260 Quotes by Nate Silver

Laplace’s Demon:.

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It’s a really great problem to have.

The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk.

I’m not trying to do anything too tricky.

When you draw up a player, scouts have a feel for what they want to see,” Sanders told me. “Prototypical standards. Dustin went against the grain in some of those areas, starting with his size.” When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg – when.

The key to making a good forecast, as we observed in chapter 2, is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information. Rather, it’s having a good process for weighing the information appropriately.

The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty in the outlook.

I love South American food, and I haven’t really been down there. I really need a vacation.

We’re not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information – and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.