Signals And Noise: Nate Silver wrote an excellent book, I wrote an OK blog post.

Over the weekend I attempted to read all of The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver’s iconic 2012 opus on forecasting and prediction. The Signal and the Noise really is a masterpiece, and nothing I can teach you in a short blog post is going to be a substitute for spending a weekend or a month absorbing what there is to learn in a 454-page manifesto. But I’m hoping to inspire a few of you to pick it up through doing this exercise.

Anyway, here are 7 ways that I’ve changed my life or my beliefs to factor in actual evidence or data. Some of them have to do with the material covered in a tome like The Signal and the Noise and some of them don’t. But they were all humbling life lessons that most would be better off not learning the hard way.

7. If everybody else is doing something, it doesn’t matter if it seems inherently pointless or cost inefficient. The mere fact that everyone else is doing it often indicates that it has some competitive aspect. Tourists and outsiders in DC will often note that there’s almost a uniform among white collar workers in the area. Why is this?

Policy analysts don’t produce better forecasts by shopping at Brooks Brothers or Vineyard Vines. If they did, a book like The Signal and the Noise wouldn’t be necessary. The preppy clothing choices add nothing to the work that they are doing. Yet they all do it! Why? Because they are not competing with regular people for jobs and social opportunities, they’re competing with other policy analysts, and all the other policy analysts are wearing crisp jackets or salmon-colored pants even when it’s 88 degrees. Opt out of these pointless games if you want, but if you don’t compete, don’t complain when you don’t win.

6. Expensive cities are generally expensive because they have bigger, better employers. And that’s unfair, but it’s just how life is. The demographic “center” of the United States has consistently moved south and west as the population has grown. Conventional wisdom suggests that in modern times sunbelt states like Florida and Texas are where the population growth is, thus, they must have an abundance of high wage jobs.

The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it’s wrong. People flock to those places primarily because they offer a low cost of living, not because they offer great odds of professional success. There’s nothing wrong with that for many people, but it is a choice that must be made for people who aspire to work in certain niche professional industries. Recognize that many places with cheap real estate are cheap primarily because they are not near many of the most lucrative job opportunities. A condo in Phoenix probably has a pool, but it won’t have all 5 major employers in a given industry nearby. It might have zero or only one of them, and the odds are very good that it won’t be the most high paying and prestigious jobs at the company. A lot of California technology start-ups move their sales or administrative jobs to Phoenix or Scottsdale once they begin to scale up, but unfortunately it’s rare for them to hire the much higher-paid engineering roles and similar functions from that market. Yet, those same developer jobs are a dime a dozen in bigger markets like New York, San Francisco, or DC. It’s an employee’s market in those cities. They cannot find enough competent warm bodies to fill all of the jobs. It’s totally unfair that pursuing a professional career generally requires living in one of the biggest and most expensive cities, but unfortunately it’s the truth. Your mom loves you, but she is probably not being realistic when she says you can make it in your field of choice from Omaha or Tallahassee.

5. The National Weather Service is not to be mocked. It’s beyond the scope of a blog post, but advances in supercomputing have driven a revolution in weather forecasting that has made official predictions far more accurate than they were decades ago. If you are told to evacuate, leave! If you are told to stay off the roads, don’t go! They are not making these precautions just to stop you from having a good time — people die as a result of hurricanes, floods, snowstorms, and other natural disasters. Whatever it is that is being inconvenienced by a warning or evacuation notice, it is not worth your life.

4. Daily news coverage is really more like entertainment than it is like reading a book. Read books to pick up the signal, because TV news and blogs are mostly noise. Even fairly credible news sources don’t always have experts who can provide nuance and context to sophisticated topics. Last week there was a trending story about an airplane that was struck by lightning. This happens all the time! Airplanes are vehicles that are meant to travel through the atmosphere! And, they are designed to safely withstand a lightning strike through the use of something called a Faraday Cage. This didn’t stop the media from resharing the video of the lightning strike over and over again, often without also pointing out that it’s a common occurrence and that it’s something engineers factor into their designs.

3. Wages are set by the free market in aggregate but not necessarily for individuals. Why does someone else at work with the same job make more than you? Because they made more at their last job, and when they got hired, they quoted a bigger number when asked what that figure was. Is that fair? No. Is that true? Yes. If you don’t like it, use the knowledge to your advantage. Read about negotiation and arm yourself with better information about what people in your field are making, and then go apply for other jobs. Also, do this sooner rather than later, because the salary arc is a lot steeper while you are still young. People will forgive a 22-year old for only making $20,000 a year. A “real adult” doing the same thing is just poor. And, unfortunately, statistics show that most salary growth occurs during the first 10 years of a career, so get crackin’.

2. Predicting the future is impossible with most of the things that people want to know. Outside of the Physics 110 classroom, deterministic systems are few and far between. The questions that people find the most interesting to debate are frequently the ones where there are no certain answers to be had. We cannot predict when the next recession will occur; indeed, we may already be in it, and we have no way of knowing. Anybody who tells you they have a sure-fire way of predicting the next recession is lying or misinformed. Likewise, foreign policy puzzles are fun to debate, but predicting what Russia or China will be doing 5, 10, or 20 years from now is an exercise in futility. Humans are really good at predicting the near future — next week or next month — because it very often resembles the present, i.e. today. It’s very likely that Vladimir Putin will still be in control of Russia tomorrow, because he is today. Will he still be in charge next year or in 2020? I have visited Russia, I spent two years studying the Russian language in college, and I follow what the Kremlin is doing pretty closely. Yet, I can’t answer that question for you. It’s not because I’m incompetent, it’s because I’m being honest about the limits of what humans are really able to predict.

1. Politicians have very little influence over the economy and business cycle. The less you rely on politics or ideology for your understanding of economics, the better off you will be. Even the Federal Reserve Bank doesn’t really understand how one thing in the economy directly affects another. Goldman Sachs doesn’t know. Hedge funds do no better than random chance at picking stocks. Those are the experts, and they don’t know. What makes you think a politician giving a speech can do anything about the unemployment rate, the national debt, GDP growth, or any other figure that tracks economic activity? Go ahead, write your Senator. They can’t do anything. They cannot change the interest rate or do anything about the business cycle. They’re probably just as frustrated as you. Factor in the nature of the global economy and the poor level of transparency from other sizable trading powers and there is really very little anybody in Washington can do to just “fix” the economy. It sucks, but it’s true.

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These are all hard lessons to learn. I’ve had to admit that I’ve been wrong about them in the past in order to learn them, and it sucked. But, I’m sharing them to try and prevent others from making the same mistakes of belief, bias, or ideology. If the 20th century was the era of better living through chemistry — the 21st is the era of better living through data. Learn to love it and reap the benefits.