Quotes from Nate Silver

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

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.

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

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

I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.

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

Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.

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

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

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.

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.

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

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

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.

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

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.

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.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren't very good at it.

In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

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

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.