Purchase
THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE
By: Nate Silver
Why Most Predictions Fail But Some Don't
Penguin Press
October 2012
On Sale: September 27, 2012
545 pages
ISBN: 159420411X
EAN: 9781594204111
Kindle: B007V65R54
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hairβs breadth, and became a national sensation as a bloggerβall by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nationβs most influential political forecasters.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the βprediction paradoxβ: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they goodβor just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentaryβand dangerousβscience.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silverβs insights are an essential read.
 Media BuzzDaily Show with Jon Stewart - April 14, 2014
Daily Show with Jon Stewart - March 27, 2014
Colbert Report - January 27, 2014
Morning Edition - July 26, 2013
Last Call with Carson Daly - January 23, 2013
All Things Considered - November 7, 2012
Last Call with Carson Daly - October 31, 2012
Daily Show with Jon Stewart - October 17, 2012
Fresh Air - NPR - October 10, 2012
On The Media - October 6, 2012
| 
© 2003-2026