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Title details for The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver - Available

The Signal and the Noise

Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't

by Nate Silver
Mike Chamberlain
Audiobook
6 of 10 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
6 of 10 copies available
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The groundbreaking exploration of probability and uncertainty that explains how to make better predictions in a world drowning in data, from the nation’s foremost political forecaster—updated with insights into the pandemic, journalism today, and polling

One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Works of Nonfiction of the Year

“Could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.”—The New York Times Book Review
Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work in sports and politics, Nate Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how to seek truth from data. In The Signal and the Noise, Silver visits innovative forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball to global pandemics, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He discovers that what the most accurate ones have in common is a superior command of probability—as well as a healthy dose of humility.
With everything from the global economy to the fight against disease hanging on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 27, 2012

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781101979662
      • File size: 471266 KB
      • Duration: 16:21:48

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Lexile® Measure: 1260
    • Text Difficulty: 9-12

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 24, 2012
      Despite the fact that there is more information about everything from finance to professional sports available than ever before, predictions "may be more prone to failure" in this "era of Big Data." Balancing technical detail and thoughtful analysis with fluid prose, statistician Silver (FiveThirtyEight ) picks apart the many ways in which predictions in various fields have been flawed, while suggesting approaches that could improve the practice. The catastrophic miscalculations on the part of financial lending agencies that led to the recession of 2008 arose for the same types of reasons that caused baseball scouts to undervalue Boston Red Sox all-star player Dustin Pedroia or feed into a political pundit's flawed forecast: overconfidence in models based on oversimplified principles and unrealistic initial assumptions. Though there is no simple solution, a Bayesian methodology, in which prior beliefs are taken into account and initial assumptions constantly revised, would lead to more accurate predictive models. Effective prediction requires, according to Silver, "the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Agent: Sydelle Kramer, The Susan Rabiner Literary Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:1260
  • Text Difficulty:9-12

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