The Signal and the Noise

This very fascinating book by Nate Silver, of 538.com and NY Times fame, was recommended by Jesse and a geneticist friend, Anil Menon - and it's a winner!  The book is all about predictions - in this era of "big data", one might think that we would be able to make more and more accurate predictions, yet Silver shows that this is not the case.  He looks closely at several fields in which predictions are crucial - weather, earthquakes, climate change and others - and shows that predictions have become more accurate in some of these (weather), but not others (climate change and earthquakes) - and discusses why this is so.  The book sounds very wonky - Bayesian statistics are discussed at some length - but it is exceptionally readable and enjoyable.   Silver's writing seems like speech - it probably was dictated - and he has a whimsical sense of humor that catches you by surprise - he's laugh out loud funny.  He discusses Isaiah Berlin and hedgehogs and foxes (see Berlin's essay) to describe effective predictors (foxes) versus ineffective predictors (hedgehogs).  Really absorbing and informative.  Very highly recommended.  I plan to re-read it soon!