Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…We’re in a law school right now. If we applied a lot more data to the law, what kind of improvement could you imagine we might come up with, just tentatively? See, I think that might be the last field where — [laughter] Where you would have a lot of — and I don’t say that in a pejorative way at all. But a lot of the advantage of working with data sets and becoming more adept at it is that you get an answer that’s at least approximately right. Whereas, the legal sector, I think, relies more on precision. You want a very precise and possibly wrong answer, which is what you’re trying to avoid sometimes when you’re doing statistical analysis. I sometimes wonder how much data do people want. As part of my prep for this, I went back to your high school yearbook, and I took a look at the quotation you left. It’s from Macbeth. It goes as follows: “Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.”…

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