Book Review Podcast: Nate Silver on the Art of Predictions

Illustration by Rex Bonomelli; photograph of Wole Soyinka (left) by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for Grey Goose; photograph of Chinua Achebe (right) by Steve Pyke for The New Yorker/Contour by Getty Images.

This week in The New York Times Book Review, Noam Scheiber reviews “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't,” by Nate Silver. Mr. Silver's blog FiveThirtyEight puts electoral politics under the statistical microscope, but Mr. Scheiber writes that “ the book hints at his ambitions to take on weightier questions. There's no better example of this than his chapter on climate change.” He continues:

What Silver is doing here is playing the role of public statistician - bringing simple but powerful empirical methods to bear on a controversial policy question, and making the results accessible to anyone with a high-school level of numeracy. The exercise is not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War. Except that their authority was based to varying degrees on their establishment credentials, whereas Silver's derives from his data savvy in the age of the stats nerd.

On this week's podcast, Mr. Silver talks about his book; Parul Sehgal discusses publishing news; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the ho st.