Quotes from Nate Silver

I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'

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

Voters memories will fade some.

I think punditry serves no purpose.

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

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

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.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

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.

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

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

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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

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

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

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.

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.

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

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.

Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

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.

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.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.