Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2022–2023years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That the people in your life have led you to believe that a man’s romantic value comes from his appearance or relative income is only evidence that you need to meet better people. The reality is that women who feel that way are never going to be happy with anyone. You should check out the first chapter of Don’t Trust Your Gut if you want to know what really matters in a successful long term relationship.
- The book that the author wrote "Don't Trust Your Gut : Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58490565-don-t-trust-you... ) is well worth a read.
There is also a good podcast episode with an interview by Steven Levitt with the author ( https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/75-self-help-for-data-... )
It might be of interest to HN types because it's essentially using loads of data to see what helps people.
- A new book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, called Don’t Trust Your Gut, argues that our “gut” — or whatever you want to call it — is usually wrong. And it’s wrong because our intuitions are often influenced by false impressions or dubious conventional wisdom.
The continued existence of homo sapiens over the last X years would be evidence undercutting SS-D's conjecture that intuitive decisions are wrong more often than right. Of course, to understand the relationship between claim and evidence it would be necessary to understand what SS-D means by "wrong."
As an example of right/wrong, he cites the relatively short lifespan of record stores compared to a dentist office as a method of deciding what kind of business to open. It isn't clear if SS-D is being facetious in terms of business opportunity options, but it is clear that SS-D deals in very low dimensional data, not information, knowledge or wisdom.
Skipping to the summary statistical result is a short-sighted decision method. To get Tower or Waterloo or any other cultural institution, many other ventures opened, innovated and failed as part of an evolution of innovation. To get evolution there must be mutation and selection. Survivorship bias makes the post-hoc claim that if only we did it the "right" way we need not have had all the short lived record stores. It doesn't admit that the "right" way wasn't known at the start.
