Nate Silver

“Well, you know, you're not going to have 86 percent of Congress voted out of office.”

“When human judgment and big data intersect there are some funny things that happen.”

“There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.”

“In politics people build whole reputations off of getting one thing right.”

“You don't want to treat any one person as oracular.”

“I have to think about how to not spread myself too thin. It's a really great problem to have.”

“The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.”

“You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.”

“When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.”

“We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.”

“I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.”

“Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.”

“Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.”

“Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.”

“Walk rate is probably the area in which a pitcher has the most room to improve, but a rate that high is tough to overcome.”

“Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.”

“All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.”

“Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.”

“I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'”

“If you're keeping yourself in the bubble and only looking at your own data or only watching the TV that fits your agenda then it gets boring.”