260 Quotes by Nate Silver

It’s a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

Alvin Toffler, writing in the book Future Shock in 1970, predicted some of the consequences of what he called “information overload.” He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.42.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don’t really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by ‘The Onion’ – or be the subject of a cartoon in ‘The New Yorker.’ I guess I’m kind of an outlier there.

The daily consumption in South Korea, which has a fairly meat-heavy diet, is about 3,070 calories per person per day, slightly above the world average. However, the obesity rate there is only about 3 percent. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, by contrast, consumes about as many calories as South Korea per day,6 but the obsesity rate there is 79 percent.

Remember, the Congress doesn’t get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.

People don’t have a good intuitive sense of how to weigh new information in light of what they already know. They tend to overrate it.

Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

Bayes’s theorem requires us to state – explicitly – how likely we believe an event is to occur before we begin to weigh the evidence. It calls this estimate a prior belief.