Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Or getting a market of superforecasters to help you make your models better. I guess I find crowdsourcing sort of boring. As a journalist, I find it boring. Even though if you’re in a business setting, that’s exactly what you should do. We actually are doing that a little bit with the Oscars this year. We found eight different people who created different models, and we’re seeing how well they do. Of course six awards is not anywhere near a sufficient sample size to deal with something like that. I don’t know. I’m very process-driven as a person. For me, a lot of the joy is in thinking through the process of it, so reading a book like this is really useful, because I talk about a process I think is pretty great. But to actually publish the projections, in some sense, is almost beside the point, in the sense that you’re still probably dealing with sample sizes that are too small to really tell you all that much. When you start to do that, then I think it takes folks away from thinking about process and heuristics for forecasting. That’s kind of an unsatisfying answer, I guess. We’ve printed out a lot of Nate’s columns. Many of them are here, so there’s plenty you can ask about. Next question.…

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