Star stats guy Nate Silver has left the New York Times for ESPN and other properties under the Disney umbrella. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Deadspin. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

When will I die?

Nate Silver:

I’d guess that the median Deadspin commenter is a 34-year-old white male with middle-to-high income but also above-average alcohol consumption. So we’re taking about a remaining live expectancy of 47 years, give or take. My best guess is that you’ll die in 2060, perhaps just a few days before Sasha Obama wins her second term.

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Question:

What size staff do you envision the new 538 having? Are you going to be looking more for specialists or generalists?

Nate Silver: 

I think the goal is perhaps to have a site where we’re publishing 3-4 articles per weekday, plus perhaps some blogs and other quick-hit type stuff. What I’m not quite sure about is exactly how many people we’ll need to hire to make that happen, and what the mix of freelancers versus full-time staffers will be.

We are looking for people with a diverse set of interests, within reason. We’ll have people who specialize in sports, I’m sure, as opposed to politics or economics or culture. But I’m not sure that we’ll have people who specialize only in (say) baseball or golf, as opposed to sports more broadly.

And yes — we are taking resumes. (There’s no formal process for this yet, but it’s not too hard to find my email.) We’ve already gotten interest from some great quant-friendly journalists. What’s a little bit tougher to find is people who are journalism-friendly quants, if that makes sense — people who might be employed in (say) tech or finance or consulting right now but who can express themselves pretty well and who might be interested in a change of careers.

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Question:

Nate, what will you miss most about the political analysis you did for the Times and what will you miss the least?

Nate Silver:

To clarify, I’m not leaving political analysis. My guess is that it might still occupy 40-50% of my time personally, and that politics/elections might represent something like 30-40% of the content at the “new” 538. We’ll probably also hire at least one full-time politics writer/editor, along with some talented freelancers.

But to be honest — there’s not very much I’ll miss about pulling back from politics some. 2012 was an amazing year for me in any objective sense, but I still get sort of bitter and angry when I think about how hard it was to get people to accept some very basic statistical conclusions, and how personal things became.•