I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.
From Nate Silver
To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.
If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.
A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.
Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
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.
The public is even more pessimistic about the economy than even the most bearish economists are.
Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.
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