The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t

Nate Silver

#1235 of 3,809 books · #105 in Science & Technology

Won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (2013). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

The Signal and the Noise won the New York Times Bestseller designation and was one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Works of Nonfiction of the Year. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because 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. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work in sports and politics, Nate Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how to seek truth from data. In The Signal and the Noise, Silver visits innovative forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball to global pandemics, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He discovers that what the most accurate ones have in common is a superior command of probability—as well as a healthy dose of humility. With everything from the global economy to the fight against disease hanging on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.