The eye test : a case for human creativity in the age of analytics

The eye test A case for human creativity in the age of analytics

Chris Jones, 1973-

Book - 2022

"THE EYE TEST is a necessary course correction, a call for a more balanced, personal approach to problem solving. Award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes the case for the human element-for what smart, practiced, devoted people can bring to situations that have proved resistant to analytics. Jones shares what he's learned from an army of extraordinary talents, including some of the best doctors, executives, athletes, meteorologists, magicians, designers, astrophysicists, and detectives in the world. There are lessons in their mastery. Of course there is a place for numbers in decision making. No baseball player should be judged by his jawline. But the analytics revolution sparked by Michael Lewis's Moneyball now threatens t...o replace one kind of absurdity with another. We have developed a blind faith in the machine, the way a driver overly reliant on his GPS might be led off the edge of a cliff. Not all statistical analysis is sound. Algorithms aren't infallible, and spreadsheets aren't testaments. Trust in them too much, and they risk becoming instruments of destruction rather than understanding. Worse, data's supremacy in our daily lives has led to a dangerous strain of anti-expertise: the belief that every problem is a math problem, and anyone given access to the right information will find the right answer. That taste doesn't matter, experience doesn't matter, creativity doesn't matter. That we can't believe our eyes, no matter how much they've seen. There is also hope. THE EYE TEST serves as a reminder that if beauty is less of a virtue in the age of analytics, a good eye still is. This book is a celebration of our greatest beholders-and an absorbing, inspiring guide for how you might become one, too"--

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Subjects
Problem solving.
Decision making.
Creative thinking.
Data mining.
Algorithms.
Published
New York : Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Chris Jones, 1973- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xii, 273 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781538730676
  • Entertainment: There's no accounting for taste
  • Sports: Love and WAR
  • Weather: A 100 percent chance of uncertainty
  • Politics: Lies, damned lies, and statistics
  • Crime: Murder with numbers
  • Money: Market corrections
  • Medicine: Every sickness asks a question. The only answer is a cure.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

How did we get to a society where numbers drive everything? This fascinating book provides helpful insight and a possible course correction. Do the math. Crunch the numbers. Follow the model. Analytics has become the secret machinery of the modern world, grinding away behind the curtain. Once hailed as the answer to any number of social ills, analytics has become a pathway to dislocation, inequality, and outright weirdness. Jones, a former writer at large for Esquire and winner of two National Magazine Awards, began his journalistic career as a sportswriter in the era when quantitative analysis was taking over professional sports. While providing plenty of useful information, the method also took away much of what made a game interesting, including tension, surprise, excitement, and even joy. Once the idea of the math model was established, it infected everything, from the making of movies to the stock market. Algorithms appear to be based on impartial science, but they seek to predict the future by looking only at the past and are unable to handle variation, complexity, and outliers. Jones has a good time recounting examples of things going wrong, and he does so with a dry sense of humor. However, the topic becomes far more serious when analytics is applied to government and law enforcement. Facial recognition software, for example, has great difficulty reading Black faces (women even more than men), and the picture gets even darker when data is used to fit a narrative rather than reveal the truth. The author makes a convincing case that we should trust our intuition and creativity and treat others as individuals instead of mere aggregations of information. Yes, analytics and algorithms are useful in many ways, but ultimately, they should remain subordinate to a person with a stock of lived experience, empathy, and wisdom. In a world dominated by analytics, algorithms, and models, this is a welcome call for reclaiming our common humanity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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