Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Everybody knows that a baby is due roughly nine months after conception. However, few people know that the standard deviation is fifteen days.

Super Crunching moves us toward a kind of statistical predeterminism.

Information is not only easier to capture now in digital form, but it is also virtually costless to copy.

The idea that a university or insurer could predict your race is itself just another way that Super Crunching is reducing our sphere of effective privacy.

This is a new kind of caveat emptor, where consumers are going to have to search more to make sure that the offered price is fair. Consumers are going to have to engage in a kind of number crunching of their own, creating and comparing datasets of (quality-adjusted) competitive prices.

Lyndon Johnson, as part of his War on Poverty, wanted to “follow through” on the vanishing gains seen from Head Start. Concerned that “poor children tend to do poorly in school,” the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity sought to determine what types of education models could best break this cycle of failure. The result was Pr

it often becomes impossible to figure out how an individual input is affecting the predicted outcome.

The timing is best explained by the digital breakthroughs that make it cheaper to capture, to merge, and to store huge electronic databases.

On the one hand, this is a massive amount of information—it’s roughly equivalent to more than half the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.