Super Crunchers

Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

By: Ian Ayres

Narrated by: Michael Kramer

Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Why would a casino try to stop a gambler from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?

Economist Ian Ayres has spent the better part of his career examining the power in numbers. Decisions used to be made by traditional experts based on experience, intuition, and trial and error. Nowadays, cutting-edge organizations are crunching ever-larger databases to find answers. Today’s super crunchers are providing greater insights into human behavior than ever before - and predicting the future with staggeringly accurate results.

In this lively and groundbreaking audiobook, Ayres takes us behind the scenes into the bold new world of today’s super crunchers.

The author sweeps over a dazzling array of topics with strange-but-true facts, wry wit, and a raconteur’s talent for the fascinating anecdote. Entertaining, enlightening, and absolutely essential, Super Crunchers is an audiobook that no businessperson, consumer, or student - statistically, that’s everyone! - should make another decision without first listening to. Thinking-by-numbers is the new way to be smart.

©2007 Ian Ayres (P)2007 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"Lively and enjoyable....Ayres skillfully demonstrates the importance that statistical literacy can play in our lives." ( Publishers Weekly)

Ran out of gas for me.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I usually listen to audiobooks while doing my daily exercises and I chose this one because I really enjoyed "Freakonomics." I found this book to be an interesting basic overview of the new number-crunching. The only drawback to it was the occasional interjection of the author's personal opinions on politics and culture, opinions about which I could hardly care less. While I enjoyed it, the book kind of ran out of gas at the end.

Have you listened to any of Michael Kramer’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have not listened to Michael Kramer before, but I will again. His style is easy on the ears and he manages to keep his own personality subsumed to the text.

Facinating

Facinating read, based very little on mathmatical theory and provides astounding insight into the world of statistics and the part they play in a world that is changing at an exponential pace.

Excellently narrated, almost haughty.

Thoroughly enjoyable

The chapter doesn't match with book

I don't know how it comes with this way. Hard to find where the content located. The chapter doesn't match with page in the real book

statistics can be your friend

Terrific introduction to the many ways in which simply collecting the data and analyzing it using statistical methods results in conclusions that beat out what intuition says. Ian Ayres does a great job of walking us through this, and Michael Kramer, the narrator, delivers an energetic performance. Although this book is a few years old, and thus, its examples are not the most current, it still delivers the goods.

Easily Digestible Information

Before 'Big Data' was a term, data mining was the competitive edge that innovative companies used. This book provides an excellent introduction to data mining and statistics with plenty of real-life examples. Even for people who aren't interested in data science, they should have an understanding of some common usages of data mining, such as Amazon's and Netflix's recommendations. These technologies, like any tools, can be both good and bad. The recommendations save us the trouble of finding products we would like. However, relying too much on recommendations from people just like ourselves narrows our exposure to diversity.

Not Super and too Crunchy

Super Crunchers has a lot of interesting examples of using statistics effectively. Many of the examples are not really Big Data, just normal old statistics with normal old number crunching. Only a few were really examples of SUPER crunching.

I found the author more than a little gung ho on the subject of Super Crunching, one sided, a bit self promoting, and my least favorite, at bit axe grinding. There was no value in the John Lott/Mary Rosh story other than to kick an opponent who is already down. Ayres spends little time looking at the potentially problematic aspects of super crunching either social, political, or technical. He does not mention the garbage in garbage out problem and seems to wave away most other downsides. I did learn a few things from Super Crunchers but I much preferred, and learned more from, The Numerati. It seems the author wants the book to be like Freakanomics which it is not.

The narration was quite good dealing well with some pretty challenging text.

Not enough information

This book gives the feeling of repeating over and over the message that statistical analysis is more accurate than the judgment of an individual expert. What's missing are specific examples of what kinds of information are being collected, how they are analyzed, and what has been learned from them. There are some examples, but it feels like for every one minute of specifics there are ten minutes of the book's main idea being repeated yet again. I kept checking to see if this was the abridged version, but it's not. The whole thing feels like an advertisement telling business executives, "Hire a lot of quantitative analysts, trust that they're more accurate than anyone else, and don't try to understand what they're doing." Perhaps the author was told to produce something dumbed-down.

One long infomercial

This book is just one long infomercial talking about how random businesses apply the use of a database. Not very math oriented, and never gets deep enough to learn anything.

Reading The Phone Book

The book --- the content --- is great but the narrator must have been a low-budget hire from "Rent-A-Reader." This guy clearly had no idea what he was reading and sounded like he could have been reading the phone book. He even mispronounced a few words. It really distracted me from absorbing the intent of the author.