Nate Silver Quotes

"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."

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

"The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information."

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

"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."

"We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty."

"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."

"We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think punditry serves no purpose."

"I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt."

"Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much."

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

"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."

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

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

"Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately."

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

"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."

"The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are."

"To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'"

"I have the same friends and the same bad habits."

"Success makes you less intimidated by things."

"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."