It’s been quite long since I actually completed books. I bought lots of them but end up leaving them on my shelves untouched after wrapping them. The recent trip to library resulted in my bringing home a couple of books I had always wanted to buy and read but couldn’t quite justify their purchase to myself. It was Super Crunchers by Ian Ayers and Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Both are the books dealing with social phenomena, and somewhat academic stuff that are similar to books like Freakonomics (by Levitt and Dubner), The Undercover Economist (by Harford), Blink (also by Gladwell), and many more.
Tipping Point was okay, the typical Malcolm Gladwell style of highlighting a phenomenon, how it can be useful or not and how we should not ignore it but life still goes on. It follows a rather Malcolm style of citing lots of cases of the phenomenon and then a couple of counter-thesis just to remain objective in the journalist sort of way. The couple of characteristics like Law of Few, Stickiness and presence of Mavens, Salesman and Connectors are interesting but do not contribute to any sort of theory to produce powerful predictions about more cases of tipping cases. In other words the tipping phenomena are all hard to predict and mostly recognized in retrospect.
Super Crunchers also introduce a new phenomena but this is particularly interesting because it’s very general and it has a couple of links with the idea of Psychohistory in Isssac Asimov’s Foundation Series. I happen to conceive this link because of A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried. Suddenly statistics become so much more interesting and powerful. I’ve been quite interested with data management and processing but now I have more reason to be interested in this area not only for business but knowledge and its real world applications. The book does give convincing arguments about how pilot and sampling are important to help us understand about the world (correlations in particular). Perhaps one day Adam Douglas’ idea of getting an answer for everything could be realised through this…
