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
In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.
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 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.
People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.
I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.
I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.
People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
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.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
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.
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.
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.