Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life

For a data scientist, a fresh and original perspective can pay off.

These experiments demonstrate the potential of Big Data to replace guesses, conventional wisdom, and shoddy correlations with what actually works—causally.

Levitt was telling us that a combination of curiosity, creativity, and data could dramatically improve our understanding of the world. There were stories hidden in data that were ready to be told and this has been proven right over and over again.

The best way to get the right answer to a question is to combine all available data.

Traditionally, when academics or businesspeople wanted data, they conducted surveys.

Most important, to squeeze insights out of Big Data, you have to ask the right questions. Just as you can’t point a telescope randomly at the night sky and have it discover Pluto for you, you can’t download a whole bunch of data and have it discover the secrets of human nature for you. You must look in promising places—Google searches that begin “m