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"One of the more momentous books of the decade." —The New York Times Book Review Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder of the website FiveThirtyEight.
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 “prediction paradox”: 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 to global pandemics, 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 good—or 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 rudimentary—and dangerous—science. 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 Silver’s insights are an essential read.
"One of the more momentous books of the decade." —The New York Times Book Review Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder of the website FiveThirtyEight.
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 “prediction paradox”: 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 to global pandemics, 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 good—or 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 rudimentary—and dangerous—science. 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 Silver’s insights are an essential read.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
At about the time The Signal and the Noise was first published in September 2012, “Big Data” was on its way becoming a Big Idea. Google searches for the term doubled over the course of a year,1 as did mentions of it in the news media.2 Hundreds of books were published on the subject. If you picked up any business periodical in 2013, advertisements for Big Data were as ubiquitous as cigarettes in an episode of Mad Men.
But by late 2014, there was evidence that trend had reached its apex. The frequency with which Big Data was mentioned in corporate press releases had slowed down and possibly begun to decline.3 The technology research firm Gartner even declared that Big Data had passed the peak of its “hype cycle.”4
I hope that Gartner is right. Coming to a better understanding of data and statistics is essential to help us navigate our lives. But as with most emerging technologies, the widespread benefits to science, industry, and human welfare will come only after the hype has died down.
FIGURE P-1: BIG DATA MENTIONS IN CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES
I worry that certain events in my life have contributed to the hype cycle. On November 6, 2012, the statistical model at my Web site FiveThirtyEight “called” the winner of the American presidential election correctly in all fifty states. I received a congratulatory phone call from the White House. I was hailed as “lord and god of the algorithm” by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. My name briefly received more Google search traffic than the vice president of the United States.
I enjoyed some of the attention, but I felt like an outlier—even a fluke. Mostly I was getting credit for having pointed out the obvious—and most of the rest was luck.*
To be sure, it was reasonably clear by Election Day that President Obama was poised to win reelection. When voters went to the polls on election morning, FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model put his chances of winning the Electoral College at about 90 percent.* A 90 percent chance is not quite a sure thing: Would you board a plane if the pilot told you it had a 90 percent chance of landing successfully? But when there’s only reputation rather than life or limb on the line, it’s a good bet. Obama needed to win only a handful of the swing states where he was tied or ahead in the polls; Mitt Romney would have had to win almost all of them.
But getting every state right was a stroke of luck. In our Election Day forecast, Obama’s chance of winning Florida was just 50.3 percent—the outcome was as random as a coin flip. Considering other states like Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and North Carolina, our chances of going fifty-for-fifty were only about 20 percent.5 FiveThirtyEight’s “perfect” forecast was fortuitous but contributed to the perception that statisticians are soothsayers—only using computers rather than crystal balls.
This is a wrongheaded and rather dangerous idea. American presidential elections are the exception to the rule—one of the few examples of a complex system in which outcomes are usually more certain than the conventional wisdom implies. (There are a number of reasons for this, not least that the conventional wisdom is often not very wise when it comes to politics.) Far more often, as this book will explain, we overrate our ability to predict the world around us. With some regularity, events that are said to be certain fail to come to fruition—or those that are deemed impossible turn out to occur. ...
Reviews-
Starred review from December 24, 2012 Despite the fact that there is more information about everything from finance to professional sports available than ever before, predictions "may be more prone to failure" in this "era of Big Data." Balancing technical detail and thoughtful analysis with fluid prose, statistician Silver (FiveThirtyEight ) picks apart the many ways in which predictions in various fields have been flawed, while suggesting approaches that could improve the practice. The catastrophic miscalculations on the part of financial lending agencies that led to the recession of 2008 arose for the same types of reasons that caused baseball scouts to undervalue Boston Red Sox all-star player Dustin Pedroia or feed into a political pundit's flawed forecast: overconfidence in models based on oversimplified principles and unrealistic initial assumptions. Though there is no simple solution, a Bayesian methodology, in which prior beliefs are taken into account and initial assumptions constantly revised, would lead to more accurate predictive models. Effective prediction requires, according to Silver, "the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Agent: Sydelle Kramer, The Susan Rabiner Literary Agency.
December 15, 2012 An anointed wunderkind explains his own success as a prognosticator and explains why so many self-anointed "experts" are often wrong about winners in politics, sports and other realms. New York Times blogger Silver initially gained attention by developing a computer-based system meant to predict performances of Major League baseball players. Eventually, the author turned his talents to nonsports topics, including trying to figure out who would win the U.S. presidency during 2008. In 49 of 50 states, Silver correctly chose the presidential vote winner. In the 35 races for the U.S. Senate, he called every one accurately. In the 2012 election, he accurately called the presidential vote in all 50 states. Silver emphasizes that predictions are ultimately a human endeavor and that computers are programmed by humans. Meteorologists, for example, predict the weather incorrectly more than anybody would like. They have, however, used computer-based data analysis to improve accuracy. In the financial sphere, economists and other professional predictors failed to grasp the coming recession in 2008 despite sophisticated computer modeling. However, Silver writes, "nobody saw it coming" is an unacceptable excuse. The financial collapse was foreseeable with the proper underlying assumptions about economic behavior programmed into the computers. Too many underlying assumptions were misguided. Even more significant, 9/11 could have been predicted as well. Intelligence-agency analysts, however, could not grasp that religious zealots would plot their own deaths in order to kill Americans. No amount of computerized information can rectify a blind spot of that nature, Silver writes. Predicting the future performance of baseball players with well-documented pasts is more conducive to predictive accuracy than trying to understand previously anonymous fanatics. Some of the sections of the book are best understood by readers with mathematical reasoning skills, but the author is mostly accessible and enlightening.
COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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