Intuition is a funny business. Back in the day, you might have thought that making life decisions by blindly following your “gut feeling” was a bad idea and could get you into trouble. But in 2005 along came Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, a massive bestseller that made the scientific case for “the power of thinking without thinking”. Split-second decisions, Gladwell argued, are often far better than ones that involve deliberation. Perhaps ironically, the idea that intuition was a good thing was itself quite counterintuitive – and counterintuitive ideas really sell books.
But now it’s time for another U-turn. The new book by the economist and ex-Google researcher Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is the anti-Gladwell: it’s about how we can learn from “big data” to help us make better decisions in our lives – and how this often goes against what our intuitions might tell us.
