Life & Society
Humans by numbers?
Published 24 April 2008
Statistics will never fully explain our behaviour
If, as the eminent neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, Susan Greenfield, believes, we are no more nor less than the chemical and electrical activity in our brain, so the super cruncher believes that we are the sum of the resulting, predictable behaviour.
A new book called Super Crunchers, written by a professor at Yale, Ian Ayres, sets out to explain why in all walks of life "traditional experts who base their decisions on experience and in tuition are losing out to a new breed of people - called the super crunchers - who are mining massive datasets with stunning accuracy".
This isn't new. Since long before advertising executives, political pollsters and financial futures were thought of, men and women have been attempting to predict and manipulate events. The tools may have been astrology or diplomacy but the impulse was the same. What is different now is the sheer volume of information that is out there, stored on electronic databases: medical records, criminal records, spending patterns, weather patterns, student attainment.
But is this development a good or a bad thing? Well, it's both. Ayres gives as an example a government programme in Mexico to tackle poverty, which attempted to focus on the children of poor families. This project was developed and monitored using statistics and has had some impressive results.
No one could argue with this kind of use for statistical analysis, but as Mark Twain once famously said (or was it Laurence Peter? The databases can't agree): "Facts are stubborn things but statistics are more pliable."
The subtitle of Ayres's book is How Anything Can Be Predicted. Yet that simply isn't true. Take Ayres's own example of Atai Winkler, a British statistician who used records of the New York Times Bestseller List dating back to 1955 to predict which titles were most likely to become bestsellers. The results weren't perfect. According to Winkler, The Da Vinci Code had only a 36 per cent chance of topping the charts.
It was a comfort to read about such errors. Even the one involving the flawed statistics that helped certain states in the US argue that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons would reduce gun crime.
The fact is, the reason why ID cards seem such an intrusion, or those personalised letters from the supermarket addressing us by our first name don't wash, is that our value as human beings is immeasurably more than the sum of our spending or voting behaviour. Capitalism encourages us to behave as "individuals" yet analyses us as groups, deskills us with technology and diminishes us with transparent attempts at manipulation. Is it any wonder that religion is becoming more attractive?
"Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted" by Ian Ayres is published by John Murray (£16.99)
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