Don’t Trust Your Gut
Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
“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.”
This is not a business type book that I normally read, but it was really interesting! The introduction is a little long and slow – mostly because it has a lot of sports which I’m not interested in. Once the book starts and gets into it though, the data is really interesting. It’s so hard to trust any data that’s on the internet, so it’s nice to have it in a book and a well presented format that is really accessible for everyone (and hopefully reliable!).
The author is a really good storyteller and uses the data in a presentable format. Although it’s a really interesting book, it doesn’t have anything to really take away and apply to life decisions, despite the cover saying you will “make better choices”. Yes there is data on what makes people happy, but I believe that this is going to change depending on the person.
It’s not a self help book with key takeaways to use everyday but the book is a fascinating and entertaining read. I recommend it – 4 stars from me.
Bloomsbury | 5 July 2022 | AU$29.99 | paperback
This novel was.. average. I kept reading it because I expected something to happen. I was hopeful the ending might redeeem it, but I was disappointed. It potters along throwing out tidbits about Molly’s life, and the life of her siblings/aunts/uncles/cousins and poor ?brother? who is far away in Australia. Come on! It’s not forever away any more! And I don’t see why they need to track down Molly at all. I received no sense of closure when the book was finished.
I found the illnesses that weren’t the fever particularly interesting. It seems like the moonflowers were good for the fever – but that was it! So Tessa’s experience as an apothecary was useful in more than one regard. I find it so hard to believe that people are still buying solutions that are useless – but I guess some people need to buy hope (COVID19 quacks anyone?)
What was good about this novel was the internal anguish of Milo trying to reconcile his homosexuality and his religious beliefs. It’s impressive how much internalised homophobia Milo had even after a single summer of feeling feelings for the wrong gender. Milo is very distressed, but also an idiot.
The book I reviewed is the new version that includes references to COVID-19 and the thinking of some people around that (so this cover isn’t quite right).
Normally I think of myself as being quite iron-stomached. This book though proved that there’s some things that I simply can’t read. I appreciated the authors’ foresight and use of stars to tell me where I could skip a section if I wasn’t feeling strong enough. I also needed to put the book down at times and reassure myself that I wasn’t in that situation and that Jeni has made it largely to the other side.
I was so invested in Georgina, and she felt like a real character with some interesting flaws. Most of the time I found myself genuinely laughing, rather than thking ‘what an idiot’. Let me say though that perhaps the reason I understood how Georgina treated her friends is because I viewed her through a lens of trauma. Georgina just doesn’t seem to have processed her own father’s death. Thus, her relationships and the horrible way she treats her family and friends is, if not justified, certainly understandable.
The title of this book is misleading. It suggests that Dr Kay literally ran out of patients, and mislead me into believing that this book was going to tell me how it happened! Instead, it’s a chronocle of sorts about his life after leaving medicine with a few bits of past-medical scenarios thrown in. I found it unsurprising that the medical system in the UK is just as broken for training doctors as Australia!
I unfortunately found this novel quite cringeworthy, and I struggled to keep reading it. I knew from the beginning that things weren’t going to go well for Noah! Was I ever so stupid in highschool?