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Audiobook (abridged)6 hours
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Written by Ian Ayres
Narrated by James Lurie
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?
Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.
Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.
From the Hardcover edition.
Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.
Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Reviews for Super Crunchers
Rating: 3.6474677880184334 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
217 ratings17 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Through extremely entertaining anecdotes and stories, Ayres provides a wonderful glimpse at some of the ways in which statistics and big data improve our ability to make intelligent decisions. Ayres tends to stay far away from the actual math or technical aspects and simply focuses on the concepts, making it a great read for anyone unfamiliar with probability, statistics, machine learning, and similar. For someone with some experience behind this, it was a little galling to hear, for example, linear regression described as an advanced machine learning technique that not only provided the answers, but provided the probability that the answer was correct (Heh. I wish life were that simple!). However, I was quickly caught up in some of the wonderful real-world examples that Ayres deftly narrates. Some of the stories are absolutely inspiring, such as the way that Mexico used randomized trials to determine the best way of helping people achieve more and rise out of the welfare system, to the entertaining, such as the case in which fine wine aficionados had their noses put out of joint by a computer which could beat them at their own game. An overall brilliant book and a great read for anyone who wants to get a glimpse at the potential of big data.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Break out Anova and Regression - everything can be "crunched". Written for a general audience to make statistical analysis and blind, random studies interesting. Talks about differences discovered and models created as if they had great explanatory power (without more than a brief mention of omitted variables, heteroskedasticity, multicollinearity, or other statistical gremlins!). Overall, a "fun" read due to the linkage of statistics to common issues and observations.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ultimately kind of vacuous. A few useful tidbits to keep you on your guard. For example, those coupons that get printed out at the register can be tailored to your spending habits and may offer you a lesser or greater discount than is offered to the next person in line. When you get a nice offer it is because somebody is pretty sure that they are making money off you.I'm well aware that Amazon has a pretty good idea of what I like and of what I've been interested in recently.But, after reading all those excellent books about bad statistics, I find that this book comes off as far too credulous. Its basic thesis seems to be that any statistical or machine learning analysis will ultimately do better than the experts. That opinion is much better explained by the unfortunate existence of fake expertise in many areas rather than anything else. The author does back-pedal a bit toward the end of the book, pointing out that mistakes can be made with numbers and data, and that there is room for smart people to intuit relationships that may exist, but it is too little, too late.Ultimately, this book is so mathematics free as to seem more like a confidence trick than an exposition.Some particular examples have been discussed in other books with a much different message. One of Joel Best's books claims to show that most of these deaths in hospital due to mistakes by staff result in a person dying about six hours earlier than they would if the mistake hadn't been made. Viewed in that light these mistakes seem less significant, and maybe in some cases a mercy.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ayres provides an understandable overview of the new role data analysis plays in many facets of. Leech life, including marketing, medicine, and social science. What I like most about this book is the examples he uses and the way he helps us understand the limits of human intuition, which is affected by a number of biases. Toward the end, the focus emphasized more than I cared to know about some of his debates with other academics.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I bought this at the A & M bookstore while on a trip with Fulmore GT students.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent book. The author clearly explains the value of statistical analysis in many aspects of prediction and analysis. I now consider the two standard deviation rule as my friend. Frankly, I am fine with recognition that computer algorithms using statistical analysis often provides better answers (with estimates of accuracy) than human estimates.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/51 of 4 people found the following review helpful:3.0 out of 5 stars An easy read on data-driven decision making, October 17, 2007Ian Ayres book is another book extolling the virtues of data-driven decision making. In that regard it is very similar to Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. The book focuses in on the power of data mining and other analytic techniques, especially when combined with random or double-blind studies and the kind of testing often called Adaptive Control (discussed, for instance, in my book Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions. It asserts, and demonstrates with many studies and studies of studies, that this kind of data-driven decision making outperforms traditional experts essentially all the time.While Ian is a little in love with the subject, and while he has created an unnecessary and irritating label (Super Crunchers) when he could have called these people Data Miners like everyone else, the book is well written and an easy read.He has some fun examples - everything from the mathematical prediction of wine vintages to established stories like Harrahs and CapOne.I liked the way in which he talks about the changing role of experts in this world. Not interpreting results but providing the subjective or face-to-face input that algorithms need to make better decisions. I think many organizations will go through a similar progression. First they might adopt a purely rules-driven or expert-centric approach. Gradually as their data, and their understanding of it, improves they might tune these rules with analytic models. Ultimately they may well find that the rules are definitively subordinate to the models with most or even all of the decision making power coming from the models. Unlike the experts in Ian's stories, one hopes the rules will not be upset by this!One section also made a great point, highlighting in passing a potential advantage of adopting decision automation over more traditional forms of decision support. While people using decision support systems do better than people alone, they still don't do as well as the analytic model would on its own. Decision automation, with its reliance on the model, would obviate this problem.He does not spend enough time discussing the difference between causation and correlation nor does he talk much about the constraints that can be imposed through regulation or explicit company policy. His focus is often on one-off insight that changes how organizations do something rather than on the use of this kind of decision making in high-volume, transactional systems.Finally I agree with him that the rise of automation in decision making will force consumers to retaliate by getting access to data, and the implications of that data, to resist the ability of companies to use data to their advantage.Overall a good book, though not perhaps as good as Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting topic for all number crunchers accountants, engineers or statisticians. Brings up some new ideas on neural networks.