260 Quotes by Nate Silver

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

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.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.