The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail

May 20, 2015 Suhrob rated it it was amazing

Yes, 5 stars. Although I was quite familiar with many of these topics (plus I long time follow his blog), one has to simply tip his hat to Silver. His material is very level headed, well researched, down to earth but smart.

There is a flurry of superficial non-fiction roughly in this quadrant, riding the coattails of Kahneman/Tetlock/Taleb/etc.. This definitely stands out by its sheer reasonableness.

You could nitpick here-and-there and it is definitely not a terribly deep study, but seriously, if ...more

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Jan 23, 2014 Vinayak rated it really liked it

Very nice book, but a bit too elementary. I expected him to get into more details of Bayesian inference. But on the plus side, I learned one more hypothesis to explain the financial crisis: the credit rating agencies were not being Bayesian.

Nate Silver seems to believe that sports outcomes are easier to predict than the stock market or the weather. I found this interesting.

Apparently there existed a poker bubble a decade ago or so where any decent poker players could go and earn loads of money. ...more

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Dec 10, 2012 Chris Aldrich rated it liked it

Shelves: popular-science, mathematics, economics, international-relations, probability-theory, political-science

Given the technical nature of what Nate Silver does, and some of the early mentions of the book, I had higher hopes for the technical portions of the book. As usual for a popular text, I was left wanting a lot more. Again, the lack of any math left a lot to desire. I wish technical writers could get away with even a handful of equations, but wishing just won't make it so.

The first few chapters were a bit more technical sounding, but eventually devolved into a more journalistic viewpoint of stati Given the technical nature of what Nate Silver does, and some of the early mentions of the book, I had higher hopes for the technical portions of the book. As usual for a popular text, I was left wanting a lot more. Again, the lack of any math left a lot to desire. I wish technical writers could get away with even a handful of equations, but wishing just won't make it so.

The first few chapters were a bit more technical sounding, but eventually devolved into a more journalistic viewpoint of statistics, prediction, and forecasting in general within the areas of economics, political elections, weather forecasting, earthquakes, baseball, poker, chess, and terrorism. I have a feeling he lost a large part of his audience in the first few chapters by discussing the economic meltdown of 2008 first instead of baseball or poker and then getting into politics and economics.

While some of the discussion around each of these bigger topics are all intrinsically interesting and there were a few interesting tidbits I hadn't heard or read about previously, on the whole it wasn't really as novel as I had hoped it would be. I think it should be required reading for all politicans however as I too often get the feeling that none of them think at this level.

There was some reasonably good philosophical discussion of Bayesian statistics versus Fisherian, but it was all too short and could have been fleshed out more significantly. I still prefer David Applebaum's historical and philosophical discussion of probability in Probability and Information: An Integrated Approach though he surprisingly didn't mention R.A. Fisher directly himself in his coverage.

It was interesting to run across additional mentions of power laws in the realms of earthquakes and terrorism after reading Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour, but I'll have to find some texts which describe the mathematics in full detail. There was surprisingly large amount of discussion skirting around the topics within complexity without delving into it in any substantive form.

For those with a pre-existing background in science and especially probability theory, I'd recommend skipping this and simply reading Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman's work is referenced several times and his book seems less intuitive than some of the material Silver presents here.

This is the kind of text which should be required reading in high school civics classes. Perhaps it might motivate more to be interested in statistics and science related pursuits as these are almost always at the root of most political and policy related questions at the end of the day.

For me, I'd personally give this three stars, but the broader public should view it with at least four stars if not five as there is some truly great stuff here. Unfortunately a lot of it is old hat or retreaded material for me.
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