Only 12% deep on the Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Not too thrilled so far. Early on, Silver goes on at length that there are two types of analysts: foxes and hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are bullish, biased, and always looking to confirm what they believe. Foxes are always scavenging the world around them to pull in little bits of data or anything that will help them understand the problem. It is obvious which Silver thinks he is.
My thought: duh. Of course people who don't ignore relevant information are able to make more accurate predictions. I don't think you need to be a stats whiz to understand that being self-critical and empirical may be helpful traits. Silver took a lot of pages to say something that is fairly obvious.
This reminds me of criticism of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Blink focused on intuitive thinking and was well read going back a few years ago. Throughout the book, there are tons of anecdotes of how experts in their fields are able to quickly solve problems or defeat a sophisticated computer meant in a war game. The takeaway from the book is that people are able to process information very quickly and subconsciously, especially experts. D'uh.
The difference between Gladwell and Silver, so far, is that Gladwell is an excellent writer. His style is accessible. He is able to dazzle you so much with that style that you don't even notice that the substance isn't too impressive. So far, Silver hasn't said much and he hasn't said it well.
As a bonus, here's a fun and somewhat unfair thrashing of Gladwell by the Hon. Richard Posner.
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