Nate Silver Quotes

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

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

I think punditry serves no purpose.

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

People have different ways of interpreting history.

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

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.

We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.

Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.

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.

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

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

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.

Accountability doesn't mean apologizing.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

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

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

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

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.

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

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

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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

Voters' memories will fade some.

Not only does political coverage often lose the signal—it frequently accentuates the noise.

I know it's cheaper to fund an op-ed columnist than a team of reporters, but I think it confuses the mission of what these great journalistic brands are about.

Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.

...the ratings agencies' problem was in being unable or uninterested in appreciating the distinction between risk and uncertainty.

Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.

In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.