The Signal and the Noise Quotes

“When we expand our sample to include events further apart from us in time and space, it often means that we will encounter cases in which the relationships we are studying did not hold up as well as we are accustomed to. The model will seem to be less powerful. It will look less impressive in a PowerPoint presentation (or a journal article or a blog post). We will be forced to acknowledge that we know less about the world than we thought we did. Our personal and professional incentives almost always discourage us from doing this. We forget—or we willfully ignore—that our models are simplifications of the world. We figure that if we make a mistake, it will be at the margin.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“So we should have some sympathy for economic forecasters.50 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

“The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty in the outlook.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Nobody saw it coming. When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The fashionable term now is “Big Data.” IBM estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, more than 90 percent of which was created in the last two years.36”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.—Donald Rumsfeld21”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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

“Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it's where we least expect them to.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“One conceit of economics is that markets as a whole can perform fairly rationally, even if many of the participants within them are irrational. But irrational behavior in the markets may result precisely because individuals are responding rationally according to their incentives.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“Stories of prediction are often those of long-term progress but short-term regress”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“Although Israel is targeted by terrorists much more frequently than the United States, Israelis do not live in fear of terrorism. A 2012 survey of Israeli Jews found that only 16 percent described terrorism as their greatest fear81—no more than the number who said they were worried about Israel’s education system. No Israeli politician would say outright that he tolerates small-scale terrorism, but that’s essentially what the country does. It tolerates it because the alternative—having everyone be paralyzed by fear—is incapacitating and in line with the terrorists’ goals. A key element in the country’s strategy is making life as normal as possible for people after an attack occurs. For instance, police typically try to clear the scene of an attack within four hours of a bomb going off,82 letting everyone get back to work, errands, or even leisure. Small-scale terrorism is treated more like crime than an existential threat. What Israel certainly does not tolerate is the potential for large-scale terrorism (as might be made more likely, for instance, by one of their neighbors acquiring weapons of mass destruction). There is some evidence that their approach is successful: Israel is the one country that has been able to bend Clauset’s curve. If we plot the fatality tolls from terrorist incidents in Israel using the power-law method (figure 13-8), we find that there have been significantly fewer large-scale terror attacks than the power-law would predict; no incident since 1979 has killed more than two hundred people. The fact that Israel’s power-law graph looks so distinct is evidence that our strategic choices do make some difference.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“When the facts change, I change my mind,” the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said. “What do you do, sir?”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Bayes’s theorem predicts that the Bayesians will win.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Thus, you will see apparently serious papers published on how toads can predict earthquakes,50 or how big-box stores like Target beget racial hate groups,51 which apply frequentist tests to produce “statistically significant” (but manifestly ridiculous) findings.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“ballot you go, the more volatile the polls tend to be: polls of House races are less accurate than polls of Senate races, which are in turn less accurate than polls of presidential races. Polls of primaries, also, are considerably less accurate than general election polls. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, the average poll missed by about eight points, far more than implied by its margin of error. The problems in polls of the Republican primaries of 2012 may have been even worse.26 In many of the major states, in fact—including Iowa, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama, and Mississippi—the candidate ahead in the polls a week before the election lost.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“It is amusing to poke fun at the experts when their predictions fail. However, we should be careful with our Schadenfreude. 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.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“These partisan beliefs can upset the equation in which more information will bring us closer to the truth. A recent study in Nature found that the more informed that strong political partisans were about global warming, the less they agreed with one another.44”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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

“Hanson writes a blog called Overcoming Bias, in which he presses his readers to consider which cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives might constrain them from making optimal decisions.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“What makes him successful is the way that he analyzes information. He is not just hunting for patterns.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones, and some of us get fooled and double-down our bets.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Financial crises—and most other failures of prediction—stem from this false sense of confidence.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“He does not depend on insider tips, crooked referees, or other sorts of hustles to make his bets. Nor does he have a “system” of any kind. He uses computer simulations, but does not rely upon them exclusively.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Players from Sweden, Lebanon, and China, for instance, have a reputation for being more aggressive than those from France, England, or India. Younger players are presumed to be looser and more aggressive than older ones. Men are assumed to be more likely to bluff than women. These stereotypes, like any others, are not always true: at the hold ’em games I used to play in at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the best players were very often women, and they were good in part because they were much more aggressive than their opponents assumed.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“poker is an incredibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.14”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.—Donald Rumsfeld”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Schelling writes of our propensity to mistake the unfamiliar for the improbable: 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

“Sophomoric forecasters sometimes make the mistake of assuming that just because something is hard to model they may as well ignore it.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't