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Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Nate Silver

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Nate Silver
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: January 13
Journalist
Mathematician
Poker Player
Statistician
East Lansing
Michigan
Nathaniel Read Silver
Nathaniel Read Nate Silver
Noise
Requires
Knowledge
Self
Distinguishing
Signal
Signals
Marketing
Scientific

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If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.
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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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Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
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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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The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
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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 it's entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or thirteen-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next 'Twilight' movie.
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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.
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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're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.
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Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.
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Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.
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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.
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People have different ways of interpreting history.
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To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight.
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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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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.
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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.
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I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.
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Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
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Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.
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