260 Quotes by Nate Silver

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.

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

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.

When we advance more confident claims and they fail to come to fruition, this constitutes much more powerful evidence against our hypothesis. We can't really blame anyone for losing faith when this occurs

...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be.

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

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.

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