Any one game in baseball doesn’t tell... - Nate silver - Quotes.Pub

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

Nate silver Quotes

We are undoubtedly living with many delusions that we do not even realize.

We may, without even realizing it, work backward to generate persuasive-sounding theories that rationalize them, and these will often fool our friends and colleagues as well as ourselves.

Never before in human history have so many predictions been made so quickly and for such high stakes.

The Industrial Revolution largely began in Protestant countries and largely in those with a free press, where both religious and scientific ideas could flow without fear of censorship.25.

On the other hand there was its culture. New Orleans does many things well, but there are two things that it proudly refuses to do. New Orleans does not move quickly, and New Orleans does not place much faith in authority. If it did those things, New Orleans would not really be New Orleans. It would also have been much better prepared to deal with Katrina, since those are the exact two things you need to do when a hurricane threatens to strike.

The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.

Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.

What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides to them. The idea of controlling one’s fate seemed to have become part of the human consciousness by Shakespeare’s time – but not yet the competencies to achieve that end.

The panel may as well have been flipping coins. I determined 338 of their predictions to be either mostly or completely false. The exact same number – 338 – were either mostly or completely true.

We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it. The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime.

Nobody saw it coming. When you can’t state your innocence, proclaim your ignorance: this is often the first line of defense when there is a failed forecast.

Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.

That meant that for every dollar that someone was willing to put in a mortgage, Wall Street was making almost $50 worth of bets on the side.

Bayes’s theorem requires us to state – explicitly – how likely we believe an event is to occur before we begin to weigh the evidence. It calls this estimate a prior belief.

I think punditry serves no purpose.

Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it’s where we least expect them to.

Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine – but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.

We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.

After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996.

The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is. We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being. We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are much cruder than we realize. We abhor uncertainty, even when it is an irreducible part of the problem we are trying to solve.

Ordinary Americans were also concerned. Google searches on the term “housing bubble” increased roughly tenfold from January 2004 through summer 2005.

The word objective is sometimes taken to be synonymous with quantitative, but it isn’t. Instead it means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem.

I lived the poker dream for a while, and then it died. I learned that poker sits at the muddy confluence of the signal and the noise. My years in the game taught me a great deal about the role that chance plays in our lives and the delusions it can produce when we seek to understand the world and predict its course.

The Weather Service was initially organized under the Department of War by President Ulysses S. Grant, who authorized it in 1870. This was partly because President Grant was convinced that only a culture of military discipline could produce the requisite accuracy in forecasting25 and partly because the whole enterprise was so hopeless that it was only worth bothering with during wartime when you would try almost anything to get an edge.

Bayes’s theorem deals with epistemological uncertainty – the limits of our knowledge.

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