The Signal and the Noise Quotes

“Wherever there is human judgment there is the potential for bias. The way to become more objective is to recognize the influence that our assumptions play in our forecasts and to question ourselves about them.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systematic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risky they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that these investments were almost risk-free. Too many investors mistook these confident conclusions for accurate ones, and too few made backup plans in case things went wrong.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“Risk, as first articulated by the economist Frank H. Knight in 1921, is somethimg that you can put a price on.......Uncertainty, on the other hand, is risk that is hard to measure.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“On the other hand there was its culture. New Orleans does many things well, but there are two things that it proudly refuses to do. New Orleans does not move quickly, and New Orleans does not place much faith in authority. If it did those things, New Orleans would not really be New Orleans. It would also have been much better prepared to deal with Katrina, since those are the exact two things you need to do when a hurricane threatens to strike.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine—but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“In science, dubious forecasts are more likely to be exposed—and the truth is more likely to prevail. In politics, a domain in which the truth enjoys no privileged status, it’s anybody’s guess.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“But Mann, who blogs along with Schmidt at RealClimate.org, sees himself as engaged in trench warfare against groups like the Heartland Institute. “We’re”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Bayes’s theorem deals with epistemological uncertainty—the limits of our knowledge.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Partisans who expect every idea to fit on a bumper sticker will proceed through the various stages of grief before accepting that they have oversimplified reality.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“failures like these have been fairly common in political prediction. A long-term study by Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania found that when political scientists claimed that a political outcome had absolutely no chance of occurring, it nevertheless happened about 15 percent of the time. (The political scientists are probably better than television pundits, however.)”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“There also were the widespread failures of prediction that accompanied the recent global financial crisis. Our naïve trust in models, and our failure to realize how fragile they were to our choice of assumptions, yielded disastrous results. On a more routine basis, meanwhile, I discovered that we are unable to predict recessions more than a few months in advance, and not for lack of trying. While there has been considerable progress made in controlling inflation, our economic policy makers are otherwise flying blind.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The Weather Service was initially organized under the Department of War by President Ulysses S. Grant, who authorized it in 1870. This was partly because President Grant was convinced that only a culture of military discipline could produce the requisite accuracy in forecasting25 and partly because the whole enterprise was so hopeless that it was only worth bothering with during wartime when you would try almost anything to get an edge.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The most basic tenet of chaos theory is that a small change in initial conditions—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—can produce a large and unexpected divergence in outcomes—a tornado in Texas. This does not mean that the behavior of the system is random, as the term “chaos” might seem to imply. Nor”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The importance of the Industrial Revolution is hard to overstate. Throughout essentially all of human history, economic growth had proceeded at a rate of perhaps 0.1 percent per year, enough to allow for a very gradual increase in population, but not any growth in per capita living standards.26 And then, suddenly, there was progress when there had been none. Economic growth began to zoom upward much faster than the growth rate of the population, as it has continued to do through to the present day, the occasional global financial meltdown notwithstanding.27”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“In 2011, he said that Donald Trump would run for the Republican nomination—and had a “damn good” chance of winning it.19”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“When you draw up a player, scouts have a feel for what they want to see,” Sanders told me. “Prototypical standards. Dustin went against the grain in some of those areas, starting with his size.” When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg—when”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Never before in human history have so many predictions been made so quickly and for such high stakes.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The daily consumption in South Korea, which has a fairly meat-heavy diet, is about 3,070 calories per person per day, slightly above the world average. However, the obesity rate there is only about 3 percent. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, by contrast, consumes about as many calories as South Korea per day,6 but the obsesity rate there is 79 percent.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The answer as to why bubbles form,” Blodget told me, “is that it’s in everybody’s interest to keep markets going up.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“RANDOM-WALK AND ACTUAL STOCK-MARKET CHARTS”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Poker is so volatile that it’s possible for a theoretically winning player to have a losing streak that persists for months, or even for a full year. The flip side of this is that it’s possible for a losing player to go on a long winning streak before he realizes that he isn’t much good.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“I was losing—a lot: about $75,000 during the last few months of 2006, most of it in one horrible evening. I played through the first several months of 2007 and continued to lose—another $60,000 or so. At that point, no longer confident that I could beat the games, I cashed out the rest of my money and quit.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“There is a “water level” established by the competition and your profit will be like the tip of an iceberg: a small sliver of competitive advantage floating just above the surface, but concealing a vast bulwark of effort that went in to support it.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“I lived the poker dream for a while, and then it died. I learned that poker sits at the muddy confluence of the signal and the noise. My years in the game taught me a great deal about the role that chance plays in our lives and the delusions it can produce when we seek to understand the world and predict its course.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“If you hold there is a 100 percent probability that God exists, or a 0 percent probability, then under Bayes’s theorem, no amount of evidence could persuade you otherwise.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“herd immunity”—the biological equivalent of a firewall in which the disease has too few opportunities to spread and dies out.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't