The Signal and the Noise

Nate Silver is a statistician, writer, and founder of The New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver also developed PECOTA, a system for forecasting baseball performance that was bought by Baseball Prospectus. He was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

出版者:Penguin Press HC, The

作者:Nate Silver

页数:544

出版时间:2012-9-27

价格:USD 27.95

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9781594204111

图书标签:统计预测大数据思维数学NateSilver经济行为经济学

"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century."

—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.

Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science.

Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.

读后感

简介 内特·希尔的新书《信号和噪声》是21世纪新机器的灵魂。- 雷切尔·玛多 《漂流》的作者 内特·希尔曾建立过一个创新的系统来预测棒球比赛，这个系统帮助他丝毫不差地预测了2008年总统选举。时时保持强烈求知欲望的他成为了引起全国轰动的博客作者，纽约时报现在出版FIVE...

这是一本和大数据唱反调的书。 如果从哲学认识论的角度来看，人类的思维模式大体上可以归集为四种类型： 1、实验试错法 2、经验归纳法 3、类比联想法 4、逻辑演绎法 每种方法或者思维模式，并无绝对的优和绝对的劣，各有利弊、适用范围或局限性。 这本书光看书名，会以...  

这是一本和大数据唱反调的书。 如果从哲学认识论的角度来看，人类的思维模式大体上可以归集为四种类型： 1、实验试错法 2、经验归纳法 3、类比联想法 4、逻辑演绎法 每种方法或者思维模式，并无绝对的优和绝对的劣，各有利弊、适用范围或局限性。 这本书光看书名，会以...  

我看的是中文版，听到有人抱怨翻译问题（通病吧），于是找来电子档翻了翻，没细看，发现如下两点 1）每章的标题被译者更换了。 2）600多页的pdf，参考的文献，居然都有200+了。 还是顺道正题，谈谈对本书的看法。 全书没有看完，只细看了前几章，后面几章就翻翻看了，所以不一...  

“大数据时代”应该算得上新近的热词了，我们每个人都在讨论大数据、讨论云计算，但问题是，为什么网络的戾气还是这么重呢？《信号与噪声》给出的答案是，信息太多了。 作为反乌托邦小说，《美丽新世界》和《一九八四》一直被当做信息处理的两种相反的手段，前者是信息泛滥以至...  

用户评价

Nate Silver

竟然是FiveThirtyEight创始人写的

这书主要说两件事儿：一是要多用贝叶斯概率预测，二是一般人就别玩扑克赌钱了。

No real insights and very boring, the US house market crash case makes me believe the author knows little on what he's talking about

竟然是FiveThirtyEight创始人写的