The Signal and the Noise Quotes

“economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world a year ahead of time.21”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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

“It’s hard enough to know where the economy is going. But it’s much, much harder if you don’t know where it is to begin with.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“expected during the Long Boom years. In the year after the stimulus package was passed in 2009, for instance, GDP was growing fast enough to create about two million jobs according to Okun’s law.41 Instead, an additional 3.5 million jobs were lost during the period.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Most statistical models are built on the notion that there are independent variables and dependent variables, inputs and outputs, and they can be kept pretty much separate from one another.39 When it comes to the economy, they are all lumped together in one hot mess.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“An American home has not, historically speaking, been a lucrative investment. In fact, according to an index developed by Robert Shiller and his colleague Karl Case, the market price of an American home has barely increased at all over the long run. After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996. The rate of return had been less in a century than the stock market typically produces in a single year.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“In complex systems, however, mistakes are not measured in degrees but in whole orders of magnitude.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“That meant that for every dollar that someone was willing to put in a mortgage, Wall Street was making almost $50 worth of bets on the side.”
― 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.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Ordinary Americans were also concerned. Google searches on the term “housing bubble” increased roughly tenfold from January 2004 through summer 2005.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don'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

“There was “nothing new under the sun,” as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it—not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“for-profit weather forecasters rarely predict exactly a 50 percent chance of rain, which might seem wishy-washy and indecisive to consumers.41 Instead, they’ll flip a coin and round up to 60, or down to 40, even though this makes the forecasts both less accurate and”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Nowadays, in a fast-paced world awash in numbers and statistics, those same tendencies can get us into trouble: when presented with a series of random numbers, we see patterns where there aren’t any. (Advertisers and politicians, possessed of modern guile, often prey on the primordial parts of our brain.)”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Like a baseball umpire, an intelligence analyst risks being blamed when something goes wrong but receives little notice when she does her job well.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“We should neither worship at the altar of technology nor be frightened by it.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Things like Google search traffic patterns, for instance, can serve as leading indicators for economic data series like unemployment.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“What isn’t acceptable under Bayes’s theorem is to pretend that you don’t have any prior beliefs. You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a sign that you have many. To state your beliefs up front—to say “Here’s where I’m coming from”12—is a way to operate in good faith and to recognize that you perceive reality through a subjective filter.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Bayes’s theorem requires us to state—explicitly—how likely we believe an event is to occur before we begin to weigh the evidence. It calls this estimate a prior belief.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives. So long as most traders are judged on the basis of short-term performance, bubbles involving large deviations of stock prices from their long-term values are possible—and perhaps even inevitable.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“members of Congress, who often gain access to inside information about a company while they are lobbied and who also have some ability to influence the fate of companies through legislation, return a profit on their investments that beats market averages by 5 to 10 percent per year,”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“sometimes the only solution when the data is very noisy—is to focus more on process than on results.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“it is not really “artificial” intelligence if a human designed the artifice.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Essentially, the frequentist approach toward statistics seeks to wash its hands of the reason that predictions most often go wrong: human error.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Successful gamblers—and successful forecasters of any kind—do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“It turns out that the economic forecasts produced by the White House, for instance, have historically been among the least accurate of all,69 regardless of whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in charge.)”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“An economic model conditioned on the notion that nothing major will change is a useless one.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“in the 1990s, economists predicted only 2 of the 60 recessions around the world a year ahead of time.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The panel may as well have been flipping coins. I determined 338 of their predictions to be either mostly or completely false. The exact same number—338—were either mostly or completely true.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't