Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart @ richardeward.com

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
by Ian Ayres
from Bantam

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

• 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 more info

• 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 more info

• 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?

• comme ci, comme ça
  It comes on the heals of some really great non-fiction analytical books. Unfortunately, this book is all anecdotal and lacks real substance. It is good for non-mathematical, non-analytical people, but not good for people with solid educations in math, statistics, and data analysis.

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