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

Smart people would win. And dumber people, the providers of dumb money, would wind up holding billions (or trillions) of unpayable IOUs.

one of the most important feedbacks is between what he calls

Tellingly, Jeff Hammerbacher, who worked on Wall Street before leading the data team at Facebook, once said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.22 That

His tip, which works every time: Ask the author of the data what’s the most interesting thing about it. They know what it is—and they’ll tell you.

I pay quite a bit of attention to what the consensus view is—what a market like Intrade is saying—when I make a forecast. It is never an absolute constraint. But the further I move away from that consensus, the stronger my evidence has to be before I come to the view that I have things right and everyone else has it wrong. This attitude, I think, w

When this property has been studied over the long run, however, the aggregate forecast has often beaten even the very best individual forecast.