260 Quotes by Nate Silver

I think there’s space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

Absolutely nothing useful is realized when one person who holds that there is a 0 percent probability of something argues against another person who holds that the probability is 100 percent.

We may, without even realizing it, work backward to generate persuasive-sounding theories that rationalize them, and these will often fool our friends and colleagues as well as ourselves.

The fashionable term now is “Big Data.” IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36.

You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.

Partisans who expect every idea to fit on a bumper sticker will proceed through the various stages of grief before accepting that they have oversimplified reality.

For Popper, a hypothesis was not scientific unless it was falsifiable – meaning that it could be tested in the real world by means of a prediction.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things – and we aren’t very good at it.

If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.