Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in it's entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or thirteen-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next 'Twilight' movie.

Nate Silver

Categorized in : Twilight Cat Movie

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Nate Silver

serenity differences self

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Nate Silver

risk marketing

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.

Nate Silver

skills real mean

Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.

Nate Silver

data-science scientist data

Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.

Nate Silver

data odds needs

Success makes you less intimidated by things.

Nate Silver

intimidated marketing

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

Nate Silver

judgment data funny

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

Nate Silver

details marketing ideas

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Nate Silver

probability marketing comfortable

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.

Nate Silver

data competition baseball

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

Nate Silver

marketing self noise

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

Nate Silver

risk age thinking

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

Nate Silver

patterns data keys

We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it's kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.

Nate Silver

doctors risk heart

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.

Nate Silver

printing luther ideas

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.

Nate Silver

arbitrary choices example

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

Nate Silver

different two way

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Nate Silver

predictions problem needs

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

Nate Silver

data play average

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.

Nate Silver

degrees acting people