Nate Silver, the author of “The Signal and the Noise”, is a statistician who rose to prominence during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Silver correctly predicted the outcomes of all 50 states in that election.
Silver lays out his philosophy on statistics and how they can be used to make predictions about the future. He argues that predictions should be made using a combination of data and expert opinion, rather than just data alone.
Silver uses a variety of real-world examples to illustrate his points, including Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis of 2008, and the popularity of various candidates in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He also provides readers with a number of tools they can use to make their own predictions.
Overall, “The Signal and the Noise” is a good introduction to statistics and their role in forecasting the future. It is well-written and easy to read, even for those who are not particularly familiar with statistics.
But the book contains errors and inconsistencies. The main point of the book seems to be that Silver is an expert at predicting the future, but this is not borne out by the evidence.
In the first chapter, Silver claims that the stock market crash of 1987 was caused by programmatic trading, when in fact it was caused by portfolio insurance. He also claims that the crash happened because traders were using too much information, when in fact they were using too little information.
The book gets worse near the end. Silver tries to argue that he can predict baseball games better than anyone else, but his arguments are full of holes. He makes ridiculous claims, such as saying that he can predict whether a team will win or lose based on the weather conditions on game day.