Quotes By Nate Silver

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm a pro-horserace guy.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

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

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

Voters memories will fade some.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

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

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.