Words matter. These are the best Nate Silver Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve just always been a bit of a dork.
If you aren’t taking a representative sample, you won’t get a representative snapshot.
I think there’s space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.
First of all, I think it’s odd that people who cover politics wouldn’t have any political views.
A lot of things can’t be modeled very well.
I don’t think you should limit what you read.
I guess I don’t like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.
You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.
Well, you know, you’re not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
Remember, the Congress doesn’t get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
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.
It’s a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
You get steely nerves playing poker.
I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don’t really have control over.
There’s always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.
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.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
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.
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
I’m not trying to do anything too tricky.
If you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
If there’s a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn’t.
I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
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.
When you try to predict future E.R.A.’s with past E.R.A.’s, you’re making a mistake.
People still don’t appreciate how ephemeral success is.
People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It’s a really great problem to have.
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.
I don’t think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the ‘experiment.’
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.
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn’t believe they applied to him.
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.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
You don’t want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
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.
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
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.
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.
Voters memories will fade some.
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
I think punditry serves no purpose.
I love South American food, and I haven’t really been down there. I really need a vacation.
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.
