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.
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.
The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A,’ don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions.
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.
The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther’s theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn’t circulated in the mainstream before.
You get steely nerves playing poker.
We are living our lives more online and you need to have different ways to capture that.
I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.
Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.
We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.
People still don’t appreciate how ephemeral success is.
If you aren’t taking a representative sample, you won’t get a representative snapshot.
If I had a spreadsheet on my computer, it looked like I was busy.
Not only does political coverage often lose the signal – it frequently accentuates the noise.
Data scientist is just a sexed up word for statistician.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
Racism is predictable. It’s predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.
We’re living in a world where Google beats Gallup.
The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.
If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.
I have the same friends and the same bad habits.