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Worthwhile reading for anyone in the data analysis, data mining, and predictive analytics fields - or who wants to understand something about those fields. Most valuable for me were the discussions on: data scraping - gathering information from online sources, the comparisons of human expertise versus simple models, and the use and uses of testing. Areas where conventional wisdom and human expertise rule the day will continue to come under attack.It's interesting to contrast this book with "The Black Swan", by N. Taleb. In my opinion, this author (Ayers) is a "true believer" in the value of statistics, regression models, and the like. Taleb, on the other hand, rails at those who put their faith in statistical models. I think there is some middle ground, in that Taleb may agree that statistical models are useful, but users need to be wary - of unlikely events and the *impact* of those events, and knowing where the models apply and where they don't.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thoroughly enjoyed this book -- it was a quick read at just over 200 pages (before the end notes kicked in). Some basic statistical concepts are provided for the statistically challenged but that doesn't detract to any large degreee from sharing of the various Super Cruncher projects that have taken place.Nearly overlooked in the book is the manner in which the data is obtained and the validation of the same. A regression model is only as good as the quality of the data and the manner in which the raw data is understood by the statistician. Anyone who is involved with model development will tell you that the real work is in the data prep phase.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ian Ayers is a surprisingly engaging writer, taking what many would consider a very dry topic — statistics — and turning it into a thought-provoking, but flawed, book.From the opening pages, Ayers pits the "super crunchers" (read: people applying statistics to large data sets) against experts in an area, be it viticulture, baseball, or marketing. With barely suppressed glee he describes how number crunching out-predicts the experts time and time again. The point being that as collecting, storing and analysing large amounts of data becomes cheaper and cheaper, more and more decision-making will take the results of "super crunching" into account, with experts either having to step aside or learn some statistical chops. To back arguments for the rise of "super crunching" Ayers draws on a large number of examples from a variety of areas and even experiments with the technique himself, describing how he used it to help choose the title of his book. Although I am more or less convinced by Ayers' arguments I found myself questioning his credibility in several places during the book. I think the main reason for this was due to the tone of the book occasionally crossing the fine line separating "enthusiastic, popular account" and "overly simplistic, gushing rave". The constant use of "super crunching" throughout the book got on my nerves after a while. It began to overemphasise the newness of what could as easily be called "statistical analysis". After a while I mentally replaced "super crunching" with the less sensational "statistical analysis" wherever I encountered it.Conversely, Ayers constantly refers to "regression" when talking about the techniques analysts use to make predictions. At first, I thought this was a convenient short-hand for a range of techniques that he didn't want to spend time distinguishing between. It was only when neural networks are described as "a newfangled competitor to the tried-and-true regression formula" and "an important contributor to the Super Crunching revolution" that I realised that Ayers may not know as much about the nuts and bolts of computational statistics as I first thought. This impression was confirmed when Ayers later confuses "summary statistics" for "sufficient statistics" and talks tautologically of "binary bytes".Stylistically, there is too much foreshadowing and repetition of topics throughout the book for my liking. This feels a little condescending at times, as does him directly asking the reader to stop and think about a concept or problem at various points. Overall, I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was a light, enjoyable read and I wholeheartedly agree with Ayers' belief in the continuing importance of statistics in decision-making and his call to improve the average person's intuition of statistics. Unfortunately, I found much of "Super Crunchers" substituting enthusiasm for coherence, as well as impressions and anecdote for any kind of meaningful argument.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The presentation of facts were very simple & easy to understand - I would say that barring the very young, this book would also be suitable for kids (read: 'young adults') that are mathematical enough to like statistics (as a kid I knew a few people like these!). Whilst interesting & easy to read, I found the book lacked direction. What I liked: The many examples of applications in current day situations (both for & against the consumer), the current psychological barrier adopting this methodology in certain industries, highlighting how absolute judgement by human perception is a myth & encouraging verification of data crunchers. What could have been better: More tips on how to apply it in daily life (perhaps the very reason why I find it inadequate is because it promises to do this), clearer segmentation, better summaries, & I also found the author's way of describing his fellow associates was slightly excessive...Overall quite a good read, but I was slightly let down because of the promises at the start of the book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a terrific book with practical implications on almost every page. It jibes with my naturalist sympathies---it says to hell with intuition and arm chair analysis: put it to the empirical test. He's surprisingly unself-conscious, though, about the sophisticated objections to reliance on randomized control trials, especially in medicine. But perhaps that's a matter for another book. He's a lucid and lively writer who betrays true commitment to the argument of the book (i.e. that we ought to place more importance in empirical results than in expertise).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I enjoyed this book because it talked about the coming world where folks use data to make decisions and this allows them to refine their ability to make better decisions later.I don't think the author gave enough focus on the issue of measuring all that's important (if you can't do that then you'll be doing yourself a disservice by deciding based on what you can measure).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The influence this book had on me resulted in two interesting gains.1. The insight into his use of the "2SD" rule to calibrate the range of one's confidence2. The reference to Michael Lewis book Moneyball.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A fascinating book which examines how manipulation of large datasets informs ever increasing faciets of our daily life. Lots of examples however few details until the author discusses impact on teaching and medicine. The book is a very positive and optimistic view of how statistics and polling are influencing our lives.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very interesting book about the ever-increasing role of statistics in a wide variety of fields. Ayres demonstrates how corporations are moving towards statistical analysis for all things from pricing of their products, to how much money a movie might make by evaluating the script alone. I found it very compelling and actually learned a few things about statistics.