Unappealing gut feeling

We have a gut feeling you’ve skipped this section to get to the Beckham stuff, but we’ll continue regardless.

We’re in a world that has been deluged by data, and AI has supercharged our tendency to default to our technological overlords. 

The push to move from intuition to information has infiltrated everything, from hiring to insurance claims.

It’s even taken over dating. Cody Zervas, the chief product officer of Keeper, a matchmaking start-up built around artificial intelligence, tried using data to find a wife. He remains single.

Given the surfeit of options to make data-driven decisions, and the potential productivity gains they offer, it wouldn’t be surprising if gut feel went the way of the dinosaurs. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. 

A report from Monash University analysed data from almost 190,000 ER visits by children in Melbourne, and found that parents’ intuition was “significantly” linked to the likelihood of their child being admitted to ICU. 

UBS global head of quantitative research, Paul Winter, ran the numbers (as he often does, we suppose) and found that human insight performed better than an AI model.

And of course, the world is currently being torn apart and rearranged by a man who runs entirely on gut feel and an attempt to fill that huge empty hole where the sense of contented self should be.

It’s a strange dichotomy - we’ve never had more data to inform our opinions, and yet live in a world that proudly rejects the perspectives of evidence and experts. 

It has led to either blindly following what AI tells us is the right decision or defaulting entirely to gut instinct. Finding a middle ground would do everyone a world of good.