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The Signal and the Noise - Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't (Paperback)
Loot Price: R463
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The Signal and the Noise - Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't (Paperback)
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List price R538
Loot Price R463
Discovery Miles 4 630
You Save R75 (14%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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UPDATED FOR 2020 WITH A NEW PREFACE BY NATE SILVER "One of the more
momentous books of the decade." -The New York Times Book Review
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. 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 the website
FiveThirtyEight. 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 to
global pandemics, 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.
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