260 Quotes by Nate Silver

Accountability doesn’t mean apologizing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Data Is Useless Without Context.

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.