"Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is more than a data scientist. He is a
prophet for how to use the data revolution to reimagine your life.
Don't Trust Your Gut is a tour de force--an intoxicating blend of
analysis, humor, and humanity." -- Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York
Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human
Big decisions are hard. We consult friends and family, make sense of
confusing "expert" advice online, maybe we read a self-help book to
guide us. In the end, we usually just do what feels right, pursuing high
stakes self-improvement--such as who we marry, how to date, where to
live, what makes us happy--based solely on what our gut instinct tells
us. But what if our gut is wrong? Biased, unpredictable, and
misinformed, our gut, it turns out, is not all that reliable. And data
can prove this.
In Don't Trust Your Gut, economist, former Google data scientist, and
New York Times bestselling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reveals
just how wrong we really are when it comes to improving our own lives.
In the past decade, scholars have mined enormous datasets to find
remarkable new approaches to life's biggest self-help puzzles. Data from
hundreds of thousands of dating profiles have revealed surprising
successful strategies to get a date; data from hundreds of millions of
tax records have uncovered the best places to raise children; data from
millions of career trajectories have found previously unknown reasons
why some rise to the top.
Telling fascinating, unexpected stories with these numbers and the
latest big data research, Stephens-Davidowitz exposes that, while we
often think we know how to better ourselves, the numbers disagree. Hard
facts and figures consistently contradict our instincts and demonstrate
self-help that actually works--whether it involves the best time in life
to start a business or how happy it actually makes us to skip a
friend's birthday party for a night of Netflix on the couch. From the
boring careers that produce the most wealth, to the old-school,
data-backed relationship advice so well-worn it's become a literal joke,
he unearths the startling conclusions that the right data can teach us
about who we are and what will make our lives better.
Lively, engrossing, and provocative, the end result opens up a new world
of self-improvement made possible with massive troves of data. Packed
with fresh, entertaining insights, Don't Trust Your Gut redefines how
to tackle our most consequential choices, one that hacks the market
inefficiencies of life and leads us to make smarter decisions about how
to improve our lives. Because in the end, the numbers don't lie.
