Nate Silver: observation

Transcript context

…You mentioned food before. Let’s take a data intensive approach to food. You’re trying to find a good place to eat. What is the underrated statistic about a restaurant that you will consult or advocate others consult in this endeavor? This is a fairly basic one. But I’d rather look, if you’re looking at Yelp or TripAdvisor, the number of reviews is a better signal than the average star rating. Especially the number of reviews relative to how long a place has been open. We’ve done some work on this, too, where when you’re drawing from a more diverse segment of people — there’s something I want to vent about how, like, every book on Amazon, in the long run, gravitates toward having four stars. A lot of 9/11 conspiracy books are rated pretty well on Amazon, because only the conspiracists bother to read them. Whereas, Othello or Macbeth or something, everyone reads, a lot of kids have to read it for homework when they don’t want to, necessarily, so they’ll leave a bad review there, potentially. But I think that problem is more acute than people might realize when it comes to restaurants, where a place is notorious for drawing people who might not like that cuisine as much. People also, when I go — and I used to do more Yelping and stuff like that — if I go to a mom-and-pop place in a small town somewhere and it’s not very good, there’s almost no way that I’m going to leave a negative review for that place. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, I don’t want to — there’s actually studies showing that Yelp reviews can, like, a one-star Yelp review can cost like thousands of dollars in business for a restaurant that has under 50 reviews or something like that. In New York City, is there better food on the avenues or the streets?…

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