Nate Silver Quotes

When you try to predict future E.R.A.’s with past E.R.A.’s, you’re making a mistake.

Remember, the Congress doesn’t get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

I don’t think you should limit what you read.

If you aren’t taking a representative sample, you won’t get a representative snapshot.

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

I don’t play fantasy baseball anymore now because it’s too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I’m pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

A lot of things can’t be modeled very well.

We’re living in a world where Google beats Gallup.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It’s a really great problem to have.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don’t really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by ‘The Onion’ – or be the subject of a cartoon in ‘The New Yorker.’ I guess I’m kind of an outlier there.

Voters memories will fade some.

To the extent that you can find ways where you’re making predictions, there’s no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don’t know the answer to in advance.

I think punditry serves no purpose.

If you have reason to think that yesterday’s forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

It’s a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

I’m not trying to do anything too tricky.

There’s always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Almost everyone’s instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A,’ don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions.

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

First of all, I think it’s odd that people who cover politics wouldn’t have any political views.

If there’s a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn’t.

I’ve just always been a bit of a dork.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

Well, you know, you’re not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.

I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it’s a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.

I think there’s space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn’t believe they applied to him.

Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther’s theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn’t circulated in the mainstream before.

If you’re keeping yourself in the bubble and only looking at your own data or only watching the TV that fits your agenda then it gets boring.

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn’t work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth – having an object outside of our personal point of view.

I don’t think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the ‘experiment.’

You don’t want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

You can build a statistical model and that’s all well and good, but if you’re dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation – then the choices you’re making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.