Super Crunchers
Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
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Narrated by:
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James Lurie
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By:
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Ian Ayres
About this listen
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.
©2007 Ian Ayres (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today, the name of the game is data. Ian Ayres shows us how and why in this groundbreaking book Super Crunchers. Not only is it fun to read, it just may change the way you think."—Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics
"Data-mining and statistical analysis have suddenly become cool.... Dissecting marketing, politics, and even sports, stuff this complex and important shouldn't be this much fun to read."—Wired
"[Ayres's] thesis is provocative: Complex statistical models could be used to market products more intelligently, craft better movies, and solve health-care problems—if only we could get past our statistics phobia."—Portfolio
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- Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
- By: Megan McArdle
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.
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Good Book
- By Ray on 05-21-14
By: Megan McArdle
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Where Does It Hurt?
- An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care
- By: Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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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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- Ankit
- 09-22-17
It's good not great
This gives couple of good insights but at very high level.
However Other better books are available
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Overall
- W Brian
- 01-02-10
Statistics drove me to listen
The 4 out of 5 got me to listen and it was worth it. It gets a little over-the-top near the very end otherwise very interesting. The reported facts are many in the narration and most I didn't know about. I do wish I would have noticed this was an abridged version however the unabridged was only an hour longer so maybe I didn't miss much.
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- PHil
- 12-15-12
Quant in everyday life
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
This book is only of interest if you enjoy learning about numbers and the role they play in our everyday life. Easy Read with no Math in it, just how math effects our lives.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The change in advertising and medicine as a result of evidence and math.
Have you listened to any of James Lurie’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
zNone
Any additional comments?
This book is a good mix with "Thinking Fast and Slow" by D kahneman. They both address what we think and what the numbers probably are telling us. Sometimes they are not what we think.....
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Overall
- K. Davis
- 01-05-08
A must read
The world has changed. Data has opened a new door of perception. This book and Freakonomics are the must reads for anyone who wants to understand how the future will be understood.
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- Fkrauss
- 11-05-12
good, but missing a lot of stuff
The whole approach of the book is descriptive, nothing teaching how to implement any of what he talks about. It's Cool to see what's happening on the field.
I think a chapter about big data, Map reduce and machine learning is missing. These are new and interesting fields that are very popular in todays crunching environment. would be cool if he would cite examples of tools so the reader can do his own crunching.
Well.. th Book is a good read if you're trying to know what it is, not how to do it. And the topics I cited above are things to research for after this book
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Anonymous User
- 01-30-08
Essential reading
It is too bad that this has somehow gotten categorized as a "business book". Certainly many of its anecdotes are business oriented, as indeed are many of the applications of supercrunching. But the profound effect that Internet-driven statistical and probability analysis has had on the lives of ordinary people are profound.
To his credit, the book is written for the lay reader. you don't have to be an expert in statistics, and the examples are from everyday life. I was expecting something pretty dry and in fact found his writing quite entertaining.
I felt there was only one omission. It seems pretty clear that business, medical, and other decision making will increasingly be driven by supercrunched statistics. So the author could have spent more time discussing the implications of this. For example, if your physician defaults to software which is generally accepted to make good diagnostic decisions, does this mean that he or she no longer has liability for malpractice? Should a bank loan officer be fired for ignoring an obvious reason for declining a mortgage which wasn't covered by the analytical software? The book could have offered more discussion of these second order consequences.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Rick
- 02-28-10
Data, data everywhere
Great overview of how technology is shaping our world and our understanding.
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Overall
- Ed
- 10-30-10
References to references that reference research
If you have read books that provide insightful information on how statistical data can open your eyes to a hidden reality then I would not recommend this book, inversely if you have never touched a book like freakonomics then this might be a good start, although I would recommend going for Steve's book. The author doesn't actually provide any research of his own, rather spends the entire book referencing others research, puts a narrative around it and puts it forward as a conclusion.
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