281. Moneyball For Your Life: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on Using Data to Get What You Really Want
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2022
⏱️ 102 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most people rely on their gut instinct to decide how to date, who to marry, where to live, what career path to take, how to find happiness, but what if our gut is wrong? Biased, unpredictable, and misinformed, our gut, it turns out, is not all that reliable. 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.
Hard facts and figures consistently contradict our instincts and demonstrate self-help that actually works — whether it involves the best time in life to start a business or how happy it actually makes us to skip a friend's 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 it's become a literal joke, Stephens-Davidowitz unearths the startling conclusions that the right data can teach us about who we are and what will make our lives better.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, a lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. His research has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. His previous book, Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller and an Economist Book of the Year. He lives in Brooklyn and is a passionate fan of the Mets, Knicks, Jets, and Leonard Cohen.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Shower is the great Seth Stevens de Vittivitz and his new book is Don't Trust |
| 0:25.4 | your gut using data to get what you really want in life. Seth is a contributing |
| 0:32.1 | op-ed writer for the New York Times, a lecturer at the Wharton School, and a former Google Data Scientist. |
| 0:38.0 | He received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. His research has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other |
| 0:45.7 | prestigious publications. His previous book, Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller |
| 0:51.7 | and an Economist Book of the year. |
| 0:54.0 | He lives in Brooklyn and is a passionate fan of, I'm sorry to say, |
| 0:57.0 | the Mets, Knicks, Jets, and Leonard Cohen. |
| 1:00.0 | The Leonard Cohen is fine, but I'm a Lakers fan and a Rams fan, you know, Dodger fan. |
| 1:07.0 | Yeah, I guess we're, we're geographically tribal species. |
| 1:12.0 | So, yeah, I love the geographical species. |
| 1:13.2 | So yeah I love the new book I listened to the whole thing and I just went through the actual physical |
| 1:17.8 | book because you have a lot of charts and graphs in there that I didn't see when I was just |
| 1:21.8 | listening to it which is interesting. I wanted to |
| 1:23.4 | just kind of just give a little background to your previous book as a seag into |
| 1:28.1 | this one because this is something of a sequel and I wrote about everybody Lies in Scientific American. |
| 1:35.0 | So let me just read what I wrote and then you can kind of give us an update about what you think some of these polling data compared to search data shows so for example I was interested |
| 1:46.1 | in as you know a moral progress and and so I was disturbed to find some of the data |
| 1:51.6 | that you found in the 2008 presidential election in which 20 |
| 1:58.0 | that you |
| 2:05.0 | that 20% that you concluded that Barack Obama receive fewer votes than expected in Democrat strongholds because of still latent racism. |
| 2:07.0 | For example, he found you that 20% of searches included the word the N-word |
... |
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