You Get Steely Nerves Playing Poker.

Data-driven Predictions Can Succeed-and They Can Fail. It Is When We Deny Our Role In The Process That The Odds Of Failure Rise. Before We Demand More Of Our Data, We Need To Demand More Of Ourselves.

Voters' Memories Will Fade Some.

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.

You Get Steely Nerves Playing Poker.

We Need To Stop, And Admit It: We Have A Prediction Problem. We Love To Predict Things—and We Aren’t Very Good At It.