Quotes By Nate Silver

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

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

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.

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

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

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've just always been a bit of a dork.

People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.

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

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.

First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.

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

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

Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.

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

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.

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

A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.

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

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

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.

You get steely nerves playing poker.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm a pro-horserace guy.

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