The Signal and the Noise ...in 30 Minutes

Copyright 2012 by Garamond Press, Berkeley, California

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ISBNs:

978-1-62315-052-5 Print

978-1-62315-053-2 eBook

CONTENTS

Chapter Summaries

INTRODUCTION

Overview

According to Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Dont , the information age has given people access to so much data that theyre having real trouble making accurate predictions.

In the first half of the book, Silver describes how predictions can fail. For example, when peoples political or personal biases interfere with how they receive information, their predictions often amount to little more than overconfident guesswork, since theyre basing them not on the truth (the signal ) but on what distracts them from the truth (the noise ). Peoples failed predictions can even have catastrophic impacts on their own and others economic and social well-being.

In the second half of the book, Silver shows how people can correct the inherent biases in their thinking and improve their prediction-making abilities in all areas. People can do this, he says, by applying Bayess theorem to the task of making predictions. Bayess theorem, Silver explains, is a stunningly simple and yet surprisingly rich mathematical formula that can guide everyone toward the kind of probabilistic thinking most likely to produce safer, more reliable predictions.

About the Author

Nate Silver (born January 13, 1978) is a statistician as well as an electoral and political analyst. His predictive abilities came to public attention through his stat-crunching activities in two highly visible American institutions professional baseball and the arena of presidential elections.

When Silver was in his early twenties, he developed the PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) system for forecasting the performance and careers of Major League Baseball players. (The acronym is a private joke, since it spells out the last name of Bill Pecota, a pesky infielder with the 1980s-era Kansas City Royals who usually meant trouble for Silvers hometown favorites, the Detroit Tigers.) The PECOTA system proved so effective that it was purchased by the Baseball Prospectus organization.

In 2007, Silver began making predictions about the 2008 US presidential election, starting with the Democratic primaries and caucuses. At first he did this work under the pseudonym Poblano and published it on the Daily Kos political blog, but in March 2008 he founded his own site, FiveThirtyEight.com (named for the total number of electoral votes available in the fifty states). At FiveThirtyEight, Silver correctly predicted the winning presidential candidate in all but one of the fifty states in 2008, and he also accurately predicted the winners of all thirty-five US Senate races that year. In fact, with his nearly perfect predictions, Silver outperformed a range of better-known pundits and polls all through the 2008 electoral season. In the 2012 presidential election, Silvers notoriety skyrocketed when he correctly predicted the winning presidential candidate in all fifty states.

In 2009, Time named Nate Silver among the magazines 100 Most Influential People for that year. In 2010, Silvers blog was licensed to the New York Times as FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silvers Political Calculus. In 2012, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences honored FiveThirtyEight with a Webby Award as Best Political Blog.

How the Book Came About

The Signal and the Noise , published in 2012, is Nate Silvers first book. Its publication is clearly an outcome of Silvers growing reputation as a statistician and political analyst. The book earned instant praise, as did Silver himself. The Boston Globe called Silver a stats whiz and deemed him responsible for remaking the art of political punditry. Esquire lauded The Signal and the Noise for bringing a humanistic approach to statistics. The Los Angeles Times called the book insightful, and the reviewer for the Wall Street Journal praised the scholarship of the author, describing Silvers arguments and examples as painstakingly researched. Some critics have found the quality of the writing uneven, but the quality of the books content has not been disputed. The Signal and the Noise was an instant success, and it quickly took its place among the top ten New York Times best sellers.