260 Quotes by Nate Silver

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.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that’s what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise.

Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another. All languages contain words that have no direct cognate in other languages, even though they are both trying to explain the same universe.

When the facts change, I change my mind,” the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said. “What do you do, sir?

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.

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.

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

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

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.