I apologize up front for my abrasive style, but fortunately I have not substituted my emotional strength with a lifeless ‘super crunching’ machine, despite being a software architect. Author Ian Ayres is a Yale Law School professor and should have stayed with law. He claims that statistical methods enable knowledgeable individuals to make better predictions. Ayres tries to proove that data-driven decisionmaking is improving education policy, health care, and even tax regulation and government. Ayres does as statisticians do: PRESELECT the input data until the outcome is as desired. Ayres says that humans put far too much trust in their intuition and would often be better off listening to the numbers. Right, but these are mostly given to them by large corporations and the government. It is statistics, so it MUST BE true! This book promotes – with a electronic store few examples but no proof whatsoever – the idea that our life is being improved by ‘experts’ who use statistical analysis and prediction. But worse is to come as in chapter 8 Ayres writes about statistical standard deviation and how it applies it to IQ, student grades and the stock market. I propose that IQ measurements and student grades are dehumanizing and tell us nothing about how our children will fare in life! When will we finally stop to discriminate humans in this horrible way? To understand the stupidity in stock markets I suggest to read “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If the ‘experts’ using Super Crunching are so smart Mr. Ayres, why do we have a crisis with bad real estate loans in the US? There is nothing wrong with using statistics to find out what happened in the past.
