Nate Silver Quotes
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If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.
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People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
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Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.
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Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
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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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Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.
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There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.
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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.
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I don't think you should limit what you read.
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I think punditry serves no purpose.
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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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I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.
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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.
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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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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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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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I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.
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I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
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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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In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.
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The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
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I'm a pro-horserace guy.
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Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
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I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.