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

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One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012 New York Times Bestseller ""Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War...could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade."" --New York Times Book Review ""Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century."" --Rachel Maddow, author of Drift ""A serious treatise about the craft of prediction--without academic mathematics--cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism."" --New York Review of Books 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 Five Thirty Eight. 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. 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, from the po