Number crunching - a useful introduction

The book: Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted
Author: Ian Ayres
Genre: Business book

Interesting book touting the power of number crunching over intuition and gurus; it holds lots of amusing examples of how established experts fail to predict the future more accurately than simple data-driven decision-making tools such as regression analysis. I took a course on this stuff in my MBA, and it is a seriously fascinating; Super Crunchers is a great introduction to the subject for people who are unfamiliar with number crunching, but curious about how it can be used. A very relevant book, especially for the creative industries.

On a side note, it also forms an interesting counterpoint to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (my review here), which heralds intuition and first impressions as the keys to making good decisions. While Gladwell’s book is well argued and has a slightly different aim, I have to say that I think the evidence favors the data-driven approach championed by Super Crunchers. The human mind is simply not very good at grappling with large amounts of variables, and suffers under a number of well-known biases, described in Cordelia Fine's entertaining book A mind of its own (my review here).