Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to be Smart by Ian Ayres

I recently finished the unabridged audio CD of this book.  Despite a few college courses, I know little about statistics, and this book helped me think about how I should apply it more in my career.  This book doesn't need to be this long, and it doesn't really have any deep discussions, or how-to ideas--it's more like a motivational book for using statistics to make decisions.  Personally, I think that's what a lot of managers need to read.

I enjoyed learning about how law experts and doctors should be able to use statistics more in their professions, and it made me think of a way I should use them in mine.  The book tells how regression models were set up to predict wine based on rain and temperature, and decisions of the Supreme Court by knowing only a few facts about the case.  The models do way better than the experts in the area.  I hope to be able to encourage my team to use a bug priority calculator rather than the current gut-based approach.

In general, I enjoyed it, but you may just get good value out of it by pondering the following summary from an Amazon reviewer.  It doesn’t do it justice, but it’s a basic outline of the book:

(1) Mathematical regression models generated from large datasets often generate better predictions than human experts, and they provide supporting information on the predictive weight and reliability of each explanatory variable.
(2) Well-crafted experiments using randomized trials and control groups provide good market research and behavioral analysis results.
(3) Technological advances - the Internet, massive data storage devices, rapid computation, broadband telecommunication - are making it possible to share more sources of information and create ever-larger databases for analysis.
(4) Today's companies engage in multiple forms of market research by creating and using large databases and large-scale randomized trials.
(5) Many phenomena conform to normal distributions in which 95% of the population will be found within two standard deviations of the mean, the 5% balance generally divided evenly in the two tails.