Nate Silver Quotes

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

Much of what I do in my job is think about whether relationships we see in data are causal, as opposed to just reflecting correlations. It's exactly these issues which come up in evaluating studies in public health.

The greatest moments are those when you see the result pop up in a graph or in your statistics analysis - that moment you realise you know something no one else does and you get the pleasure of thinking about how to tell them.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

All models have faults - that doesn't mean you can't use them as tools for making decisions.

The type of measure used placed constraints on which statistics can be used.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

We spend our time bandying statistics about.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.