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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
Signals
Marketing
Scientific
Noise
Requires
Knowledge
Self
Distinguishing
Signal

More quotes by Nate Silver

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People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
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Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.
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The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
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People don't have a good intuitive sense of how to weigh new information in light of what they already know. They tend to overrate it.
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All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
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If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.
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People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
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You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
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Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
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Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.
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Success makes you less intimidated by things.
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One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that 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.
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If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.
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In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
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You get steely nerves playing poker.
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A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
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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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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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Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.
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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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