Forecasting
Politics, baseball, and poker
Nate Silver’s known for accurately predicting the outcome of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. This book is about predictions in many domains besides politics. He knows a lot about baseball, and I especially liked his explanation of hold’em poker.
Anyone interested in politics may be attracted to Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t. Silver got a lot of attention in 2012 for predicting—accurately, as it turned out—the results of the U.S. presidential election. This book actually came out before the election, though, and it’s about predictions in many domains besides politics. Silver knows a lot about baseball, and I especially liked his explanation of hold’em poker. A few pages where he talks about how early computers supposedly made everything less efficient are utter nonsense. I wish he had gone into more depth on some things, like why it is that voters are increasingly polarized.
