Nate Silver Quotes

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know.

These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics - they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

Crazy old people are our entire source of polling information.

It always cracks me up when program directors or music directors or companies will say, 'Well, we did research, and we interviewed 25 people in our focus group, and this is what they said.' And I'm like, 'I've talked to 25 people in two hours! I talk to 50, 60, 70 people a night! Five or six days a week!'

The opinions of a convenience sample... may not represent all users.

When I started in the nineties, a sample size was a 4 and a 6.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

I'm a pollster by trade, so I'm into things that are actually quantifiable.

The more instances we examine, and the more care we employ, the more assurance shall we acquire, that the enumeration, which we form from the whole, is complete and entire.

Some of the pictures in 'The Human Face of Big Data' will bring tears to your eyes; others are so surprising or memorable that you just have to show them to your friends and family.

When I look at a pie chart, I just go numb.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

There's something that happens with the collection of a large amount of data when it's dumped into an Excel spreadsheet or put into a pie chart. You run the risk of completely missing what it's about.

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.

Bobby and I went through some old questionnaires about customer requirements for languages, then we compiled a new one and sent it out to a few dozen people we knew.

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

At the beginning of all experimental work stands the choice of the appropriate technique of investigation.

I think the biggest problem in clinical trials is that they are underpowered. And that fundamentally, the studies are just too small.

It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions.