Nate Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
“Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like
John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy
and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the
Vietnam War . . . could turn out to be one of the more
momentous books of the decade.” —New York Times Book
Review
“Mr. Silver, just 34, is an expert at finding signal in noise . . .
Lively prose—from energetic to outraged . . . illustrates his dos
and don’ts through a series of interesting essays that examine how
predictions are made in fields including chess, baseball, weather
forecasting, earthquake analysis and politics… [the] chapter on
global warming is one of the most objective and honest analyses
I’ve seen . . . even the noise makes for a good read.” —New
York Times
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction—without academic
mathematics—cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is
polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change
and terrorism." —New York Review of Books
"Mr. Silver's breezy style makes even the most difficult
statistical material accessible. What is more, his arguments and
examples are painstakingly researched . . ." —Wall Street
Journal
"Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics . . . His
ambitious new book, The Signal and the Noise, is a practical
handbook and a philosophical manifesto in one, following the theme
of prediction through a series of case studies ranging from
hurricane tracking to professional poker to counterterrorism. It
will be a supremely valuable resource for anyone who wants to make
good guesses about the future, or who wants to assess the guesses
made by others. In other words, everyone." —The Boston Globe
"Silver delivers an improbably breezy read on what is
essentially a primer on making predictions." —Washington Post
“The Signal and the Noise is many things—an introduction to
the Bayesian theory of probability, a meditation on luck and
character, a commentary on poker's insights into life—but it's most
important function is its most basic and absolutely necessary one
right now: a guide to detecting and avoiding bullshit dressed up as
data . . . What is most refreshing . . . is its
humility. Sometimes we have to deal with not knowing, and we
need somebody to tell us that.” —Esquire
“[An] entertaining popularization of a subject that scares many
people off . . .Silver’s journey from consulting to baseball
analytics to professional poker to political prognosticating is
very much that of a restless and curious mind. And this, more than
number-crunching, is where real forecasting prowess comes from.”
—Slate
“Nate Silver serves as a sort of Zen master to American
election-watchers . . . In the spirit of Nassim Nicholas
Taleb’s widely read The Black Swan, Mr. Silver asserts that humans
are overconfident in their predictive abilities, that they struggle
to think in probabilistic terms and build models that do not allow
for uncertainty.” —The Economist
"Silver explores our attempts at forecasting stocks, storms,
sports, and anything else not set in stone." —Wired
"The Signal and the Noise is essential reading in the era of Big
Data that touches every business, every sports event, and every
policymaker." —Forbes.com
“Laser sharp. Surprisingly, statistics in Silver’s hands is not
without some fun.” —Smithsonian Magazine
“A substantial, wide-ranging, and potentially important gauntlet of
probabilistic thinking based on actual data thrown at the feet of a
culture determined to sweep away silly liberal notions like
‘facts.’” —The Village Voice
“Silver shines a light on 600 years of human
intelligence-gathering—from the advent of the printing press all
the way through the Industrial Revolution and up to the current
day—and he finds that it's been an inspiring climb. We've learned
so much, and we still have so much left to learn.” —MLB.com
“Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a
New Machine for the 21st century (a century we thought we’d be
a lot better at predicting than we actually are). Our political
discourse is already better informed and more data-driven because
of Nate’s influence. But here he shows us what he has always been
able to see in the numbers—the heart and the ethical imperative of
getting the quantitative questions right. A wonderful
read—totally engrossing." —Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
“Yogi Berra was right: ‘forecasting is hard, especially about the
future.’ In this important book, Nate Silver explains why the
performance of experts varies from prescient to useless and why we
must plan for the unexpected. Must reading for anyone who
cares about what might happen next.” —Richard Thaler,
co-author of Nudge
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