Nate Silver • On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.

I came to realize that prediction in the era of Big Data was not going very well.

“The rationalist utopia is a power trip,”

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening. This syndrome is often associated with very precise-seeming predictions that are not at all accurate.

The goal of a data scientist is to understand the world.

In the most competitive industries, like sports, the best forecasters must constantly innovate. It’s easy to adopt a goal of “exploit market inefficiencies.” But that doesn’t really give you a plan for how to find them and then determine whether they represent fresh dawns or false leads. It’s hard to have an idea that nobody else has thought of. It

Instead of physics or biology, however, electoral forecasting resembles something like poker: we can observe our opponent’s behavior and pick up a few clues, but we can’t see his cards. Making the most of that limited information requires a willingness to update one’s forecast as newer and better information becomes available. It is the alternative