Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Can we apply data analysis to figure out the next Supreme Court pick — again not to know who it will be but to get that 52 percent edge up on what other people are thinking? Potentially. There are some fledgling attempts at Supreme Court analytics although this is also a case where we’re in a sample size of zero, where you have a nominee who’s very unlikely to be confirmed but there’s still high political stakes. My uninformed guess would be maybe Srinivasan who was confirmed 97 to nothing. I would tend to think that — my hunch and this is just a hunch, the theory is that either Obama nominates someone with unimpeachable credentials and makes Republicans look very unreasonable or he makes a pick that trolls Republicans and plays to Democratic base. I’m more of a believer in the former as Obama’s mode of doing things. I think he’d push things in their way and have someone who might just be at the risk of pissing off the liberal base, but the Republicans have to look ridiculous opposing, as opposed to the other way around. Now my last question before we get to the crowd. As you said before, we have a lot of same interests, food, travel, sports, not sure if politics counts as one of mine but in a broad sense politics. You’ve taken a lot of trips, some for work, some vacation. If you apply data analysis to those trips, what do you learn about what makes for a good trip and what can you do or what can we all do to have better trips?…

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