Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

"Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is more than a data scientist. He is a prophet for how to use the data revolution to reimagine your life. Dont Trust Your Gut is a tour de forcean intoxicating blend of analysis, humor, and humanity. Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is HumanBig 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-improvementsuch as who we marry, how to date, where to live, what makes us happybased 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 Dont 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 lifes 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 workswhether it involves the best time in life to start a business or how happy it actually makes us to skip a friends 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 its 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, Dont 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 dont lie.This book offers a clear, counterintuitive roadmap for your most important decisions:Relationship Advice: Discover what data from thousands of couples and millions of dating profiles actually reveals about who we should marryand why it contradicts what we compete for on the apps. Parenting Advice: Learn the one decision that has the biggest impact on your childs success, based on an analysis of hundreds of millions of tax records. Career Advice: Uncover the surprisingly boring careers that consistently create millionaires and the counterintuitive formula for entrepreneurial success (hint: its not about being young). A Formula for Happiness: Explore a revolutionary, data-backed answer to what truly makes us happy, mined ...

An Economist Best Book of the YearA PBS NewsHour Book of the YearAn Entrepeneur Top Business Book An Amazon Best Book of the Year in Business and LeadershipNew York Times BestsellerForeword by Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information from Big Data now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our worldprovided we ask the right questions.By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of informationunprecedented in historycan tell us a great deal about who we arethe fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, this new approach to social science allows us to gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didnt vote for Barack Obama because hes black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and whos more self-conscious about sex, men or women? Investigating these questions and a host of others using surprising sources like internet search data, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potentialrevealing biases deeply embedded within the human psyche, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions were afraid to ask that might be essential to our healthboth emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.What secrets are hidden in our internet searches?Digital Truth Serum: Discover what people confess to a search engine that they would never admit to a pollster, from secret political biases to surprising sexual anxieties. Human Behavior, Unfiltered: Explore surprising truths about everything from the real effects of violent movies to whether parents secretly favor sons over daughters. Behavioral Economics in the Wild: Go beyond theory to see what trillions of data points reveal about our conscious and unconscious decisions in economics, sports, ethics, and more. The Science of Google Trends: Learn how the simple act of searching for information becomes the most important...

En un día promedio de principios del siglo xxi, los seres humanos que buscan en Internet acumulan ocho billones de gigabytes de datos. Esta asombrosa cantidad de información puede decirnos mucho sobre quienes somos, los miedos, deseos y comportamientos que nos impulsan y las decisiones conscientes e inconscientes que tomamos. De lo profundo a lo mundano, podemos obtener un asombroso conocimiento sobre la psique humana que hace menos de veinte años parecia insondable.Stephens-Davidowitz nos ofrece informacion fascinante, sorprendente y a menudo graciosa, sobre temas que van desde la economia hasta la etica, los deportes, el sexo, etc. Todo ello extraido del mundo del big data.A partir de estudios y experimentos sobre como vivimos y pensamos realmente, el autor demuestra en que medida todo el mundo es un laboratorio. Con conclusiones que van desde lo extraño pero cierto hasta lo provocador y lo perturbador, explora el poder de este suero de la verdad digital y su potencial mas profundo, revelando sesgos profundamente arraigados en nosotros; una informacion que sin duda podemos utilizar para cambiar nuestra cultura. La influencia del big data se esta multiplicando exponencialmente, y Stephens-Davidowitz nos desafia a pensar de una manera diferente sobre el mundo y la forma en que lo vemos.

Al final de un día promedio a principios del siglo XXI, los seres humanos que buscan en Internet acumularán ocho billones de gigabytes de datos. Esta asombrosa cantidad de información, sin precedentes en la historia, puede decirnos mucho sobre quienes somos, los miedos, deseos y comportamientos que nos impulsan y las decisiones conscientes e inconscientes que tomamos. A partir de estudios y experimentos sobre como vivimos y pensamos realmente, Stephens-Davidowitz demuestra de manera fascinante y a menudo divertida en que medida todo el mundo es un laboratorio. Con conclusiones que van desde lo extraño pero cierto hasta lo provocador y lo perturbador, explora el poder de este suero de la verdad digital y su potencial mas profundo, revelando sesgos profundamente arraigados en nosotros.