Nate Silver Quotes - Page 2

To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'

First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

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.

Voters' memories will fade some.

If you're keeping yourself in the bubble and only looking at your own data or only watching the TV that fits your agenda then it gets boring.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

I know it's cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about.

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.

We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it's kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times. And so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.

Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.

The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won't make for punchy headlines.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.