The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
Nate Silver
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
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 hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.
I've just always been a bit of a dork.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
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 toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.
Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
Voters memories will fade some.
We're living in a world where Google beats Gallup.
I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.
I have the same friends and the same bad habits.
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 Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.
If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.
You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.
I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.
If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.
Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.
People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.
I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.
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.
People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.
I think punditry serves no purpose.
I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
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.
Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.
I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
To be a very, very minor, eighth-tier celebrity, you realize, 'Hey, celebrities are just like us.'
