Nate Silver

Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born 13 January 1978) is an American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics) and elections (see psephology). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News.

Quotes[edit]

I'd say I am somewhere in between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose.
- Interview with Charlie Rose (29 October 2012)

I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe.
- As quoted in "Nate Silver: it's the numbers, stupid" (17 November 2012), by Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian

There are entire disciplines in which predictions have been failing, often at great cost to society. Consider something like biomedical research. In 2005, an Athens-raised medical researcher named John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." ... The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis's hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves. ...
- The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't. Penguin Press. 2012. p. 11. ISBN 978-1-59420-411-1.

GOP are so all-in on an "all base mobilization, all the time" strategy that people just take for granted it must be smart politics when it's far from obvious that's the case.
- Twitter post (30 October 2018)

Bernie Sanders proudly describes himself as a “socialist” (or more commonly, as a “democratic socialist”). To Americans of a certain age, this is a potential liability. I’m just old enough (38) to have grown up during the Cold War, a time when “socialist” did not just mean “far left” but also implied something vaguely un-American. If you’re older than me, you may have even more acutely negative associations with “socialism” and may see it as a step on the road to communism. If you’re a few years younger than me, however, you may instead associate “socialism” with the social democracies of Northern Europe, which have high taxes and large welfare states. Sweden may not be your cup of tea, but it isn’t scary in the way the USSR was to people a generation ago.
- "Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders" (8 February 2016), FiveThirtyEight

Since December 2015, there have 10 incidents that killed 10 or more people. That’s more than there was in 30 years between 1982 and 2011. And five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history have all happened in the last five years.
- August 11, 2019 on ABC's This Week ("'This Week' Transcript 8-11-19". This Week. ABC News. August 11, 2019. )