You Can Build A Statistical Model And

I Love South American Food, And I Haven't Really Been Down There. I Really Need A Vacation.

Finding Patterns Is Easy In Any Kind Of Data-rich Environment; That's What Mediocre Gamblers Do. The Key Is In Determining Whether The Patterns Represent Signal Or Noise

Expert Estimates Of Probability Are Often Off By Factors Of Hundreds Or Thousands. [...] I Used To Be Annoyed When The Margin Of Error Was High In A Forecasting Model That I Might Put Together. Now I View It As Perhaps The Single Most Important Piece Of Information That A Forecaster Provides. When We Publish A Forecast On Fivethirtyeight, I Go To Great Lengths To Document The Uncertainty Attached To It, Even If The Uncertainty Is Sufficiently Large That The Forecast Won't Make For Punchy Headlines.

I Don't Think That Somebody Who Is Observing Or Predicting Behavior Should Also Be Participating In The 'experiment.'

Shakespeare's Plays Often Turn On The Idea Of Fate, As Much Drama Does. What Makes Them So Tragic Is The Gap Between What His Characters Might Like To Accomplish And What Fate Provides Them.