Forecaster, founder of FiveThirtyEight, author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. Writes Silver Bulletin, where the predictions come with numbers and the numbers are later checked against what happened.
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3 of Nate Silver's claims fit 2 mental models. Most often: Probabilistic thinking, Cognitive biases.
Think in odds, not certainties, and bet heavily only when the odds are clearly yours.
Their wordsThe models that wrongly treated races as a series of independent coin flips have died out, and deservedly so.
Their wordsA projection model will never solve the problem that a 17-game NFL season with imbalanced schedules is inherently going to introduce a degree of randomness.
Your mind jumps to conclusions and defends them; look for the evidence against you and use checklists.
Their wordsA lot of fans, whether or not they even realize it, tend to stick to their priors long after those priors have any practical use.