Nate Silver Quotes

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

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

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

I love data. I think it's very important to get it right, and I think it's good to question it.

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.

The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

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

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.

Not enough of our society is trained how to understand and interpret quantitative information. This activity is a centerpiece of science literacy to which we should all strive-the future health, wealth, and security of our democracy depend on it. Until that is achieved, we are at risk of making under-informed decisions that affect ourselves, our communities, our country, and even the world.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go: "A judicious man," says he, "looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him."

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

I think of myself as a translator. I just change the dry, unfeeling language of data into a visual language that allows for feeling.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

Computers can't find the unexpected, but people can when they eyeball the data.

Analytics is not about sitting behind a computer and pushing enter and having it produce an answer.

People believe the best way to learn from the data is to have a hypothesis and then go check it, but the data is so complex that someone who is working with a data set will not know the most significant things to ask. That's a huge problem.

My job is to analyze our data set to understand it and build products on it. I look at raw data, do the math to clean it up, and build systems to make it easy to understand.

The big mystery of Big Data is causation versus correlation.

A lot of people seem to think that data science is just a process of adding up a bunch of data and looking at the results, but that's actually not at all what the process is.

There's a very low amount of data literacy around people.