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The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

Nate Silver

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Goodreads Choice Award

Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2012)

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth. 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 FiveThirtyEight.com.

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.