UPDATED FOR 2020 WITH A NEW PREFACE BY NATE SILVER "One of the more momentous books of the
decade."-The New York Times Book Review Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting
baseball performance predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth and became a
national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as
the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012
election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight. Drawing
on his own groundbreaking work Silver examines the world of prediction investigating how we
can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail often at
great cost to society because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and
uncertainty. Both 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. In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data Silver visits
the most successful 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 explains
and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their
success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their
forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected
juxtapositions. And sometimes it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense
that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases prediction is
still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science. Silver observes that the most accurate
forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability and they tend to be both humble and
hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable and they notice a
thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of
probability they can distinguish the signal from the noise. With everything from the health
of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our
predictions Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.
