Why so Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't

Nate Silver is the guy who predicted, with startling accuracy, the last two elections.  It has also made his ideas intriguing.  So I picked up his book The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t from the library yesterday.  I thought at the time it would be a book I would skim through reading only the most interesting parts.  However, after reading the introduction, I predict I will read the entire book. 

Silver repeats what we all know—information has drastically proliferated in this computer age (something that started with the printing press), and we don’t know what to do with it all.  He quotes Alvin Toffer on how we often respond:  

…in 1970 [Toffer] predicted some of the consequences of what he call “information overload.”  He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.(12)

He ends his introduction with this:

The world has come a long way since the days of the printing press.  Information is no longer a scarce commodity; we have more of it than we know what to do with.  But relatively little of it is useful.  We perceive it selectively, subjectively, and without much self-regard for the distortions that this causes.  We think we want information when we really want knowledge.

The signal is the truth.  The noise is what distracts us from the truth.  This is a book about the signal and the noise. (17)