 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | An international sensation—and still the talk of the relevant blogosphere—this Wall Street Journal and New York Times business bestseller examines the “power” in numbers. Today more than ever, number crunching affects your life in ways you might not even imagine. Intuition and experience are no longer enough to make the grade. In order to succeed—even survive—in our data-based world, you need to become statistically literate.
Cutting-edge organizations are already crunching increasingly larger databases to find the unseen connections among seemingly unconnected things to predict human behavior with staggeringly accurate results. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that use filters to keep track of your tastes and your purchasing history, to insurance companies and government agencies that every day make decisions affecting your life, the brave new world of the super crunchers is happening right now. No one who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Ian Ayres’s engrossing and enlightening book. |
Average Customer Rating:   Ayres Challenges Assumptions with Assumptions Author Ian Ayres argues that "Super Crunching"--using statistical data to improve society--trumps experienced best guessing.
How odd that a numbers book would have virtually no citations to aid the reader in locating the studies Ayres cites. Apparently, he wants the reader to accept his conclusions without independent study and verification. Hint: Try labeling sentences with citations like every student does instead of grouping pages together in the book's rear, thereby avoiding easy independent confirmation.
Numerous instances appear in the book where Ayres selectively leaves out information to support his own conclusions. Ayres' statements reveal him to be a supporter of Wal-Mart, long incarceration periods (which he himself says are pointless), and George W. Bush and friends.
On Wal-Mart (p. 29-30):
"Barbara Ehrenreich was appalled when she took an employment test at a Minneapolis Wal-Mart and was told that she had given the wrong answer when she agreed with the proposition 'there is room in every corporation for a non-conformist.' . . . In a world where mind-numbing jobs are legal, it's hard for me to see what's wrong with a statistically validated test that helps match employees that are most compatible with those jobs."
Folks, next time you're at a Wal-Mart and ask an Associate for help and they're able to offer none because they were selected based on their dronish, unthinking qualities, thank people like Ian Ayres for the absence of creative application. It's totally legal to be brainless.
On pointlessly long prison sentences (p. 78):
"Two political scientists, Danton Berube and Donald Green, have directly looked at the recidivism rates of those sentences by judges with different sentencing propensities. Not only do they find that longer sentences incapacitate prisoners from committing crimes outside of prison," (You don't say?) "but also that the longer sentences of the hanging judges were not associated with increased or decreased recidivism rates once the prisoners hit the streets. The 'lock 'em up' crowd can take solace in the fact that longer sentences are not hardening prisoners. Then again, the longer sentences don't specifically deter future bad acts."
A numbers person should know that if longer sentences don't result in less criminals returning to the streets to commit criminal acts versus shorter sentences, then it's foolish to have longer sentences. Why? Because they COST MORE MONEY! Prisons aren't free!
On George W. Bush and company's lies regarding the ease and cheapness of completing the Iraq and Afghanistan missions (remember "Mission Accomplished" on the Abraham Lincoln? That was in 2003. This paperback shows published 2008)(p. 125):
"While it's easy to dismiss these forecasts as self-interested spin, I think it's more likely that these were genuine beliefs of decision makers who, like the rest of us, have trouble updating beliefs in the face of disconfirming information"
Except that almost all of us have long since accepted that Dubya and company were liars.
I'm not going to quote every stupid thing in the book. There are plenty. It's an OKAY book because it's interesting and why I gave it 3/5 stars. However,
Most of the predictive gains cited by Ayres as evidence for the superiority of statistical data over expert judgment, can be attributed to margins of error and unrepresentative, minute sample sizes. Note that with a few exceptions, Ayres almost never considers the harm of error margins in the studies he cites to support his claims. I have laughed out loud reading where he seriously cites a five percent or less advantage of "super crunching" over expert judgment. Almost everyone knows that error rates in statistical studies of 5 to 10 percent are very common. Yet Ayres seems to think these within-error-rate gains are proof of anything.
Overall, Super Crunching is an interesting Marketing book, but here you have one computer scientist who found Ayres' conclusions to be at times amusing and other times, woefully foolish. I encourage you to buy at the lowest possible price and come to your own conclusions. But don't pay $14 like I did.
Glad I listening to it I had an audio book of this and am glad I listened to it, a very engaging, interesting book. I would also recommend "The Numerati" if you are interested in this subject. Required Reading Excellent non-technical, persuasive demonstration of the importance of statistical reasoning, and how "super crunching" meshes with judgment. If concepts like regression, normal curves, and standard deviations make your skin crawl, you NEED this book. Who Is Data-Mining You? When a customer deleted the cookies on his computer which identified him as a regular Amazon customer, he discovered that Amazon's quoted price for DVDs fell significantly. This prompted Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to declare: "we've never tested and we will never test prices based on customer demographics."
