Quotes By Nate Silver

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

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

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

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Voters memories will fade some.

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

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.

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.

I have the same friends and the same bad habits.

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

A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

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

Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

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