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
Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise
Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
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.
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 human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
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.
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'