Zitat des Tages von Nate Silver:
In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.
Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.
Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.
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.
I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.
I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.
First of all, I think it's odd that people who cover politics wouldn't have any political views.
I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately.
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.
There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.
Remember, the Congress doesn't get as many opportunities to make an impression with the public.
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.
A lot of news is just entertainment masquerading as news.
I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it's a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.
You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
I'm a pro-horserace guy.
Success makes you less intimidated by things.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.
I think punditry serves no purpose.
To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.
A lot of things can't be modeled very well.
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
Every four years in the presidential election, some new precedent is broken.
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.