The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions... by Nate Silver

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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. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the... read more

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““Investors need to learn how to do exactly the reverse of what their fight-or-flight mechanism is telling them to do,” Blodget told me. “When the market crashes, that is the time to get excited and put your money into it. It’s not the time to get scared and pull money out. What you see instead is the more the market drops, the more money comes out of it. Normal investors are obliterated, because they continuously do exactly the wrong thing.””
Henry Blodget
“Al Qaeda had only about 500 to 1,000 operatives at its peak.79 This figure includes hangers-on and wannabes, as well as the people engaged in all the nonviolent functions that groups like Al Qaeda must perform: some doofus has to reboot Al Qaeda’s server when their network goes down.”
“Staring at the ocean and waiting for a flash of insight is how ideas are generated in the movies. In the real world, they rarely come when you are standing in place. Nor do the “big” ideas necessarily start out that way. It’s more often with small, incremental, and sometimes even accidental steps that we make progress.”

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This is a book about information, technology, and scientific progress.

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Introduction

1. A Catastrophic Failure Of Prediction.
2. Are You Smarter Than A Television Pundit.
3. All I Care About Is W's And L's
4. For Years You've Been Telling Us That Rain Is Green.
5. Desperately Seeking Signal
6. How To Drown In Three Feet Of Water
7. Role Models
8. Less And Less And Less Wrong
9. Rage Against The Machines
10. The Poker Bubble
11. If You Can't Beat 'Em...
12. A Climate Of Healthy Skepticism
13. What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

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Nate Silver (Author)

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Original Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Press
Country: United States
Publication Date: September 27, 2012
ISBN: 9781594204111
Page Count: 544

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Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Finalist, 2012: Science and Technology, Shortlist)

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Books › Business & Investing › Popular Economics

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The Signal and the Noise (2012) (edit title/settings)

Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't

by Nate Silver (Author) (edit contributors)