Super Crunchers Book Summary, by Ian Ayres

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1-Page Summary of Super Crunchers

Overview

In today’s age of technology, we have access to vast amounts of data that can be overwhelming. However, if you’re able to connect the dots and analyze it with a skilled number cruncher, you’ll be able to transform your business.

In big organizations such as medicine and social work, even in small businesses or sports agencies, number crunching is used to discover hidden connections between seemingly unrelated things.

In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of number crunching and how it can be used in many different ways.

You’ll also learn how to invest in good wines and detect auction fraud, as well as how data sets shape policies.

Big Idea #1: Super crunching has applications in a wide range of fields, such as wine dealing and baseball.

Super crunching might sound like an action from a video game, but it refers to the statistical analysis of large data sets. Its applications are practically endless and can be applied to many different fields. Let’s start with some surprising examples.

Super crunching can be used to predict the future quality of wine. This is an invaluable tool for wine dealers because it helps them determine the value of their stock.

A high-quality red wine is an investment because it gets better as time goes on. Wine dealers need to be able to predict a wine’s future value. Orley Ashenfelter, an economist and wine enthusiast, has found that historical relationships between weather and the price of Bordeaux wines can accurately predict their quality.

Ashenfelter found that the more rain a wine gets during winter, the higher its price. This is because of his analysis, which is used by both wine dealers and baseball players to determine whether or not they should buy a certain wine at a certain price. Bill James challenged the assumption that experts could assess talent simply by watching players. He postulated that data-based analysis would be superior to expert opinions in assessing player talent—and he was right!

Scouts didn’t think much of Jeremy Brown, but the Oakland A’s did. They signed him based on a formula developed by Bill James. The decision turned out to be a great one because Jeremy was able to make his major league debut in September 2006.

Big Idea #2: Regression is a super crunching technique that allows you to predict future events and uncover patterns in the past.

Most people think statistics are boring, but what if they could help you find true love or detect fraud? Regression is a powerful super crunching technique that can do both of these things.

Regression is a way to assess historical data to determine how different factors influence one variable of interest. It can be used for both research and prediction purposes. For example, it can predict the compatibility between two people in a relationship based on their characteristics. This technique has been applied before with success by eHarmony, which uses regression to match people up according to personality traits that make them compatible relationship partners.

eHarmony uses regression to figure out which combinations of personality traits work best together. They then predict how well two people will get along in the future by looking at previous relationships that were successful and unsuccessful.

For example, if a man who is high on agreeableness and conscientiousness marries a woman who is low on those same traits, they are more likely to be happy with each other than if he married someone who had the opposite characteristics.

Super Crunchers Book Summary, by Ian Ayres