260 Quotes by Nate Silver

The litmus test for whether you are a competent forecaster is if more information makes your predictions better.

The Industrial Revolution largely began in Protestant countries and largely in those with a free press, where both religious and scientific ideas could flow without fear of censorship.25.

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be.

If there’s a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn’t.

Ordinary Americans were also concerned. Google searches on the term “housing bubble” increased roughly tenfold from January 2004 through summer 2005.

The fundamental dilemma faced by climatologists is that global warming is a long-term problem that might require a near-term solution.

Any one game in baseball doesn’t tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn’t tell you that much.

The panel may as well have been flipping coins. I determined 338 of their predictions to be either mostly or completely false. The exact same number – 338 – were either mostly or completely true.

We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it.