I have to make sure that I make good choices and that if I put my name on it, it’s a high-quality endeavor and that I have time to be a human being.
People attach too much importance to intangibles like heart, desire and clutch hitting.
Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that’s what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise.
Accountability doesn’t mean apologizing.
You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.
Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
Data-driven predictions can succeed-and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.
Voters memories will fade some.
To the extent that you can find ways where you’re making predictions, there’s no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don’t know the answer to in advance.
A lot of the time nothing happens in a day.
It’s a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.
All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.
We look at all the polls, not just the Gallup Poll. So, it’s kind of like if you have, you know, four out of five doctors agree that reducing cholesterol reduces your risk of a heart attack, Gallup is like the fifth doctor.
When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.
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.
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.
The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
Shakespeare’s plays often turn on the idea of fate, as much drama does. What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides them.
I don’t play fantasy baseball anymore now because it’s too much work, and I feel like I have to hold myself up to such a high standard. I’m pretty serious about my fantasy football, though.
I prefer more to kind of show people different things than tell them ‘oh, here’s what you should believe’ and, over time, you can build up a rapport with your audience.