The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

But when it seems like all of your friends are saying the same thing—that’s when you need to be on high alert. It doesn’t mean those views are necessarily wrong. Hopefully, you’ll have selected your news sources well (and your friends well).* But if a news story stimulates an instinctual, System 1 reaction, as can be especially likely when it’s shared on social media, slow down and make sure it checks out with System 2. Update your priors.

Big Data will produce progress—eventually. How quickly it does, and whether we regress in the meantime, will depend on us.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas—in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird virtually every interaction in society.

Foxes, on the other hand, are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem.