the role that chance plays in our lives and the delusions it can produce when we seek to understand the world and predict its course.”

— Nate Silver

137. “It’s hard enough to know where the economy is going. But it’s much, much harder if you don’t know where it is to begin with.”

— Nate Silver

138. “Absolutely nothing useful is realized when one person who holds that there is a 0 percent probability of something argues against another person who holds that the probability is 100 percent.”

— Nate Silver

139. “Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another.”

— Nate Silver

140. “When they play against each other, the game usually comes down to who can find his opponent’s blind spots first.”

— Nate Silver

141. “For Popper, a hypothesis was not scientific unless it was falsifiable – meaning that it could be tested in the real world by means of a prediction.”

— Nate Silver

142. “One conceit of economics is that markets as a whole can perform fairly rationally, even if many of the participants within them are irrational. But irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives.”

— Nate Silver

143. “The litmus test for whether you are a competent forecaster is if more information makes your predictions better.”

— Nate Silver

144. “Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it’s where we least expect them to.”

— Nate Silver

145. “A forecaster who says he doesn’t care about the science is like the cook who says he doesn’t care about food.”

— Nate Silver

146. “Most statistical models are built on the notion that there are independent variables and dependent variables, inputs and outputs, and they can be kept pretty much separate from one another.39 When it comes to the economy, they are all lumped together in one hot mess.”

— Nate Silver

147. “Wherever there is human judgment there is the potential for bias.”

— Nate Silver

148. “We should neither worship at the altar of technology nor be frightened by it.”

— Nate Silver

149. “An American home has not, historically speaking, been a lucrative investment. In fact, according to an index developed by Robert Shiller and his colleague Karl Case, the market price of an American home has barely increased at all over the long run. After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996. The rate of return had been less in a century than the stock market typically produces in a single year.”

— Nate Silver

150. “Partisans who expect every idea to fit on a bumper sticker will proceed through the various stages of grief before accepting that they have oversimplified reality.”

— Nate Silver