260 Quotes by Nate Silver

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

I don’t think you should limit what you read.

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.

Bayes’s theorem deals with epistemological uncertainty – the limits of our knowledge.

The Weather Service was initially organized under the Department of War by President Ulysses S. Grant, who authorized it in 1870. This was partly because President Grant was convinced that only a culture of military discipline could produce the requisite accuracy in forecasting25 and partly because the whole enterprise was so hopeless that it was only worth bothering with during wartime when you would try almost anything to get an edge.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

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

How can we apply our judgment to the data – without succumbing to our biases?

Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.