Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. He writes the Substack “Silver Bulletin.”
“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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