Era Of The Super Cruncher.(Society)

Byline: Jerry Adler

Intuition is losing ground to data mining, a new book claims.

If the editors of a magazine -- NEWSWEEK, for instance -- want to know what interests their readers, their resources are limited. They can count cover sales, but that only tells them about one story a week. They can convene a focus group, but that's a cumbersome and costly way to assess the tastes of 3 million subscribers. Online, by contrast, that information is available for the asking -- not just the number of readers, but how long they spent with a given story and what else they read. So as journalism increasingly migrates to the Web, the job of figuring out what readers want becomes almost automatic -- thereby raising the question, how much do we really need editors anyway?

Just kidding! But according to a new book by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale, this is a microcosm of a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book, the latest attempt to siphon off a bit of the buzz that surrounds the hugely successful "Freakonomics." In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.

Super-crunchable data can be broadly statistical or profoundly personal. Illustrating the former, Ayres chose the title of his book by running two Google ads that appeared in random order when someone searched for phrases like "data mining." The decision was made by the plurality who clicked on the ad for "Super Crunchers" rather than the competing title, "The End of Intuition." This is both a more scientific ...