James

“There are no guarantees that flu predictions will do better the next time around. In fact, the flu and other infectious diseases have several properties that make them intrinsically very challenging to predict.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Thirty years ago, the sociologist Fred Goldner wrote about what it means to experience the opposite of paranoia: pronoia. According to the distinguished psychologist Brian Little, pronoia is “the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being, or saying nice things about you behind your back.”
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

“As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“Women are attracted to funny men, it is often said. This is not true. It only appears this way because women laugh at everything a very handsome man says. So this gives the very handsome men the idea that they are funny.”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story