Quotes By Nate Silver

I think punditry serves no purpose.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

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

I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.

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.

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.

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

I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

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.

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

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.

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.

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

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.