I was inspired by my dear friend Juliano Spyer to read “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart”, by Ian Ayres, Professor of Law and Management at Yale University.

With this title you may think it is a boring book about Economy or pure mathematics but it is actually a very easy-to read book in which Ayres discusses how logical thinking and data analysis has been killing experts and beating their intuitive decision-making process.

The book is full of examples of how correlating things (especially the ones you think that have no link) can get to more accurate facts, better predictions and, consequently, better business ideas and opportunities. Ayres praises that we should start listening to numbers and stop guessing.

Yes this is a very interesting argument. Yes we should pay more attention to measuring and filing every data we possibly can as statistics and data mining tend to be more precise than human experience only. Yes numbers can help us a lot. But I just don’t think we should give up on intuition completely.

Data depend on people to register and file it properly. People can make mistakes and one little piece of wrong information destroys the entire chain. Even when computers are responsible for keeping and crossing data, algorithms can fail. Again, in order to notice and correct wrong data you need people with expertise and also intuition.

That’s why I believe that relying 100% on numbers can be very dangerous. Honestly, I live in a country where we barely know how many people die every year. I hope we get inspired by Ayres to integrate numbers with human knowledge and expertise. Good sense and guts should always matter.