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

Nate Silver

Sept 2012 · Sold by Penguin

About this eBook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The groundbreaking exploration of probability and uncertainty that explains how to make better predictions in a world drowning in data, from the nation’s foremost political forecaster—updated with insights into the pandemic, journalism today, and polling

One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Works of Nonfiction of the Year

“Could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.”—The New York Times Book Review

Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because 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 “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

Drawing on his own groundbreaking work in sports and politics, Nate Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how to seek truth from data. In The Signal and the Noise, Silver visits innovative forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball to global pandemics, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He discovers that what the most accurate ones have in common is a superior command of probability—as well as a healthy dose of humility.

With everything from the global economy to the fight against disease hanging on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

Ratings and reviews

Some good stuff, but poor editing . Two examples from the sample: the protestants were at war with the church and the emperor, not the empire itself. Holy roman empire is not the roman catholic church. The chart listing mortgage securities ha mislabelled headings. Correlated and uncorrelated are reversed. The text has it right.

Some stupid publishers only give you the front cover, title page, and copyright page to preview. Dolts! This preview gives you the entire foreword, and into chapter 1. Bravo!

Interesting ideas, but buried under too many graphs, statistics and math. It read like a high school text book on probability and statics.

About the author

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.”