This excerpt from Super Crunchers introduces two techniques that form the focus of the book: regression analysis and randomized trials. Regressions are a widely used statistical technique that can be used for prediction, inference, hypothesis testing and modeling of causal relationships. The term "regression" was coined in 1877 by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, when he estimated a formula to predict the size of sweet pea seeds based on the size of their parent seeds (there was "regression toward the mean": peas didn't grow into balloons). Applied to DVDs and book sales, regression analysis helps predict a consumer's willingness to pay and leads to a pricing policy that maximize the value of sales based on a consumer's characteristics and buying pattern. It also allows websites like Amazon to make buying suggestions based on the observation that "consumers who bought this also bought that".
Randomized trials, used in the testing of pharmaceuticals, takes the analysis one step further. Instead of analyzing historical patterns, they produce their own data in an experimental setting that involves the random allocation of different treatments to subjects. The key word is random: if two groups of subjects with identical characteristics are exposed to a different intervention or condition, with all other things being held equal, then we can be confident that any change in the two group's outcome was caused by their different treatment. Randomized testing can also be used to test how much money can be extracted from a consumer by exposing similar buyers to different bundles of products and prices.
Ian Ayres, a law professor with a taste for numbers, has applied statistical testing to a variety of subjects: taxicab tipping, affirmative action programs, car theft, baseball card selling on eBay, weight reduction programs, etc. He doesn't shy away from sensitive issues. He was the first to expose the higher price markups that women and minorities had to pay at car dealerships. His research shows that the impact of concealed handgun laws on crime is inconclusive and doesn't validate the "More Guns, Less Crime" hypothesis.
But as he demonstrates in his book, applying statistical techniques to social issues is not the prerogative of academics. These techniques have now moved out of the ivory tower, as business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. Number crunchers "are not just invading and displacing traditional experts; they are changing our lives. They are not just changing the way that decisions are made; they are changing the decisions themselves." From teaching methods to health care, management is now backed by rigorous data analysis. Evidence-Based Medicine or Direct Instruction force doctors and teachers to follow a script, like a flight attendant reading FAA safety warning word for word at the beginning of each flight.
Data-driven decision making sometimes faces strong resistance. In the medical sciences for instance, the idea that doctors should give special emphasis to statistical techniques remains controversial to this day. The author notes that doctors are less likely than pilots to accept the drills of decision support software: "unlike pilots, doctors don't go down with their planes". In 1840, Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who recommended doctors and nurses at clinics to wash their hands before surgery, after having observed that mortality rates dropped from 12 percent to 2 percent if they did. He was ridiculed by other physicians who considered hand-washing several times a day a waste of time, and after a nervous breakdown he ended up in a mental hospital, where he died at the age of forty-seven. How ironic: the reference for the diagnosis of mental disorders is now the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, which evolved out of systems for collecting census psychiatric hospital statistics.
Super Crunchers can be read as a sequel to the hugely popular essay Freakonomics (the authors of the two books share the same blog on the New York Times website). Freakonomics focussed on how statistical analysis can reveal unexpected relations of causation, like the link between the abortion rate in 1970 and the crime rate in 1990. It also played the forensic economist trying to expose criminal frauds, like match rigging by Japanese sumo wrestlers or the rewriting of multiple choice questions by teachers in the Chicago school system. The book was "freakish" in a way as it presented unconventional academic results that sometimes had only a faint relation to economics as a science. By contrast, Super Crunchers focusses on real-world decisions and how they are being impacted by data-driven management. It is even further away from the academic discipline of economics. But the techniques and results that it covers are highly relevant for policy makers and business executives. The power, importance, and objectivity of numbers. A book about statistics would not seem to interest most readers, but Ian Ayer's Super Crunchers, will interest many. From gambling habits to medical research, from job-seeking to titling a book, Ayers shows us the power, importance, and objectivity of statistical analysis. He also briefly touches upon the ethics associated with the use of statistical information.
In general, Ayers's uses plain, but complete, language to explain mathematical concepts such as random assignment. However, his use of breast cancer detection rates as a vehicle to explain the concept of "initial assumptions" was presented poorly. At the end of his explanation he reported that many doctors are confused by the concept of "initial assumptions" in regards to breast cancer detection. By his presentation, I can understand why doctors, so often misunderstand the concept of "initial assumptions."
However, in general, as Ayers so compelling shows us the power, importance, and objectivity of statistical analysis, college math professors should consider requiring it as a supplemental text for courses in statistics (particularly courses for non-math majors). For the non-mathematically inclined, Super Crunchers, would help take away some of the confusion and mystery of "number crunching."
However, Super Crunchers is no "textbook." It is an insightful and informative book for the consumer, the patient, the job-seeker, gambler etc. In short, it is a book almost every adult would find relevant in one way or another.
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