The Signal and the Noise
by Nate Silver · first published 2012
59% recommend41% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Accessible, example-rich tour of why forecasts fail, covering weather, earthquakes, politics, sports and poker. Stresses Bayesian thinking and overfitting noise; suits general readers wanting statistical intuition.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. 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
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
Statistics, A Tool for Social Research
Joseph F. Healey
Recommended by 2 · mentioned by 22 recommend · 2 mention2 recommend · 22 recommend
2012–2016Concise Guide to Macroeconomics
David A. Moss
Recommended by 2 · mentioned by 22 recommend · 2 mention2 recommend · 22 recommend
2010–2026Rising Up and Rising Down
William T. Vollmann
Recommended by 3 · mentioned by 43 recommend · 4 mention3 recommend · 43 recommend
2012–2021Blood Song
Anthony Ryan
Recommended by 4 · mentioned by 44 recommend · 4 mention4 recommend · 44 recommend
2009–20231776
David McCullough
Recommended by 3 · mentioned by 43 recommend · 4 mention3 recommend · 43 recommend
2007–2026Super Crunchers
Ian Ayres
Recommended by 9 · mentioned by 219 recommend · 21 mention9 recommend · 219 recommend
2013–2024Naked Statistics
Charles J. Wheelan
Recommended by 7 · mentioned by 157 recommend · 15 mention7 recommend · 157 recommend
2007–2022Origin of Wealth
Eric D. Beinhocker
Recommended by 15 · mentioned by 1915 recommend · 19 mention15 recommend · 1915 recommend
…when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.
on “Disney Erased FiveThirtyEight” ↗Nate Silver discusses the Fox/Hedgehog division in his excellent "The Signal and the Noise" frequently, and he largely takes on the meaning proposed by Phillip Tetlock in his book on expert political judgement. The idea that Tetlock puts forward is that pundits divide into two categories,…
on “What the Fox Knows” ↗One interesting fact that I learned from Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, is that weather forecasting is a four-dimensional problem (space + time), so to produce a forecast that is twice as detailed requires approximately 16x the computing resources. Historically, the resolution…
on “Met Office forecasters set for 'billion pound' supercomputer” ↗…Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart Bernstein, Peter (1996) Against the Gods: Remarkable Story of Risk Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow Silver, Nate (2012) Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness, 2E _________ (2010) Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2E BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT / ENTREPRENEURSHIP…
on “Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?” ↗…than waiting for data from future games, you should backtest on old data and see how it performs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtesting). You might also be interested in checking out the book The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver (He runs the FiveThirtyEight political/data blog that notably predicted last year's election results with great accuracy.)
on “How I'm Predicting Baseball Outcomes” ↗…a small part of mathematics, although a powerful example of logical reasoning. If I could encourage my Level 2 students to a level where they could read and understand (say) Chapter 8 of Silver's The Signal and The Noise we might be getting somewhere.
on “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” ↗Non-fiction: On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker The Origin of Wealth - Eric Beinhocker The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver The Money Culture - Michael Lewis Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations - David Warsh Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing - John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013” ↗I liked Nate Silver's chapter on climate modeling predictions in his book The Signal and the Noise. He wasn't impressed. Maybe somebody needs to start a fantasy weather league.
on “The Official Forecast of the U.S. Government Never Saw This Winter Coming” ↗I like Nate Silver's book, "The Signal and the Noise." If you read it, you shouldn't focus on the scenarios he describes specifically. You should try to take his mindset, walk away from the book, and try to decode the signal from the noise everywhere.…
on “Ask HN: What should I read this summer?” ↗Coincidently, I just finished reading The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver too. I found it interesting and not too technical. It covered lot of ground. Now, I am reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. It is more in depth and technical than Nate's.
on “Ask HN: What Books Are You Reading?” ↗As explained well by Nate Silver's "Signal and the Noise", when the weather forecast model says a 50% chance of rain, that doesn't mean it "might" rain, that means that in 50.001293% of millions of simulations precipitation above some threshold developed in…
on “New Weather Service supercomputer faces chaos” ↗…teaching assistant at UC Santa Cruz.] 4. Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow [Kahneman combines cognitive psychology with statistical concepts; highly recommended] 5. Silver, Nate (2012) Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't [Silver's book offers an excellent summary of major concepts in statistics and how they are applied to real-world problems] 6. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005)…
on “Recommended Self-Study Path for Statistics” ↗…understood the basics of how increased C02 causes global warming for about a century. Current detailed climate models are kind of crap, Nate Silver went into why in some detail in his book on modeling, The Signal and the Noise, which I recommend but that doesn't change the anything I said in the above post - climate models are as likely to undershoot the dangers of warming as they are to overshoot them. Christy basically seemed…
on “Climate Change in a Nutshell: The Gathering Storm [pdf]” ↗Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
on “Ask HN: Favorite nonfiction books of 2018?” ↗A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people…
on “The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back” ↗