Nate Silver
Nate Silver
Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silveris an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseballand elections. He is currently the editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight blog and a Special Correspondent for ABC News. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth13 January 1978
CityEast Lansing, MI
CountryUnited States of America
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
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've just always been a bit of a dork.
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.
Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
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.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
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.
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
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.
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.
Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.