Nate Silver

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

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

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.

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.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

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

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

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.

I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.

I love South American food, and I haven't really been down there. I really need a vacation.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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

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.

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 think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.

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 think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

I'm a pro-horserace guy.

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

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.

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

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

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

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

Voters memories will fade some.

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

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

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

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

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

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.