If you’re going to read one book at the start of this year to improve your understanding of the world and the compliance professional’s role in it, read The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. It’s been on the best seller list since its debut last September, and I finally opened a copy the other day. Before I finished even Chapter 1, I could see why the book has been so popular, and why it can be so useful for those of us who make a living in the corporate compliance world.
Silver is a professional statistician turned media celebrity, thanks largely to the FiveThirtyEight blog he launched in 2008 to study political forecasts. Silver isn’t wholly a political junkie; he started his career as a consultant and then created a tool to analyze and predict professional baseball players’ performance. But he came into his own this past election season, predicting President Obama’s re-election early and sticking to that call despite fierce statistical second-guessing from the political right—which all turned out to be wrong come Nov. 6.
