★★★★☆ The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
All the Nate Silver anyone could want
The Signal and the Noise
Nate Silver
All the Nate Silver anyone could want
I read The Signal and the Noise ten years ago (13-Oct-2012). I count myself as an admirer of Nate Silver, not a wildly over-the-top fan, but one who thinks him worth reading, and who finds him to be right more often than most political commentators. You have to understand what, in that sentence, the word "right" means. "Right" doesn't mean that the person you predict has the highest probability of winning always wins. That is, as Silver will explicitly tell you, "wrong". If I make a bunch of predictions where the probabilities are 70/30, then in 70% of those predictions the party I thought had the higher probability of winning should win, and in 30% of those predictions the person with the lower probability should win. If the 30% chance doesn't show up with a frequency of 30%, your prediction is wrong. What Silver's website FiveThirtyEight does that almost no one else does is try very hard to report the uncertainty.
Now, this is too difficult an idea for most of our political class to understand. People hate to think quantitatively -- they want simple, definite answers, even when no firm basis exists for such an answer. I know many people who are still angry that FiveThirtyEight predicted that Clinton had a 70% chance of winning the presidential election in 2016, and Trump a 30% chance. As the world now knows, Trump won, and if you're a simple thinker, you're apt to conclude that FiveThirtyEight predicted wrong. FiveThirtyEight did not predict wrong. An event they gave a 30% probability happened. As a matter of fact, FiveThirtyEight was among the loudest voices proclaiming in the final days before the election that Clinton did not have it in the bag. See this article by Harry Enten, at that time a FiveThirtyEight writer, saying just days before the election that Trump might very well win.
The Signal and the Noise is a serviceable collection of essays about making predictions in the face of uncertainty, with some fun stories in the mix. I enjoyed reading about Silver's time as a professional gambler. It was an introduction to a world I knew nothing about. The chapters about weather prediction were also very interesting.
The Signal and the Noise will not change your life. It might help you think better.