Quotes By Nate Silver

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

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'

All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.

If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.

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

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

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.

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

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.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

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

I think punditry serves no purpose.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.