{"id":901,"date":"2012-10-29T16:47:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T00:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/?p=901"},"modified":"2013-03-06T18:24:58","modified_gmt":"2013-03-07T02:24:58","slug":"the-signal-and-the-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/10\/29\/the-signal-and-the-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"The Signal and the Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Book review: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don&#8217;t by Nate Silver.<\/p>\n<p>This is a well-written book about the challenges associated with making predictions. But nearly all the ideas in it were ones I was already familiar with.<\/p>\n<p>I agree with nearly everything the book says. But I&#8217;ll mention two small disagreements.<\/p>\n<p>He claims that 0 and 100 percent are probabilities. Many Bayesians <a href=\"http:\/\/lesswrong.com\/lw\/mp\/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities\/\">dispute that<\/a>. He has a logically consistent interpretation and doesn&#8217;t claim it&#8217;s ever sane to believe something with probability 0 or 100 percent, so I&#8217;m not sure the difference matters, but rejecting the idea that those can represent probabilities seems at least like a simpler way of avoiding mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>When pointing out the weak correlation between calorie consumption and obesity, he says he doesn&#8217;t know of an &#8220;obesity skeptics&#8221; community that would be comparable to the global warming skeptics. In fact there are people (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bulletproofexec.com\/not-the-calories-stupid-reply-to-time-magazine\/\">Dave Asprey<\/a>) who deny that excess calories cause obesity (with better tests than the global warming skeptics).<\/p>\n<p>It would make sense to read this book instead of alternatives such as Moneyball and Tetlock&#8217;s Expert Political Judgment, but if you&#8217;ve been reading books in this area already this one won&#8217;t seem important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book review: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don&#8217;t by Nate Silver. This is a well-written book about the challenges associated with making predictions. But nearly all the ideas in it were ones I was already familiar with. I agree with nearly everything the book says. But I&#8217;ll mention two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,17,18,15],"tags":[44,54,35],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-if","category-investing","category-us","tag-bias","tag-data-mining","tag-polls"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-ex","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":930,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}