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The Signal and the Noise
- Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
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The Signal and the Noise
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Summary
Updated for 2020 with a new Preface by Nate Silver.
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 30. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight.
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 of probability and uncertainty. Both 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.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful 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 explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good - or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary - and dangerous - science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential listen.
Critic reviews
"One of the more momentous books of the decade." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Mr. Silver, just 34, is an expert at finding signal in noise.... Lively prose - from energetic to outraged...illustrates his dos and don’ts through a series of interesting essays that examine how predictions are made in fields including chess, baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake analysis and politics...[the] chapter on global warming is one of the most objective and honest analyses I’ve seen...even the noise makes for a good read." (New York Times)
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction - without academic mathematics - cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism." (New York Review of Books)
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What listeners say about The Signal and the Noise
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- DR
- 23-08-20
Love this book.
Great book. Well put together and well performed. I’ll buy you both a beer in the improbable event I meet you both 😃
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- Mr. Cja Carr
- 10-05-23
A good follow on from Incerto
If you’ve read Nassim Taleb’s Incerto series this is a good follow on from that (albeit written before at least two of his books we’re written).
If you aren’t aware exactly how bad we are at prediction then listen to this, and also how we get better. Combine it with Taleb’s advice on how to improve predictions and you’ll see the world in a very different way.
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- jw
- 08-08-23
Excellent read
Great read and comparable to other similar books, some very good i sites. Highly recommend.
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- Megan
- 05-09-20
Great book well narrated
The book came out several years ago and I was worried it was less relevant now or that the material had been covered elsewhere in books that I had read - e.g. Phillip Tetlock’s book. But that is not the case. It remains as fresh and relevant as ever, and has something unique to offer. I had also wondered about Silver’s credentials to comment on all these different types of predictions but he appears to have got on top of the essentials of different disciplines from weather forecasting to earthquake predictions.
If there was one thing that I might have done with less of it was the baseball and other sports betting material but this was still okay.
It also contained one of the clearest explanations of the thesis behind climate change that I’ve heard. However this chapter has been criticised by climate scientists as misleading, as giving too much credence to climate sceptics and cranks, as misrepresenting the IPCC findings and as accusing climate scientists of understanding the uncertainty in forecasts. See https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nate-silver-climate-change_b_1909482
The reading / narration / “performance “ was excellent - fresh, full of expression, witty and fun.
Altogether really worthwhile.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Ian Heptinstall
- 03-04-21
Anyone interested in Data Analytics - read this
Data-driven technologies have the power to significantly change our ability to understand and predict the behaviour of systems. They also have the power to lure us into a black hole of wasted effort and frustration.
Through a range of examples and principles, Nate Silver shows how to tell the difference. Should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in data analytics and machine learning.
Well read too. A few words seemed mispronounced, but that might have been a UK-US difference, rather than reading error.
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- Mr. M. J. Yeomans
- 05-03-20
Easy to follow, compelling & educational A*
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Very interesting with lots of great examples from different disciplines and fields to help make the concepts clear. Statistics and probability was never something I was good at in school (stopping maths at 16!) but this really helped and provided some of the big ideas to be considering, tying together human psychology and principles of maths excellently to better understand how and why models work and why they are better in some circumstances than in others.
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- Anonymous User
- 15-05-19
Great book that is narrated well.
The book is great for listening, as its not so technical that it referes to graph or equations, but still delivers the problems in layman terms.
Mike does a great narration of the book.
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- Ras
- 26-09-19
Full of anectodes
This book is complete noise with very little substance. It is boring and not educational at the same time.
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1 person found this helpful