Sometimes, I wonder why someone would trade a good, comfortable, career in a quality organisation to pursue their so called “passion.” I wonder if it is worth the risk and pain and uncertainty.Until I came across this current book I am reading.
It is called THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: The Art And Science of Prediction by 35-year old Nate Silver.
The author’s story would resonate with you or someone you know. But first, the book.
I believe that finding a book that is interesting enough to hold and sustain one’s interest is one reason for our poor reading habit. A boring book can dampen your reading habit, just as a great one can ignite it.
So how do you choose a good book? One key criterion I consider is what I call “validation.” Who is the author and what qualifies him to write on the subject matter?
At the Ikeja Shopping Mall bookstore this past Sunday, I struggled to find an interesting book. Then I saw this very one, turned it over casually, didn’t know what to make of it.
Until I turned to the author’s short bio.
Nate Silver is a statistician and political forecaster at the New York Times. He correctly PREDICTED 49 out of the 50 states during the US Presidential election in 2008.
Last year, he correctly predicted the winner of all 35 US Senate races. And in the Presidential election between Obama and Romney, he correctly predicted who among them would win in all 50 states! Incredible! Never done before.
He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the world.
So when someone like this writes about the subject of PREDICTION, then, it is worth reading. The book infact was named by Amazon as the No 1 Non-fiction book for the whole of 2012!
Then as I started reading the book, I came across even more amazing stuff about Nate Silver.
He was born in 1978. After college, he joined KPMG working as a transfer pricing consultant in their Chicago office. He says, “the job wasn’t bad. My bosses and co-workers were friendly and professional. The pay was honest and I felt secure.”
So why leave a career like this?
He continues, “It was too riskless, too prudent, and too routine for a restless twenty-four-year-old, and I was as bored as I’d ever been. The one advantage was that I had a lot of extra time on my hand. So in my empty hours, I started building a colourful spreadsheet full of baseball statistics that would later become the basis for PECOTA”
PECOTA is the model he developed to predict and rank baseball players as well as how their clubs would perform in the season. It was hailed for its precision and predictive power, and was promptly acquired by a bigger rival company that lured him away from KPMG making him a co-owner of the business.
Nate Silver is a baseball fanatic. Talk about passion.
But he didn’t just jump ship blindly. Hear him:
“And slowly, over the course of those long days at KPMG in 2002, PECOTA began to develop. It took the form of a giant, colourful Excel spreadsheet – fortuitously so, since Excel was one of the main tools that I used in my day job at KPMG. (Every time one of my bosses worked by, they assumed I was diligently working on a highly elaborate model for one of our clients).”
“Eventually, by stealing an hour or two at a time during slow periods during the workday, and a few more while at home at night, I developed a database consisting of more than 10,000 player-seasons (every major- league season since World War II was waged.)”
Talk about true passion!
Enough of the author. Now about the book. Here are some direct and indirect quotes from the book.
Ever heard of Big Data lately? IMB estimates that we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. Quintillion is defined as the No 1 followed by 18 zeros (in the US) and 30 zeros (in Britain).
So the world is swimming in oceans of data. But why we have loads and loads of information, what is really valuable is processed and relevant information, called knowledge.
Translating information into knowledge is key. Sifting through the noise for the signal.
The human brain is quite remarkable. It can store perhaps three terabyte of information. And yet, that is only about one one-millionth of the information that IBM says is now produced in the world each day.
So, we have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember.
If the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal.
Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But relatively little of it is useful. We think we want information when we really want knowledge.
And then he says, “The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth. This book is about the signal and the noise.”
Phenomenal!
Warm regards,
Martin Udogie
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