Neil Chilson

“The story the data tells us is often the one we’d like to hear, and we usually make sure that it has a happy ending.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“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, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“But forecasters often resist considering these out-of-sample problems. When we expand our sample to include events further apart from us in time and space, it often means that we will encounter cases in which the relationships we are studying did not hold up as well as we are accustomed to. The model will seem to be less powerful. It will look less impressive in a PowerPoint presentation (or a journal article or a blog post). We will be forced to acknowledge that we know less about the world than we thought we did. Our personal and professional incentives almost always discourage us from doing this.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't