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

Autopsy studies show that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time.

Firms are figuring out more and more sophisticated ways to treat the price-oblivious differently than the price-conscious.

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

For example, Ford Motor Credit tells a dealer that it was willing to lend Susan money at a 6 percent interest rate, but that they would pay the dealership $2,800 if the dealership could get Susan to sign an 11 percent loan. The borrower would never be told that the dealership was marking up the loan. The dealer and the lender would then split the e

Snijders’s purchasing managers couldn’t outperform a simple statistical formula to predict timeliness of delivery, adherence to the budget, or purchasing satisfaction.

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

the cost of providing the search assistance. For every dollar invested in job assistance, the government saved about two dollars.

The random trial method is not the end of intuition. Instead it puts intuition to the test.

As the size of datasets balloons almost beyond the scope of our imagination, it becomes all the more important to continually audit them to check for the possibility of error.