Synopses & Reviews
"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 hairs breadth, and became a national sensation as a bloggerall by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
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 goodor 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 rudimentaryand dangerousscience.
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 Silvers insights are an essential read.
Review
One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012
“Mr. Silver, just 34, is an expert at finding signal in noise… Lively prose — from energetic to outraged… illustrates his dos and donts through a series of interesting essays that examine how predictions are made in fields including chess, baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake analysis and politics… [the] chapter on global warming is one of the most objective and honest analyses Ive seen… even the noise makes for a good read.”
—New York Times
“Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.”
—New York Times Book Review
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction—without academic mathematics—cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism."
—New York Review of Books
"Mr. Silver's breezy style makes even the most difficult statistical material accessible. What is more, his arguments and examples are painstakingly researched..."
—Wall Street Journal
"Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics... His ambitious new book, The Signal and the Noise, is a practical handbook and a philosophical manifesto in one, following the theme of prediction through a series of case studies ranging from hurricane tracking to professional poker to counterterrorism. It will be a supremely valuable resource for anyone who wants to make good guesses about the future, or who wants to assess the guesses made by others. In other words, everyone."
—The Boston Globe
"Silver delivers an improbably breezy read on what is essentially a primer on making predictions."
—Washington Post
“The Signal and the Noise is many things — an introduction to the Bayesian theory of probability, a meditation on luck and character, a commentary on poker's insights into life — but it's most important function is its most basic and absolutely necessary one right now: a guide to detecting and avoiding bullshit dressed up as data…What is most refreshing… is its humility. Sometimes we have to deal with not knowing, and we need somebody to tell us that.”
—Esquire
“[An] entertaining popularization of a subject that scares many people off… Silvers journey from consulting to baseball analytics to professional poker to political prognosticating is very much that of a restless and curious mind. And this, more than number-crunching, is where real forecasting prowess comes from.”
—Slate
“Nate Silver serves as a sort of Zen master to American election-watchers… In the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Talebs widely read “The Black Swan”, Mr. Silver asserts that humans are overconfident in their predictive abilities, that they struggle to think in probabilistic terms and build models that do not allow for uncertainty.”
—The Economist
"Silver explores our attempts at forecasting stocks, storms, sports, and anything else not set in stone."
—Wired
"The Signal and the Noise is essential reading in the era of Big Data that touches every business, every sports event, and every policymaker."
—Forbes.com
“Laser sharp. Surprisingly, statistics in Silvers hands is not without some fun.”
—Smithsonian Magazine
“A substantial, wide-ranging, and potentially important gauntlet of probabilistic thinking based on actual data thrown at the feet of a culture determined to sweep away silly liberal notions like ‘facts.”
—The Village Voice
“Silver shines a light on 600 years of human intelligence-gathering—from the advent of the printing press all the way through the Industrial Revolution and up to the current day—and he finds that it's been an inspiring climb. We've learned so much, and we still have so much left to learn.”
—MLB.com
Review
“Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century (a century we thought we’d be a lot better at predicting than we actually are). Our political discourse is already better informed and more data-driven because of Nate’s influence. But here he shows us what he has always been able to see in the numbers—the heart and the ethical imperative of getting the quantitative questions right. A wonderful read—totally engrossing.”
—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
“Yogi Berra was right: ‘forecasting is hard, especially about the future.’ In this important book, Nate Silver explains why the performance of experts varies from prescient to useless and why we must plan for the unexpected. Must reading for anyone who cares about what might happen next.”
—Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge
“Making predictions in the era of ‘big data’ is not what you might imagine. Nate Silver's refreshing and original book provides unpredictably illuminating insights differentiating objective and subjective realities in forecasting our future. He reminds us that the human element is still essential in predicting advances in science, technology and even politics... if we were only wise enough to learn from our mistakes.”
—Governor Jon Huntsman
“Here's a prediction: after you read The Signal and the Noise, you'll have much more insight into why some models work well—and also why many don't. You'll learn to pay more attention to weather forecasts for the coming week—and none at all for weather forecasts beyond that. Nate Silver takes a complex, difficult subject and makes it fun, interesting, and relevant.”
—Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget
“Projection, prediction, assumption, trepidation, anticipation, expectation, estimation… we wouldn’t have 80 words like this in the English language if it wasn’t central to our lives. We tend not to take prediction seriously because, on some level, we know that we don’t know. Silver shows us how this inevitable part of life goes awry when projected on a grand scale into the murky worlds of politics, science and economics. Dancing through chess, sports, snowstorms, global warming and the McLaughlin Group, he makes a serious and systematic effort to show us how to clean the noise off the signal.”
—Bill James, author of The Bill James Baseball Abstracts
Synopsis
A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It's our nature.
Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they're enabling countless new tribes to be borngroups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.
And so the key question: Who is going to lead us?
The Web can do amazing things, but it can't provide leadership. That still has to come from individualspeople just like you who have passion about something. The explosion in tribes means that anyone who wants to make a difference now has the tools at her fingertips.
If you think leadership is for other people, think againleaders come in surprising packages. Consider Joel Spolsky and his international tribe of scary-smart software engineers. Or Gary Vaynerhuck, a wine expert with a devoted following of enthusiasts. Chris Sharma leads a tribe of rock climbers up impossible cliff faces, while Mich Mathews, a VP at Microsoft, runs her internal tribe of marketers from her cube in Seattle. All they have in common is the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.
If you ignore this opportunity, you risk turning into a "sheepwalker"someone who fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you (or your organization) any good. Sheepwalkers don't do very well these days.
Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities in leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, or readers. . . . It's not easy, but it's easier than you think.
Synopsis
In
WE-Commerce, visionary marketing strategist Billee Howard lays out her plan for a new vision of success and long-term, purposeful profitability in the new global, sharing economy
Today, the most successful small businesses and entrepreneurs thrive through connectivity, socialization, and sharing. It is an age of WE-Commerce, an economy centered on the power of we” instead of me,” focused on the needs of the many over the few. Booming companies such as Uber and Airbnb leverage technology to create platforms that rely largely on social media and community feedback to facilitate peoples ability to collaborate with one another. Instead of traditional business strategies, companies must now inspire belief and trust in their communities; collaborate with their customers; create business models that are socially and environmentally responsible; find opportunities for creative collaboration with large, global markets; and become a new generation of innovatorsartists of business.”
With advice from stay small but include all” to profit with purpose” and embrace disruption,” Billee Howard gives readers the reinvented business toolkit that they will need to effectively collaborate, co-create, and succeed in a WE-Commerce landscape, and to acquire a new set of skills that will position them as leaders in the transformed economy.
About the Author
Billee Howard is founder and chief engagement officer of Brandthropologie, and president of Mojo Risin Productions. Brandthropologie is a cutting-edge communications consulting firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals to produce innovative, creative, and passionate dialogues with target communities, while blazing a trail toward new models of artful, responsible, and sustainable business success. Mojo Risin, Brandthropologies small-batch production studio, creates custom branded immersive entertainment content for television on the web. Howard is a veteran communications executive in brand development, trend forecasting, strategic media relations, and C-suite executive positioning. She began her career at age twenty-two as press secretary for the president of the Philippines, and subsequently worked at the world's largest PR firm, Weber Shandwick, handling global communications for Samsung, PepsiCo, MasterCard, and All State.