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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
The End of Intuition:
The author explains that he originally intended to title the book, "The End of Intuition". I think that would have been the better title. Interestingly, the name change resulted in a clever use of Google's adwords. The problem with the title Super Crunchers is that it makes the impression that the book is about data mining huge data sets. I have read one scathing review in the KDD community that makes this point, but data mining is not the focus of the book. If you are looking for a book about data mining,... more info
Entertaining, but far from super:
This is an easy and mostly entertaining read. The author uses many anecdotes to
persuade us that statistics can be a useful tool for decision making. Some of
the described applications use lots of data and multiple regression. Those are
easier to do now than they used to be, because more data is collected and kept.
Some are trivial. If your company hurts a customer, apologize. You might get
some ideas of thing to do that might help your organization. You will not get
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What you can do with large datasets:
The answer is of course: a lot.
And Ian Ayres' book will tell you a little about it. Supercrunchers are those who use lage datasets
to find patterns in human behaviour, and
predict the future based on these large datasets. The book informs us that super crunching is on the verge of being
used all over. E.g.
Chess grandmaster Kasparov was no match
for IBMs Deep Blue chess computer,
that stored some 700.000 grandmaster chess games to help find the
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Weak Book, not original material:
This is new? The notion that empirical research is useful has been dealt with in book after book. The book not only recycles stories word for word without quote marks from the New York Times and other publications. There are hundreds of books that show that empirical work can help understand the world. What is new? What is interesting that is new here?
