260 Quotes by Nate Silver

The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it. The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime.

Poker is so volatile that it’s possible for a theoretically winning player to have a losing streak that persists for months, or even for a full year. The flip side of this is that it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realizes that he isn’t much good.

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.

You don’t want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Things like Google search traffic patterns, for instance, can serve as leading indicators for economic data series like unemployment.

Almost everyone’s instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.

Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine – but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.