Quotes By Nate Silver

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

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.

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.

On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

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

We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.

I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.

I've just always been a bit of a dork.

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

I prefer more to kind of show people different things than tell them 'oh, here's what you should believe' and, over time, you can build up a rapport with your audience.

We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

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

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.

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

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.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.