A world view according to a fox

The Signal and the Noise: Why Many Forecasts Fail - and Some Don't

by Nate Silver

it's actually a pretty entertaining book despite an apparently technical topic. some scientific training might be required to appreciate it however.


i was more taken by the philosophical views the author endorsed, like Berlin's hedgehog vs. fox and the Bayes' theorem. The book brought out a heightened understanding of things I had known all along, but only vaguely. it's like learning of a foxy fellowship for the first time while being a fox all life long.


Quotes：

Human beings do not have very many natural defenses. We are not all that fast, and we are not all that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor We cannot spit venom. We cannot camouflage ourselves. And we cannot fly. Instead, we survive by means of our wits. Our minds are quick. We are wired to detect patterns and respond to opportunities and threats without much hesitation. p12

The problem, Poggio says, is that these evolutionary instincts sometimes lead us to see patterns when there are none there. “People have been doing that all the time,” Poggio said. “Finding patterns in random noise." p12

But this book is emphatically against the nihilistic viewpoint that there is no objective truth. It asserts, rather, that a belief in the objective truth— and a commitment to pursuing it— is the first prerequisite of making better predictions. The forecaster’s next commitment is to realize that she perceives it imperfectly. p14

"Every hedgehog fantasizes that they will make a daring, audacious, outside- the- box prediction— one that differs radically from the consensus view on a subject." p66

the Laplace demon: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. p112

Meanwhile, the same tectonic forces that carve fault lines beneath the earth’s surface also carve breathtaking mountains, fertile valleys, and handsome coastlines. What that means is that people will probably never stop living in them, despite the seismic danger. p173 

“You do not need to understand all the intricacies of the economy to accurately read those gauges.” This kind of statement is becoming more common in the age of Big Data. Who needs theory when you have so much information? p196

But as was the case in other fields, like earthquake forecasting during that time period, improved technology did not cover for the lack of theoretical understanding about the economy; it only gave economists faster and more elaborate ways to mistake noise for a signal. Promising- seeming models failed badly at some point or another and were consigned to the dustbin. p198

the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a major spark for the development of secular philosophy. p154

But the number of meaningful relationships in the data— those that speak to causality rather than correlation and testify to how the world really works— is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space. p249

that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor. We cannot spit venom. We cannot camouflage ourselves. And we cannot fly. Instead, we survive by means of our wits. Our minds are quick. We are wired to detect patterns and respond to opportunities and threats without much hesitation. p12