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

by Nate Silver

The first 20 percent often begins with having the right data, the right technology, and the right incentives. You need to have some information—more of it rather than less, ideally—and you need to make sure that it is quality-controlled. You need to have some familiarity with the tools of your trade—having top-shelf technology is nice, but it’s more important that you know how to use what you have. You need to care about accuracy—about getting at the objective truth—rather than about making the most pleasing or convenient prediction, or the one that might get you on television. Then you might progress to a few intermediate steps, developing some rules of thumb (heuristics) that are grounded in experience and common sense and some systematic process to make a forecast rather than doing so on an ad hoc basis. These things aren’t exactly easy—many people get them wrong. But they aren’t hard either, and by doing them you may be able to make predictions 80 percent as reliable as those of the world’s foremost expert.