The Signal and the Noise Quotes

“The word objective is sometimes taken to be synonymous with quantitative, but it isn’t. Instead it means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“It is the alternative—failing to change our forecast because we risk embarrassment by doing so—that reveals a lack of courage.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“if you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast was wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise. If there are a number of polls in a state that show the Republican ahead, it won’t make news when another one says the same thing. But if a new poll comes out showing the Democrat with the lead, it will grab headlines—even though the poll is probably an outlier and won’t predict the outcome accurately.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Hedgehogs who have lots of information construct stories—stories that are neater and tidier than the real world, with protagonists and villains, winners and losers, climaxes and dénouements—and, usually, a happy ending for the home team. The candidate who is down ten points in the polls is going to win, goddamnit, because I know the candidate and I know the voters in her state, and maybe I heard something from her press secretary about how the polls are tightening—and have you seen her latest commercial?”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Men may construe things, after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The fundamental dilemma faced by climatologists is that global warming is a long-term problem that might require a near-term solution.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The blind spots in our thinking are usually of our own making and they can grow worse as we age.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another. All languages contain words that have no direct cognate in other languages, even though they are both trying to explain the same universe.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy. Statistical inferences are much stronger when backed up by theory or at least some deeper thinking about their root causes.”
― 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.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Laplace’s Demon:”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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 fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Most of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation—our ingenuity and our industriousness, our arrogance and our impatience—stem from our unshakable belief in the idea that we choose our own course.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Scientific progress is harder to measure than economic progress.32 But one mark of it is the number of patents produced, especially relative to the investment in research and development. If it has become cheaper to produce a new invention, this suggests that we are using our information wisely and are forging it into knowledge.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides to them. The idea of controlling one’s fate seemed to have become part of the human consciousness by Shakespeare’s time—but not yet the competencies to achieve that end.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“having so much more shared knowledge was increasing isolation along national and religious lines. The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“If today we feel a sense of impermanence because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal concern for the generations before us.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“If you correctly detect an opponent’s bluff, but he gets a lucky card and wins the hand anyway, you should be pleased rather than angry, because you played the hand as well as you could. The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“poker is a hard way to make an easy living.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Nuestra reacción instintiva ante un «exceso de información» consiste en abordarla de forma selectiva. Así, elegimos las partes que nos gustan e ignoramos el resto, y convertimos en aliados a quienes han hecho las mismas elecciones que nosotros y en enemigos a los demás.”
― Nate Silver, La señal y el ruido: Por qué algunas predicciones fallan y otras no (DIVULGACIÓN)

“Language, for instance, is a type of model, an approximation that we use to communicate with one another.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Akerlof wrote a famous paper on this subject called “The Market for Lemons”78—it won him a Nobel Prize. In the paper,”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Technology is beneficial as a labor-saving device, but we should not expect machines to do our thinking for us.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't