STAT 440 - Forecasting
Reading Assignment

This semester we will read the book The Signal and the Noise. This recent popular-press book is an interesting and accessible treatment of a variety of topics related to forecasting methods in "real world" practice.

The author, Nate Silver, gained considerable attention following the 2012 presidential election, when his website (FiveThirtyEight.org, now defunct) correctly called the election outcome in all 50 states. He didn't do quite so well in 2016 — but did better than pretty much everyone else, as he was giving Donald Trump one chance in three of winning the election. Prior to his work as a political forecaster, he was known to baseball enthusiasts for his development of statistical models to predict player performance. He has broad expertise in applying statistical forecasting techniques to a variety of topics.

We will read the book at a rate of one chapter per week. For each chapter, you are asked to write a brief reaction paper to the chapter’s contents. This paper need not be long — a typical paper will run perhaps a page (typed, single-spaced with double-spacing between paragraphs) or two (if you double-space, and multiple pages will of course be stapled), perhaps somewhat less.

Your paper should contain two parts. First, BRIEFLY summarize the contents of the chapter (in a paragraph). Second, write a short reflective essay: your thoughts, opinions, and/or reactions to the reading or some portion thereof In essence, I’m asking you to have a (written) conversation with Nate Silver — you’ll be saying something on the lines of "I never thought of that" or "this relates to something we were talking about in my finance class" or "something like that was in the news just this week" or some such.

Papers are due every Friday. (For Good Friday, when classes don’t meet, the paper is due the following Monday.) Late papers receive a penalty grade. The schedule is as follows:

In case you are not able to obtain a copy of the book in time for the first reading assignment, a copy of the book introduction is available here, as a .PDF file. Please note that I cannot and will not do this in general — this is a one-time-only stopgap provision for the beginning of the semester. We need to respect the author's copyright, and to provide him and the publisher with appropriate compensation for their work in producing the book.

A note on the use of generative AI on this assignment

Short version: Don’t.

Longer version:
Generative AI (ChatGPT and such) can be a wonderful tool in the right situation. It can greatly speed and simplify the process in transactional writing. It can be used to brainstorm ideas, to generate outlines and drafts of papers, and in general to relieve much of the drudgery in the writing process. (It’s terrible at chess … but you can’t have everything.)

I view the advent of generative AI as transforming the writing world in much the same way that the calculator (and later the personal computer and the spreadsheet) transformed the computational world. It automates many of the low-level tasks, so we can focus our attention on the higher-level tasks.

And it’s the higher-level tasks that are the purpose of this assignment. If the goal were to have a summary and commentary on the text, then using Chat GPT (or Google Bard or whatever) would be fine.

But that’s not the goal here.

The goals are (1) to help you better remember what you read, and (2) to have you practice the art of making connections between domains of knowledge.

When you summarize a text, your brain actively engages with that text. That means things are "stored" in multiple places in the brain. This greatly increases long-term memory of the material. If we just read something, we retain a minimal amount of the information. By interacting with the material in some way, we remember much more of it.

Connecting pieces of information together is a higher-level cognitive skill. And it is a crucial one. The great discoveries happen when someone links disparate concepts together. A common complaint about our educational system is that it’s all just meaningless memorization, with no relevance to much of anything. But that happens because we don’t work at making those links. We must train our brains to get in the habit of making connections between pieces of knowledge.

Those are the two goals of this assignment. And they won’t be achieved by having ChatGPT produce some document just for the sake of producing a document.

If I suspect you are using generative AI on this assignment, even once, then I will refer the matter to the Honor System Council as an egregious breach of standards for academic integrity. My recommended grade penalty would be for you to receive negative credit for all reading assignments (that is, not just a zero, but minus 15% on the course grade), with the proviso that subsequent satisfactory completion of the assignment (all readings, no GenAI) would raise this to a zero.

So don’t do it. You’ll hurt your grade badly. Far more importantly, you’ll deprive yourself of all the learning value. And it’s a really great book — well worth reading and remembering.