''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 the 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 Cou ...

, a law professor at

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by ''U ...

, about how quantitative analysis of

social behaviour Social behavior is behavior among two or more organisms within the same species, and encompasses any behavior in which one member affects the other. This is due to an interaction among those members. Social behavior can be seen as similar to an ...

and

natural experiment A natural experiment is an empirical 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 pro ...

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 at Princeton University. His areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. H ...

's work predicting the price of

Bordeaux wine Bordeaux wine ( oc, vin de Bordèu, french: vin de Bordeaux) 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 ...

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

DISTAR Direct Instruction (DI) is a term for the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material to students. A particular subset of direct instruction, denoted by capitalization as Direct Instruction, refers to a speci ...

, choosing baseball players based on statistics (

Sabermetrics Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...

), and

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

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. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

. The main mathematical approach used in these studies is multiple

regression analysis In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome' or 'response' variable, or a 'label' in machine learning parlance) and one ...

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 private educational foundation headquartered in Carmel, founded by Pierre F. Goodrich. Through publishing, conferences, and educational resources, the operating mandate of the Liberty Fund was set forth in an un ...

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

Awards

See also

Notes

External links