it is always like that. the impact is what others frame for you and the world after it happens. the president is only what you are experiencing and focused on right now. every so often my past and present come together. i was invited to this fundraiser at a children's hospital in the bay area last year. steve carell was there. i showed the photos to him when i got a chance to talk with him. we got a chance to have a brief conversation.

we looked at the photocopy of the review and talked about the different people in the group and where they were. we kept in touch with some. he patted me on the back and said, i'm sorry it did not work out for you. [laughter] you cannot draw that path looking forward. you have to figure out what you love to do and what you have conviction about and go do that. so far you guys have gotten where you are by meeting and exceeding expectations. you are awesome. look at you. you look like an amazing, giant flyer. giant choir.

[laughter] but from here on out, you have to switch gears. there are no expectations. when you doing what you love to do, you become resilient because that is a habit you create for yourself. you create a habit of taking chances on yourself and making bold choices in service to doing what you love. if on the other hand you do what you think is expected of you are what you are supposed to do and things go poorly or chaos ensues, you will look for external sources for what to do next. that will be the habit you have created for yourself. you'll be standing there frozen on the stage of your own life.

if you are just filling a role, you will be blindsided. i do not feel like i can stand there and tell you to try to have an impact. the problem seems so massive, it seems impossible to make any impact at all and you end up feeling like you cannot do anything. just thinking about it in iran and north korea, if you go through the list, and makes me want to sweat and not just because of this robe that does not seem to have natural fibers in it. [laughter] instead, what i implore you to do is see if you make courageous choices and bet on yourself and put yourself out there, you will have an impact as a result of what you do any do not need to know how that will happen because no one ever does.

i would like to leave you with a metaphor of my early improv days. you are here now and look at everything you have accomplished. it is remarkable. you are also amazing to me. i'm proud of everything you have done. as you get ready to walk out under the bright lights of improvisational stage of the rest of your life, i implore you to remember those two lessons i learned years ago -- be bold. make courageous choices for yourself. be in the keebler elf factory. what are you afraid of? do not always worry about what your next line is supposed to be. there is no script. live your life. be in this moment. be in this moment. now be in this moment.

20 years from now, you'll be sitting in a different seat in the stadium. you will be lying in a field and looking up at the clouds and holding up a patient hand and you will be grading or evaluating a student's essay and you will be sitting on the sidelines of your daughter's soccer practice and sitting on the podium. be right there in that moment. soak all of it in. remember to say thank you. thank you #goblue. [cheers and applause]

the new school in new york city awarded statistician nate silver an honorary degree in literature at their commencement ceremony on may 24. he is a political pollster and creator of the "new york times" 538 log. this is about 15 minutes. [applause] [applause] don't go too far, nate. , ours and gentlemen commencement speaker, nate silver. [applause]

thank you very much. i am humbled to be here today and receive this degree. it is a gigantic honor and i , andto thank the president the rest of the new school community. most of all i want to thank you guys, the graduates, for having had the fortitude to devote the possible years of your life to your love of learning and pursuit of your passions. i want to thank your parents and their friends, your family, your teachers, your faculty, for helping make the streams possible. [applause] i need to warn the graduates that there are some people out there who don't hold you guys in the same high esteem that i do. one of them is jewel -- joel stein, a columnist for time

magazine. he calls your generation, lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow area. what should we make of his claims? there is no doubt that your generation is going to have to endorse and challenges. infact, college graduates america today face a future that may be more uncertain than ever before. in 1994, courting to the department of education, 87% of students would need bachelors degrees while working full-time or part-time a year later. today that figure is just 73%. still an degree is incredible advantage, but no longer a guarantee of a good job or successful career. the good news is that absolutely none of this is your fault. the bad news that we will be counting on you guys to clean up the mess that the previous generation left behind. punted onation has

solving a whole host of problems. is investing less and less in the future. education spending is down, infrastructure spending is down, even as bridges are collapsing. to be atgdp spending a 20 year low this year. how is it that your generation stands accused of being lazy, entitled, selfish, and shallow? [applause] it is your standard of living that has imprisoned by the previous generations mistakes. good news,re however. the previous generation has left behind something else the hand of his problems. lots and lots of data. data in every imaginable field and format. according to ibm, 90% of the

