Don’t Trust Your Gut
Introduction
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 Ok Cupid 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.