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Don't Trust Your Gut

Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

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Don't Trust Your Gut

Written by: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
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About this listen

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 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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
Economics Personal Success Popular Culture Happiness Career
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Didn’t always identify the limitations of the data

It was a fun easy to listen book but deeply flawed imo especially for a guy with a phd in data science. I think I would have enjoyed it more if he didn’t try to extract advice from the data as it all seemed biased to me, but that might just be me.

I found the happiness section to be the worst. I found the author didn’t highlight the limitations of the data. Specifically most of the happiness data was record as in the moment versus looking back. Let me use an example I imagine cheating of my wife may be very enjoyable during the sex. But afterwards that brief 2 minute act would likely ruin my life and that of my families. Seems no distinction was made between in the moment happiness and the feeling we get after having done something. He also skips bits of data from some of those studies that would highlight this point. Like the fact that people often reported being less happy with their kids when they were doing house work. I think anyone with kids could appreciate this. Kids can be annoying and house work can be a great break. But I don’t think many people would get the same life satisfaction from cleaning than raising kids.

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