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Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life



Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life PDF

Author: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Publisher: Dey Street Books

Genres:

Publish Date: May 10, 2022

ISBN-10: 0062880918

Pages: 320

File Type: PDF

Language: English

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Book Preface

You can make better life decisions. Big Data can help you.
We are living through a quiet revolution in our understanding of the most important areas of human life—thanks to the internet and all the data it has created. In the past few years, scholars have mined a variety of enormous datasets—everything from OkCupid messages to Wikipedia profiles to Facebook relationship statuses. In these thousands or millions of data points, they have found, for perhaps the first time, credible answers to fundamental questions. Questions such as:

What makes a good parent?
Who is secretly rich—and why?
What are the odds of becoming a celebrity?Why are some people unusually lucky?What predicts a happy marriage?
What, more generally, makes people happy?

Often, the answers revealed in the data are not what you might have guessed, and they suggest making different decisions than you might otherwise make. Quite simply, there are insights in these mounds of new data that can allow you, or someone you know, to make better decisions.
Here are three examples uncovered from researchers studying very different parts of life.
Example # 1: Suppose you are a single man or woman who isn’t getting as many dates as you would like. You try to improve yourself in every way that others suggest. You dress better. You whiten your teeth. You get a pricey new haircut. But still. The dates, they’re not coming.
Insights from Big Data might help.
The mathematician and author Christian Rudder studied tens of millions of preferences on OkCupid to learn the qualities of the site’s most successful daters. He found—and this was not at all surprising—that the most prized daters are those blessed with conventional beauty: the Brad Pitts and Natalie Portmans of the world.
But he found, in the mounds of data, other daters who did surprisingly well: those with extreme looks. Think, for example, of people with blue hair, body art, wild glasses, or shaved heads.
Why? The key to these unconventional daters’ success is that, while many people aren’t especially attracted to them, or find them plainly unattractive, some people are really attracted to them. And in dating that is what is most important.
In dating, unless you are drop-dead gorgeous, the best strategy is, in Rudder’s words, to get “lots of Yes, lots of No, but very little Meh.” Such a strategy, Rudder discovered, can lead to about 70 percent more messages. Be an extreme version of yourself, the data says, and some people will find you extremely attractive.
And example # 2: Suppose you just had a baby.* You need to pick a neighborhood in which to raise this child. You know the drill. You consult a few friends, Google some basic facts, visit a couple of homes. And voila! You’ve got yourself a home for your family. You assume there isn’t much more of a science to this.
There is a science to neighborhood-hunting now. Researchers recently took advantage of newly digitized tax records to study the life trajectories of hundreds of millions of Americans. The scientists discovered that being raised in certain cities—and even certain blocks within those cities—can dramatically improve a person’s life outcomes. And these great neighborhoods are not necessarily the ones people suspect. Nor are they the ones that cost the most. There are now maps that can inform parents, based on extensive data analysis, about the quality of every tiny neighborhood of the United States.
That’s not all. Researchers have also mined data to find traits that the best neighborhoods for raising kids tend to share; in the process, they have upended much conventional wisdom about child-rearing. Thanks to Big Data, we are finally able to tell parents what really matters for raising a successful kid (hint: adult role models) and what matters a lot less (hint: the fanciest schools).
And example # 3: Suppose you are an aspiring artist who can’t seem to catch your big break. You buy every book you can on your craft. You get feedback from your friends. You revise your pieces again and again and again. But nothing seems to work. You can’t figure out what you are doing wrong.
Big Data has uncovered a likely mistake.
A recent study of the career trajectories of hundreds of thousands of painters, led by Samuel P. Fraiberger, has uncovered a previously hidden pattern in why some succeed, and others don’t. So, what’s the secret that differentiates the big names from the anonymous strugglers?
It is often how they present their work. Artists who never break through, the data tells us, tend to present their work to the same few places over and over again. The artists who make it big, in contrast, present to a far wider set of places, allowing themselves to stumble upon a big break.
Many people have talked about the importance in your career of showing up. But data scientists have found it’s about showing up to a wide range of places.
This book isn’t meant to give advice only for single people, new parents, or aspiring artists—though there will be more lessons here for all of them. My goal is to offer some lessons in new, big datasets that are useful for you, no matter what stage of life you are in. There will be lessons recently uncovered by data scientists in how to be happier, look better, advance your career, and much more. And the idea for the book all came to me one evening while . . . I was watching a baseball game.


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