Nate Silver

Writer

1978-01-13

Quotes by Nate Silver

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

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• By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

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• 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.

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• Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

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

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• I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.

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• 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.

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• We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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