Super Crunchers
Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
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Narrated by:
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Michael Kramer
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By:
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Ian Ayres
About this listen
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 TapeListeners also enjoyed...
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A bold new remedy for the sprawling and wasteful health care industry. In this provocative book, Jonathan Bush, cofounder and CEO of athenahealth, calls for a revolution in health care to give customers more choices, freedom, power, and information, and at far lower prices.
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No critical thinking
- By Steve from MD on 07-31-14
By: Jonathan Bush, and others
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To Sell Is Human
- The Surprising Truth about Moving Others
- By: Daniel H. Pink
- Narrated by: Daniel H. Pink
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than 15 million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight. Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others.
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Lenghty book with a few solid tips on persuation
- By Gerardo A Dada on 01-21-13
By: Daniel H. Pink
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Mindware
- Tools for Smart Thinking
- By: Richard E. Nisbett
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives at home, work, and school to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behavior and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions.
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Sound scientific advice on how to live your life
- By Neuron on 08-26-15
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Sway
- The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
- By: Rom Brafman, Ori Brafman
- Narrated by: John Apicella
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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A Harvard Business School student pays over $200 for a $20 bill. Washington, D.C., commuters ignore a free subway concert by a violin prodigy. A veteran airline pilot attempts to take off without control-tower clearance and collides with another plane on the runway. Why do we do the wildly irrational things we sometimes do?
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Disappointing book
- By Martin Proulx on 12-10-08
By: Rom Brafman, and others
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Technically Wrong
- Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
- By: Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Narrated by: Andrea Emmes
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us ask how all these digital products are designed, or why. It's time we change that. Many of the services we rely on are full of oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares. Chatbots that harass women. Signup forms that fail anyone who's not straight. Social media sites that send peppy messages about dead relatives. Algorithms that put more black people behind bars.
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Pretty good but not complete
- By Casey on 10-29-17
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Machine, Platform, Crowd
- Harnessing Our Digital Future
- By: Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help listeners make the most of our collective future. Machine | Platform | Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.
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Both How AND Why for Techies
- By Dan Collins on 08-11-17
By: Erik Brynjolfsson, and others
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
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Outnumbered
- Exploring the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
- By: David Sumpter
- Narrated by: David West
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Our increasing reliance on technology and the Internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision making to algorithms - are we giving up this up too easily?
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A good reality check for "Cambridge Hyperbolitica"
- By Haggai Elkayam on 08-06-18
By: David Sumpter
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What Works
- Gender Equality by Design
- By: Iris Bohnet
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.
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Excellent book every women and executive should read
- By N LI on 05-10-21
By: Iris Bohnet
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Predictably Irrational
- The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
- By: Dan Ariely
- Narrated by: Simon Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.
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Good lessons, mediocre science?
- By William Stanger on 02-24-09
By: Dan Ariely
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Automate This
- How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
- By: Christopher Steiner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.
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good start, book runs out of sustenace
- By RealTruth on 02-15-13
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Epic Measures
- One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients.
- By: Jeremy N. Smith
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Moneyball meets medicine in this remarkable chronicle of one of the greatest scientific quests of our time - the groundbreaking program to answer the most essential question for humanity: How do we live and die? - and the visionary mastermind behind it.
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Fabulously insightful read!
- By Dr. Jack E. Fincham on 10-08-15
By: Jeremy N. Smith
What listeners say about Super Crunchers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Scott
- 10-19-17
Good listen.
It's a solid listen. Insightful but not as entertaining as other similar books out there.
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- Stephen
- 07-14-08
Very Interesting but drawn out
This was an extremely intersting book on how the analysis of information is used to improve decision making, sales campaigns, medical decisions etc. It demonstrates the power of collecting objective information in virtually all endeavors to assess the success of your decisions and how to make the next decision. There is virtually no actual math or technical descriptions about how information is collected or how it is analyzed - most just making the case that you should collect the data and that you should analyze it. In this sense, it is not a 'how to' book but rather 'why you should' book. Although I am great believer in this approach and in fact, do it for a living, after about the 2/3 mark, I found that the book became a bit tedious as there many examples of the same thing and there was little description of how people are actually collecting information.
I realize these types of books are difficult to write because they try and balance information and entertainment with minimal actual technical detail. However, I thought there should have more technical detail in fewer examples. I am guessing that readers attracted to this book have more than a passing intested in the technology and methods.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Williamb
- 12-13-17
Required Reading (and Re-Reading!)
Ian Ayres has done us a huge service, he has made statistics completely clear and understandable. More than that, he has made it practical and applicable to everyday life. This book has many excellent examples from the mundane to the noteworthy. You really cannot go a day without seeing something differently and more clearly because of this book.
