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. – Nate Silver
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
I’ve become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I’m actually doing and what I actually deserve. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
Remember, the Congress doesn’t get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
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. – Nate Silver
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves. – Nate Silver
