Review Of Nate Silver's The Signal And The Noise

Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fails-But Some Don’t serves as a guide to ordinary citizens on the dangers and benefits of prediction and forecasting in modern society. The book criticizes many of society’s so-called “experts and authorities” for their incorrect usage of statistical methodologies. Silver illustrates the statistical problems and progress that society has made through the usage of multiple examples and professions ranging from baseball predictions to seismology. Nate Silver was born in January 13, 1978 in East Lansing, Michigan. The Signal and the Noise was published in 2012 and quickly climbed up bestseller lists. Nate Silver authored the book in the hopes that human society betters its understanding

In today’s society, another revolutionary invention that has shaped the circulation of information is the World Wide Web, also known as the Internet. The Internet’s quality of data widely varies from either outright abominable to pristine and clear data. The widespread abundance of all of this data is now known as “Big Data” Silver (2012). Silver goes on to illustrate many examples of statistics at work among many fields such as the failure of the stock ratings agencies to properly rate the actual integrity and value of the corporations due to greed. Silver also goes on to criticize television pundits and classifies so called “analysts” and experts into two groups; hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs are those who are usually wrong and tends to make generalized statements about any situation such as (The Iraq War is bad, Obama is a do-nothing president, etc.). Foxes are more calculated and tend to be more accurate as they concede that models aren’t entirely accurate and that there are deviations that could

Silver efficiently uses many different examples in order to illustrate the central point of that statistics is all about context, without context the data means nothing. A particularly poignant example is the entire situation of terrorism. In the book, Silver points that terrorism is quite similar to the logarithmic scale of seismology (logarithmic means that each value after each previous value is ten times higher than the previous value). This is particularly striking because it makes an example of saying that if the events of 9/11 were an 8 on the scale, what would a 9 be? Silver’s usage of all these examples such as poker, baseball, climate change, and financial markets gives it a universal appeal as almost all of the U.S. population can relate to the examples he presents in the book. Silver also introduces the Bayesian method of probability which essentially states that before calculating anything, one must hold a prior belief of how much an event was to succeed. This method is brilliant because it would be quite effective in terminating bias within calculations, but of course bias would still exist. The style of writing is also quite excellent, its usage of informal language gives it a comfort familiarity of regular conversations, but its intelligent writing also lends much credit to Silver’s authority. In many ways, Silver is a