Don’t Trust Your Gut

“Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is as good a data storyteller as I have ever met.” (Steven Levitt, co-author, Freakonomics)

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 best-selling 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.