To misuse a quote from Wordsworth, "My heart leaped up", every time an example showed me that I was in error in my presumed understanding of some concept or or term. Increasing understanding is an emotional experience for me. For example, Ayers pulls apart the 9 month human gestation period into standard deviation of 15 days (skewed to the left of the 9 months everyone comes to expect). So why do doctors still tell us that it will be 9 months? There are historical reasons that explain the misconceptions. "Physicians using the crude Naegle rule cruelly set up first-time mothers for disappointment." Ayers reminds us, as Naegle measured gestation in lunar months in the early 1800's.
Political polls that are reported in "margin of error" terms rather than standard deviations or, even better, probability. We can look at polling data with this little explanation and understand what we are being told (or sold) with some level of confidence. "Current newspaper conventions on how to report polling data are all screwed up", Ayers tells us. He shows us the same data, from the way it is reported, through 2SD (standard deviation) and probability. And he shows us how to figure these out on our own!
Of course conclusions from data are only as good as the reliability of the data itself. Ayers takes us through how scientists have sometimes taken themselves down the garden path to incorrect conclusions. He opens up the data enough to show us where and how these mistakes are sometimes made and overlooked.
Within all of this math, Ayers is able to bring us perspective. Statistics is not a tool to beat people over the head with indisputable "truth" of someone's manufacture. If we understand even a little of the math behind the correlations represented, we are able to draw our conclusions on our own. We are better able to see false or misrepresented correlations. If we are very serious about it, we can dig into the data to find the reliability of the relationships, or at least understand a critical inspection from an opposing point of view.
This is one of the most useful books I've ever read. Ayers invokes the 1950's film, "The Desk Set" to illustrate the context we continue to live in with number crunchers using computers and exercising judgement. Cold hard numbers do not require a cold hard heart, in fact the opposite. We apply our human interest without denying the facts. We must recognize when we are being practical, wishful, heroic, or naive, based on the facts. That should not stop us if our cause is important. We are human, after all.
Aside from a few pronunciations that I did not share, the narration is excellent. The diction and clarity is reliable and only helps in understanding. I bought the kindle book as well, but listened mostly.
I loved this book. A tear came to my eye when it ended.
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Overall
- Roger
- 12-26-07
Statisticians Rule!
This book shows how all forms of business, medicine, the law, and social activities are being measured, analyzed, and optimized. It is important to recognize that decisions by hunches is a dying practice.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Brantley
- 11-16-07
Terrific Book!
All decisions should be based on data!
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Overall
- Jon
- 01-31-08
Great book on
There is an old expression, "the man who knows 'how' will always have a job... reporting to the man that knows 'why'".
This is a fantastic book on the 'what' and 'why' of statistical analysis but if you are looking for a book on 'how' to do a regression analysis, you would want to find a different book.
I teach Six Sigma Black Belt classes and after listening to this book I ordered 25 copies to give to everyone in a class I am teaching. What I really liked about this book is that the author uses a wide variety of examples, from medicine to casinos to car dealers to credit cards to hiring practices, etc. etc. In each example, the author explains how data mining and number crunching has been used to make amazingly accurate predictions that most experts in that particular field did not think possible.
The book is fascinating from beginning to end. It is also a little Orwellian in places as you begin to realize that the surveillance technology show cased in books such as "1984" and movies such as "Minority Report" are much closer to reality than most people realize.
Between audible.com and traditional books, I read/listen to about 30 books a year and I would place this book in my top 5 favorite list over the past couple of years.
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30 people found this helpful
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- Mark R
- 10-31-17
Interesting, but too long & monotone
I thought this was an interesting topic, but six hours to listen to this topic is far too long. I think it could’ve been about half that.
The narration was fine, but it felt like a high school science teacher in a monotone lecture. Maybe the material is to blame.
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- Nandita
- 12-04-07
It's a whole new world
Very clearly written, and nicely narrated book that makes academic subject matter understandable and applicable.
It's disconcerting to be one of the "experts" that will be overwritten by the results of super-crunchers.
From the relationship between wines and weather, to medical decision making, the "super crunchers" are truly affecting our day to day lives.
This book is a clearly written, thought provoking, and an enjoyable listening experience.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Eric & Jennifer Rice
- 12-08-19
Required for MBA but would read anyway
It was a great interesting read and not so technical for the audio version. One of the highlights to this Data Driven Decisions course.
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- Kurt Smock
- 07-16-22
Older Book. But still pretty relevant.
Books like this are heavily context dependent. This book mentions Blockbuster and Netflix DVDs... In 2022 that will make it feel ancient. In some ways it is. But if you think about the subject matter in its context and extrapolate its logic out to present, you can see where we came from, where we are today, and how we got here. The Noise and the Signal was a good bit better on a lot of levels in my opinion. Still, this was worth the read.
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