Nate Silver Quotes

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

To be a good analyst, you need to know what the trends are and what teams are doing.

I've said many times that I'm not one of those people who check statistics, follows history, and says, 'If I do this, what will happen.'

No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.

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

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

We’re not used to calculating large amounts of data. Our brains think anecdotally.

I am strongly committed to evidence-based policymaking across government.

In disciplines as disparate as baseball, financial services, trucking and retail, people are realizing the power of data to help make better decisions.

I am an analyst; my job is to analyze.

An old friend of mine, an economist by trade, once explained to me that the statistical definition of 'dilemma' is 49.9% in favor and 50.1% against. If the gap is greater, there is no dilemma, because the answer is clear.

It's easy for me to see how a business proposition is going to play out, or who our next-generation competitors are, from taking this data point from this customer and another data point from another customer... and jump to Z.

I try to look at problems very clearly and think, 'How do we get out of this? What will work? What will be the consequences for the people involved?'