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

by Nate Silver

To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn ourselves with some awfully faint praise. Prediction does play a particularly important role in science, however. Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view. But this book is emphatically against the nihilistic viewpoint that there is no objective truth. It asserts, rather, that a belief in the objective truth—and a commitment to pursuing it—is the first prerequisite of making better predictions. The forecaster’s next commitment is to realize that she perceives it imperfectly. Prediction is important because it connects subjective and objective reality. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, recognized this view.45 For Popper, a hypothesis was not scientific unless it was falsifiable—meaning that it could be tested in the real world by means of a prediction. What should give us pause is that the few ideas we have tested aren’t doing so well, and many of our ideas have not or cannot be tested at all.