New and expanded edition. An International Bestseller - Over One Million Copies Sold! Shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Since Aristotle, we have fought to understand the causes behind everything. But this ideology is fading. In the age of big data, we can crunch an incomprehensible amount of information, providing us with invaluable insights about the what rather than the why. We're just starting to reap the benefits: tracking vital signs to foresee deadly infections, predicting building fires, anticipating the best moment to buy a plane ticket, seeing inflation in real time and monitoring social media in order to identify trends. But there is a dark side to big data. Will it be machines, rather than people, that make the decisions? How do you regulate an algorithm? What will happen to privacy? Will individuals be punished for acts they have yet to commit? In this groundbreaking and fascinating book, two of the world's most-respected data experts reveal the reality of a big data world and outline clear and actionable steps that will equip the reader with the tools needed for this next phase of human evolution.

A Financial Times and Economist Book of the Year 'Wonderfully stimulating... will teach you to see around corners' - TIM HARFORD 'A paean to cognitive agility and the elasticity of the imagination' - ECOMOMIST 'Captivating... will transform the way you think' MARISSA KING, PROFESSOR AT YALE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT The power of mental models to make better decisions We're often told that humans make bad decisions and that more data is better. But this is backwards: people are good at decisions precisely because we use mental models and can envision new realities outside of data. Great outcomes don't depend so much on the final moment of choosing but on generating better alternatives to choose between. That's framing. It's a cognitive muscle we can strengthen to improve our lives, work and future -- to meet this historical moment. Framers shows how.

'Wonderfully stimulating... will teach you to see around corners' -- Tim Harford 'A paean to cognitive agility and the elasticity of the imagination' -- The Economist 'A tightly written prescription for smart thinking' -- Financial Times The power of mental models to make better decisions We're always told that humans make bad decisions and that more data is better. But this is backwards: people are actually good at decisions because we use mental models and can envision new realities outside of data. Great outcomes don't depend so much on the final moment of choosing but on generating better alternatives to choose between. That's framing. It's a cognitive muscle we can strengthen to improve our lives, work and future -- to meet our moment of economic upheaval, social tensions and existential threats. Framers shows how.

"Financial Times" Business Book of the Year Finalist
"Illuminating and very timely . . . a fascinating -- and sometimes alarming -- survey of big data's growing effect on just about everything: business, government, science and medicine, privacy, and even on the way we think."
--"New York Times"
It seems like "big data" is in the news every day, as we read the latest examples of how powerful algorithms are teasing out the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated things. Whether it is used by the NSA to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers' buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven't even done yet, based on big data's ability to predict our future behavior. What we have already seen is just the tip of the iceberg.
"Big Data" is the first major book about this earthshaking subject, with two leading experts explaining what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards.
"An optimistic and practical look at the Big Data revolution -- just the thing to get your head around the big changes already underway and the bigger changes to come."
--Cory Doctorow, boingboing.com