The Signal and the Noise Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't Nate Silver

The early 21st century has already seen numerous catastrophic failures of prediction: From terrorist attacks to financial crises to natural disasters to political upheaval, we routinely seem unable to predict the events that change the world. In The Signal and the Noise, statistician, analyst, and FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver sets out to explain why—and how we can do better.Silver argues that our predictions falter because of mental mistakes such as incorrect assumptions, overconfidence, bias, and warped incentives. However, he also suggests that we can mitigate these thinking errors (and thus improve our forecasts) with the help of a method called Bayesian inference. In this guide, we’ll explain how fields ranging from politics to poker to meteorology can teach you how to make better predictions and avoid costly mistakes in judgment. Along the way, we’ll update Silver’s examples with the latest research and place his arguments in conversation with other experts on prediction such as Philip E. Tetlock and Daniel Kahneman.