The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.


We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it.


The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime.


As we came to more realistic views of what that new technology could accomplish for us, our research productivity began to improve again in the 1990s. We wandered up fewer blind alleys; computers began to improve our everyday lives and help our economy.


Data-driven predictions can succeed—and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.


If there is one thing that defines Americans—one thing that makes us exceptional—it is our belief in Cassius’s idea that we are in control of our own


Human beings do not have very many natural defenses. We are not all that fast, and we are not all that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor. We cannot spit venom. We cannot camouflage ourselves. And we cannot fly. Instead, we survive by means of our wits. Our minds are quick. We are wired to detect patterns and respond to opportunities and threats without much hesitation.


We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.


Each chapter is oriented around a particular subject and describes it in some depth. There is no denying that this is a detailed book—in part because that is often where the devil lies, and in part because my view is that a certain amount of immersion in a topic will provide disproportionately more insight than an executive summary.


Shiller uncovered another key piece of evidence for the bubble: the people buying the homes had completely unrealistic assumptions about what their investments might return. A survey commissioned by Case and Schiller in 2003 found that homeowners expected their properties to appreciate at a rate of about 13 percent per year.56 In practice, over that one-hundred-year period from 1896 through 199657 to which I referred earlier, sale prices of houses had increased by just 6 percent total after inflation, or about 0.06 percent annually.


Akerlof wrote a famous paper on this subject called “The Market for Lemons”78—it won him a Nobel Prize. In the paper, he demonstrated that in a market plagued by asymmetries of information, the quality of goods will decrease and the market will come to be dominated by crooked sellers and gullible or desperate buyers.


And the lower the man is willing to go on the price, the more convinced you may become that the offer is too good to be true. There may be no such thing as a fair price.


The market was counting on them to be the Debbie Downer of the mortgage party—but they were acting more like Robert Downey Jr.


Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm. Rarely can they be found in the temperate latitudes between these two spaces, where we spend 99 percent of our lives. The categorizations and approximations we make in the normal course of our lives are usually good enough to get by, but sometimes we let information that might give us a competitive advantage slip through the cracks.


If you have strong analytical skills that might be applicable in a number of disciplines, it is very much worth considering the strength of the competition. It is often possible to make a profit by being pretty good at prediction in fields where the competition succumbs to poor incentives, bad habits, or blind adherence to tradition—or because you have better data or technology than they do.


The heuristic of “follow the crowd, especially when you don’t know any better” usually works pretty well.