In a world increasingly ruled by numbers and algorithms award-winning journalist Chris Jones
makes a compelling case for a more personal approach to analytical thinking. 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 to 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. 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.
