Don’t Trust Your Gut by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz review – the problem with intuition

From relationships, to sport, to happiness - why data points, not feelings, are a better guide to what works

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.