What Mathematics Educators Can Gain from Silver’s Approach to Humanizing Mathematical Predictions A Review of Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t

Abstract

The book The Signal and The Noise; Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don’t is, as its name implies, a book about predictions in a wide range of fields including weather, sports-betting, elections, and economic predictions. Rather than focus solely on the mathematics of prediction in each field, it places just as much emphasis on the role of people that make predictions. Thus, the book is about the human process of making predictions, the many factors that affect their accuracy, and how these factors interact with each other. Silver’s (2012) approach highlights that because the person making predictions is an indispensable part of the prediction process, the fallibility of people leads to the fallibility of predictions. He takes great care to describe approaches to mitigating these biases and describes them thoroughly in the context of prediction.