Nate Silver

“By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.”

“On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.”

“People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.”

“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.”

“The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that ha...”

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.”

“I've just always been a bit of a dork.”

“We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.”

“Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos o...”

“You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.”

“I don't play fantasy baseball anymore now because it's too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I'm pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.”

“When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.”

“A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.”

“When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yor...”

“The problem is that when polls are wrong, they tend to be wrong in the same direction. If they miss in New Hampshire, for instance, they all miss on the same mistake.”

“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.”

“Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, exce...”

“Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.”

“A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment to...”

“Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.”