The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
From Nate Silver
When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.
Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.
By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.
People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.
We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.
The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.
There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.
If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
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