Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Nate doesn’t need much of an introduction. He is a phenomenon in the areas of data, sports, politics, online media — all the growth sectors, basically. When I think of your work, I think of you as dedicated to the idea of numbers and data and wanting to apply that to as many different areas as possible. If you had to say of all the areas of human life, where can data bring the biggest improvements, what would your answer be? That’s a pretty heavy question. I should have taken half an hour to think about that. The answers are probably obvious in some sense where health is an area where I’ve not done a lot of work personally, but I’m sure it’s incredibly valuable. Doctors are not known for being terribly analytics driven. I don’t know the culture enough as to know why. In terms of areas that I would like us to focus on at FiveThirtyEight a little bit more than we do now, criminality and criminal justice is an interesting area, in part because you have lots of issues with data. If you want to know how many police officers are killed, how many people are killed by police officers, you don’t really know that very well. Education is an area where I suspect you have a lot of data used poorly as well as data used well. Urban planning is something we’re fascinated by. We did a big analysis of Uber data that New York City spent like $2 million to conclude, but we concluded on our own in a week or two of work, which is that Uber, by and large in New York, was not adding cars to the streets, at least not in Manhattan.…

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