''Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to be Smart'' is a book written by

Ian Ayres Ian Ayres (born 1959) is an American lawyer and economist. Ayres is a professor at Yale Law School and at the Yale School of Management. Early life and education Ayres grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where they graduated from Pembroke Country ...

, a law professor at

Yale Law School Yale Law School (YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824. The 2020–21 acceptance rate was 4%, the lowest of any law school in the United ...

, about how quantitative analysis of

social behaviour Social behavior is behavior among two or more organisms within the same species, it encompasses any behavior in which one member affects another. Social behavior can be seen as similar to an exchange of goods, with the expectation that when you ...

and

natural experiment A natural experiment is a study in which individuals (or clusters of individuals) are exposed to the experimental and control conditions that are determined by nature or by other factors outside the control of the investigators. The process gove ...

can be creatively deployed to reveal insights in all areas of life, often in unexpected ways. With examples such as predicting gestation period more precisely than Naegele's rule, predicting the box office success of films,

Orley Ashenfelter Orley Clark Ashenfelter (born October 18, 1942) is an American economist and the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics emeritus at Princeton University. His areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and eco ...

's work predicting the price of

Bordeaux wine Bordeaux wine (; ) is produced in the Bordeaux region of southwest France, around the city of Bordeaux, on the Garonne River. To the north of the city, the Dordogne River joins the Garonne forming the broad estuary called the Gironde; the Gi ...

based on weather data, collecting data on the effectiveness of teaching methods such as

DISTAR Distar may refer to: * DiStar, an electronics manufacturer based in Thailand * DISTAR, a method of direct instruction for teaching reading * Distar Air, a Czech aircraft manufacturer * Společnost DISTAR CZ a.s., a diversified Czech manufacturi ...

, choosing baseball players based on statistics (

Sabermetrics Sabermetrics (originally SABRmetrics) is the original or blanket term for sports analytics in the US, the empirical analysis of baseball, especially the development of advanced metrics based on baseball statistics that measure in-game activity ...

), and

A/B testing A/B testing (also known as bucket testing, split-run testing or split testing) is a user-experience research method. A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment that usually involves two variants (A and B), although the concept can be also exte ...

to determine the most effective advertisements, Ayres explains how statistical evidence can be used as a supplement or substitute for human

intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledg ...

. The main mathematical approach used in these studies is multiple regression analysis.

Awards

* The Economist – Books of the Year 2007

Notes

External links

*
Ian Ayres's home page
* {{cite web , last=Roberts , first=Russ , title=Ayres on Super Crunchers and the Power of Data , url=http://www.econtalk.org/archives/_featuring/ian_ayres/ , work=

EconTalk ''EconTalk'' is a weekly economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. Roberts, formerly an economics professor at George Mason University, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. On the podcast, Roberts typically interviews ...

, publisher=

Library of Economics and Liberty Liberty Fund, Inc. is an American nonprofit foundation headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, that promotes the libertarian views of its founder, Pierre F. Goodrich, through publishing, conferences, and educational resources. The operating mandate ...

, authorlink=Russ Roberts , date=October 22, 2007 2007 non-fiction books Statistics books

Awards

See also

Notes

External links