data in the world was created in the past two years. here is the catch. the previous generation has not done a very good job of transforming all of data into useful knowledge. that will be up to you guys as well. the new millennium is been characterized by a series of crises, earthquakes and hurricanes, recessions and financial bubbles, wars and terrorist strikes, you name it. not all of this could've been prevented, but they all involve some failure of analysis that magnified consequences. many seismologists in japan wrongly concluded that an earthquake as large as a magnitude nine that struck in 2011 was physically impossible. the fukushima nuclear reactor had only been built to withstand a magnitude 8.6. let me pause to relate a little bit for my own small experience. in 2012 it published a fiscal model for the 538 log of the "new york times."

it's up to forecast the outcome of the presidential race. called all 50 statess right. there was no wizardry or is in this model. it was taking an average of publicly available polls and letting the data determine the forecast. a lot of our competitors did --y well, calling 48 or 59 49 of 50 states right. forecasting the outcome of an election is a simpler problem and much less consequential one than most of what your generation will have to deal with. this relatively simple model generated an inordinate amount of controversy. by election day, more to the work and i think google searches for mining name them for vice president biden. the forecast a lot of by liberals to the extent that may have been unhealthy. i was the subject of one new yorker profile that compared me to justin bieber. by somelified republicans. one of them called me a thin and effeminate man with a soft sounding voice, which could also be justin bieber, come to think of it. [laughter]

like it would somehow make mitt romney win colorado. others allege that the polls of been skewed by a grand conspiracy of pollsters. just prior to election day, a prominent republican columnist predicted not around the andpipe -- win, but landslide. there was also funny us back from mainstream journalists. joe scarborough, the msnbc host, insisted i should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones. a columnist at politico friends i would become in one term celebrity if i did not have a good election. just be clear, these are high- class problems to have. election forecasting is not the most important concerning the world. it makes for an instructive test case. andical polls are simple objective facts. some commentators and pundits could not take an average of them and see who is ahead does not speak very well of their judgment or expertise. no wonder they left your generation was such a mess.

this is the point in the speech which i am supposed to blame a lack of fiscal literacy for all of these problems. there is no doubt that this is a big issue. probability and statistics are not always taught enough in many classrooms or talk or a well. there is a huge demand for analytical talent, which is why the number of people working as statisticians has increased by 43% past 10 years, even as overall employment has been stagnant. i think it is leading the pundits and the previous generation off too easily. it is not just that they don't know statistics, it is that they don't know how much they don't know and that they wallow in their ignorance. take the mission statement put out by the publication "political." ,e do not focus on the masses we focus on what is exclusively on an elite audience. the smart set is small. the problem with this is, it leaked is not a good synonym for smart when it comes to politics especially. [applause]

instead, the way we might learn something from political elites is figuring out what they do and doing exactly the opposite. consider an experiment performed by a professor of psychology at the wharton school. he spent 20 years studying members of the political elite, from pundits to generalist to academics to people who work for the government. he asked them to make predictions about a number of major events from the followed the ussr, to the rate of economic growth. when he tallied up their scores went years later, he found the experts had done barely any better than a set of chimpanzees flinging hoop at a dart board -- poop at a dart board. the more they were on television, the worst depictions tended to be. he also found that a certain type of expert did a little better than the others. these were the experts that he foxes instead of hedgehogs. the fox knows many little

things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. what does it mean to behave like one of those cute foxes that can make something of the data we have today? being a fox ought to come naturally to many of you. it means claim the values you have learned here at the new school. foxes value diversity and independence. i like a wide rage of information. fox's understand that we are small creatures in a large and complex universe. they think in terms of probabilities and not absolutes. they question authority and are rightly distrustful of people who claim to have all the answers, no what their credentials. they are not type a personalities. they are the artsy creative types. they know success results from a combination of skill, luck him and hard work. they focus on the process within their results come visiting a