260 Quotes by Nate Silver

What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides to them. The idea of controlling one’s fate seemed to have become part of the human consciousness by Shakespeare’s time – but not yet the competencies to achieve that end.

In 2011, he said that Donald Trump would run for the Republican nomination – and had a “damn good” chance of winning it.19.

In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes’ theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.

Political experts had difficulty anticipating the USSR’s collapse, Tetlock found, because a prediction that not only forecast the regime’s demise but also understood the reasons for it required different strands of argument to be woven together. There was nothing inherently contradictory about these ideas, but they tended to emanate from people on different sides of the political spectrum,11 and scholars firmly entrenched in one ideological camp were unlikely to have embraced them both.

You will need to learn how to express-and quantify-the uncertainty in your predictions. You will need to update your forecast as facts and circumstances change. You will need to recognize the wisdom in seeing the world from a different viewpoint. The more you are willing to do these things, the more capable you will be of evaluating a wide variety of information without abusing it.

Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.

I was losing – a lot: about $75,000 during the last few months of 2006, most of it in one horrible evening. I played through the first several months of 2007 and continued to lose – another $60,000 or so. At that point, no longer confident that I could beat the games, I cashed out the rest of my money and quit.

The blind spots in our thinking are usually of our own making and they can grow worse as we age.

The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.