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

Nicholas Negroponte, MIT professor and guru of media technology, sees in these “personalized news” features the emergence of the “Daily Me”—news publications that expose citizens only to information that fits with their narrowly preconceived preferences.

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.

In fact, because the algorithm is not public, it is possible that eHarmony puts a normative finger on the scale to favor certain clients.

She found that the NIT didn’t reduce employment nearly as much as people feared, but there was a very unexpected spike in divorce. Poor families that were randomly selected to receive the NIT were more likely to split up.

In each of these cases, the companies not only know the generalized probability of some behavior, they can make incredibly accurate predictions about how individual customers are going to behave.

Once we form a mistaken belief about something, we tend to cling to it. As new evidence arrives, we’re likely to discount disconfirming evidence and focus instead on evidence that supports our preexisting beliefs.

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.

Number crunching can put the little guy at a real disadvantage, since sellers can better predict how much they can squeeze out of us.

Misdiagnosis accounts for about one-third of all medical error.