How a Statistician Hires People

America’s boyfriend Nate Silver talked to TIME recently about his plans for FiveThirtyEight, and the magazine offered us some insight into how the statistician decides whom to hire:

He has insisted that potential hires demonstrate an ability to learn new things. In the journalism business, that might mean computer-programming skills or the creation of a novel beat. Silver judges potential employees by a set of coordinate axes he has saved on his computer. (“Because I’m a dork,” he says.)

The x-axis runs from “quantitative” to “qualitative,” the y-axis (top to bottom) from “rigorous and empirical” to “anecdotal and ad hoc.” All FiveThirtyEight employees, he says, need to land in the upper-left quadrant of the coordinate plane, where they are quantitatively inclined, rigorous and empirical.

I don’t know why, but I’m kinda into that? There is a clear method to Nate Silver’s madness.

Photo: Bill Rand

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