Nate Silver

It goes without saying that "popular statistics" book is mostly an oxymoron. On the one hand, statistics is largely a very dry field. On the other hand, those of us who do understand statistics (and even freaks, like my husband, who enjoy statistics), find any attempt at popular statistics largely too elementary to be interesting. Nate Silver doesn't just walk the fine line in the middle, he eliminates it and writes a completely novel statistic book that is appealing to both the mathematician and the math hater: this book fascinates.

Nate Silver focuses on the forecasting in areas that are difficult to predict: weather, climate, earthquakes, poker, politics, chess and sports. Each of these areas is individually interesting -- I had never spent much time considering online poker, for instance, and the chapter focusing on poker is not just mathematically-focused, but also an expose on the world of online poker and the life and times (or at least the two year subset thereof) of Silver's 6-figure gambling career. In addition, his overall thesis, which seems to be that we should use Bayesian analysis to think probabilistically about the world and continually evaluate our probabilities both builds naturally and has far-reaching applications.

I feel like I have spent years of my life trying to explain to medical students (and more advanced physicians who should really know better) why every time a paper is published with a p… (altro)

Reading this book is like going for a walk with Nate Silver while he discusses finding the signal in the noise in situations from his life and that he has researched for you. The subjects are wide-ranging. All are centered on the idea of prediction, but prediction is defined loosely enough to cover almost any analytical problem. Topics include the 2oo8 financial collapse, the inaccuracy of predictions in politics and economics, baseball statistics, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, predicting next year’s influenza variant, professional poker, chess, Bayes theorem (explained with unusually clear charts), and the difficulty in predicting military and terrorist attacks (as the author says, Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it’s where we least expect them to.).… (altro)

The signal and the noise is all about prediction. It starts with the subprime mortgage financial crisis and discusses the combination of perverse incentives and overconfidence that caused the rating services to fail to accurately portray the risks of those securities (primarily the assumption that even with housing prices astronomically high, the risk of default of each individual mortgage was completely independent rather than affected by the economy). Next he looks at television pundits and the fact that more television appearances is negatively correlated to forecast accuracy. Here he gives a solid introduction to Philip Tetlock’s work on forecasting, which can be found in more depth in his book Superforecasting. He touches on baseball, an information-rich environment, before moving on to irreducibly complex problems like the weather, seismic activity, and the economy where you fundamentally can’t get anywhere near enough raw data or information on interactions between data points to paint a complete picture.

The second half moves towards giving you an idea how to approach problems probabilistically and how to improve and refine your process over time. He starts with simple problems like sports and poker before moving onto more complex problems like terrorism and global warming.


I wouldn’t consider this book a complete guide to rational, evidence based decision making (ignoring that it doesn’t give you the math), but it’s a pretty accessible introduction to the topic and is largely technically sound. It’s a solid place to start.… (altro)