The most inadvertently hilarious book of 2022

A former Google scientist has written what feels like a parody of a TED talk, harnessing big data to tell us… the bleeding obvious

320pp, Bloomsbury, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £12.29 ÌÌÌÌÌ

We live in the age of data. The internet is, in essence, an unending customer survey in which every click shows someone somewhere your preferences. Vast chunks of infrastructure and processing power are dedicated to sifting your online movements for anything that can be learned about what you love, what you hate, what you need, what keeps your eyes on a site for longer than anything else.

The aim, of course, is to sell you things. But the byproduct, as Seth Stephens-Davidowitz points out, is an unprecedented trove of data on human wishes and desires. In other words, he argues, a means of finally answering “in a rigorous, systematic way ” that most enduring question: “What makes people happy?”

A former Google data scientist, Stephens-Davidowitz is a selfavowed “dataist”, who approaches his chosen field with an evangelical faith in the good news it offers. While his first book, Everybody Lies (2017), used mankind’s aggregated search history to lift the lid on our darkest secrets and neuroses, the pitch of Don’t Follow Your Gut is a path towards the light: “the DataDriven Answer to Life”.

Follow the data, says StephensDavidowitz, and you can find “a reliable formula for happiness” – one that as he somewhat bathetically puts it, promises to shake up everyday life the way that statistical approaches shook up early 2000s baseball. Prepare, mankind, to shake off the shackles of your misery by playing “Moneyball for your life”.

You may not be shocked to find that Don’t Trust Your Gut does not quite follow through on its promise, but it did make me happy. As I chortled my way through it, I began to believe that it might well be the most inadvertently entertaining thing I have read this year. If it were presented as a satire on the specific brand of TED-talky non-fiction that has come to rule the New York Times bestseller list, I would nominate it for a comedy award. I’m not sure anyone has ever pinpointed the tics of the genre quite so well.

Ever wanted to know what those tics are? Rhetorical questions followed by exclamation-marked answers for one! Ellipses, too, deployed every few sentences to build up to a… heavily previewed anticlimax. Have you ever wondered if popular American nonfiction has found something it cannot liken to baseball or basketball? Well… it has not. “What if we ran our personal lives the way that Billy Beane ran the Oakland A’s?” Stephens-Davidowitz asks. I honestly don’t know. What if ?

Ever find yourself wondering what percentage of American popnon-fic authors cite studies that put firm numbers on things you cannot really put numbers on at all? According to my armchair survey, over 87.32 per cent, including Stephens-Davidowitz. Don’t Trust Your Gut offers this classic of the form: “A recent study calculated that in the first year of a baby’s life, parents face 1,750 difficult decisions.” Don’t trust your gut when it whispers: “Hmm, that seems spurious – follow the ‘data’ gleaned by a baby formula manufacturer and published as an advertorial on thebump.com!”

The pièce de résistance, though, is this book’s deployment of what, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, has become the mainstay of modern non-fiction: the simple counterintuitive idea. Collect enough data, however, and you begin to see what Stephens-Davidowitz calls the power of the “counter-counterintuitive idea”. Or as you might term it, the obvious.

Counter-counterintuitively, for instance, the data show that most successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, hardworking people with long experience and lots of contacts, rather than marginal knownothing upstarts with big ideas and lots of moxie. Other counter-counterintuitive data-driven insights include the facts that “people are more likely to laugh when things are going well” and that “greater intelligence is an advantage in life”.

Those of us who are not data scientists might well find this all quite reassuring. It is easy to feel left out of the data revolution, but Don’t Trust Your Gut uses it to tell us, for the most part, exactly what we should have known all along.

In its festival of the obvious, we learn that attractive people get more attention on dating apps, that superficial attraction is not a predictor of long-term relationship success, that work makes you miserable unless you do it with people you like, and that sex is almost everyone’s idea of a good time.

Do not adjust your set: that sound you are hearing is your own mind being blown, irreparably.

Insights include ‘people are more likely to laugh when things are going well’