Nevertheless, this book encourages readers to think carefully about the signal and the noise and to seek out forecasts that couch their predictions in percentage or probabilistic terms. They are a more honest representation of the limits of our predictive abilities. When a prediction about a complex phenomenon is expressed with a great deal of confidence, it may be a sign that the forecaster has not thought through the problem carefully, has overfit his statistical model, or is more interested in making a name for himself than in getting at the truth.