Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
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Editor's Note
The new ‘Freakonomics’…
Everybody lies. It’s the truth. Former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a deep understanding of our psyche and the questions we desperately want answered. He unmasks what we’re all really doing — regardless of what we want others to believe — online and off.
Description
Foreword by Steven Pinker
Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.
By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
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About the author
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. He lives in New York City.
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Reviews
What people think about Everybody Lies
4.3Reader reviews
- (5/5)Smart and entertaining. Good and simple book about big data analysis with real cases
- (2/5)Hard to tell if the author does good science because he does such uninteresting writing. I can imagine another book that could be so pleased with itself and, at the same time, so calculatingly composed to fulfill a contractual obligation. There is very little that is remarkable here, except for perhaps the author's obsession with porn. But even those endlessly prurient sections felt like someone trying to get more clicks for a lightweight article rather than actually contributing to the overarching theory of a book.
This was weak, sub-Gladwell, smug pop science. Not recommended. - (4/5)In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explores the idea behind social desirability bias and how internet searches are helping Big Data paint a clearer picture about society. In short:Many people under-report embarrassing behaviors and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous.Stephens-Davidowitz posits that while people may lie to anonymous surveys they tend to type their true feelings and intentions into Google searches. It is this vast sum of new data that will allow researchers to make better predictions and offers brand new tools to allow insight all aspects of human behavior that direct questioning never could. It's a fascinating idea and the book provides plenty of food for thought. The new age of Big Data is starting to show how wrong many of our assumptions about society are. How Google searches predicted Donald Trump's victory to common body anxieties to why people root for specific sports teams to the value of attending an elite high school to zooming in on health data and how it could change the way we receive care. It's eerie and a bit creepy when you stop and think about what people type into an internet search box, how much of that data is being captured and just what that data is starting to say about society. On the flip side, the author notes that Big Data has many pitfalls and it's a fairly new science that is still in its infancy.
- (4/5)The biggest appeal of books like these for me is finding out all the things that I thought I knew were false. The author shares a great sample of interesting things that illustrate the ways really big data groups can teach us things about ourselves that we didn't know or didn't want to know. This work did make me wonder if I should get off the internet and stay off!
- (4/5)Jam-packed with "who'd have thought it?" insights based on his professional data analysis skills, and reams of data, mostly Google searches. A wowser on nearly every page, many which you can't resist sharing. What's the magic age for a person to be for his team's World Series win to make him a lifelong fan? How could you have predicted where Trump would win based on offensive Google searches? Like Freakonomics meets Malcolm Gladwell. Fun!
- (4/5)This book provides plenty of food for thought and ambitious in its scope - the author uses Google search data to present theories about why Donald Trump was elected president, the prevalence of racism in American society, the value of attending an elite high school, how to determine a good sport player, and more topics both grand and petty. It's all presented in an engaging manner and helps one make sense of what some of the trends identified mean. It also can sometimes be a little creepy if one thinks about how often we interact with internet services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and the amount of data that is recorded about our behavior (even if it's largely anonymous data gathering).