Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

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HarperCollins

Annotation: A former Google data scientist presents an insider's look at what the vast, instantly available amounts of information from the Internet can reveal about human civilization and society.

Genre: [Social sciences]

Reviews: 1

Catalog Number: #167180

Format: Publisher's Hardcover

Publisher: HarperCollins

Edition Date: 2017 Release Date: 05/09/17

Pages: xi, 338 pages

ISBN: 0-06-239085-6

ISBN 13: 978-0-06-239085-1

Dewey: 302.23

LCCN: 2017297094

Dimensions: 22 cm.

Subject Heading:
Data mining. Social aspects.
Big data. Social aspects.
Internet. Social aspects.

Language: English

Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews

If your pal swears to God that he'll repay a loan, write it off: a tour of the many things that big data can tell us about ourselves.Trained as an economist and a philosopher, Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, ventures into sociology and psychology with his look at the corpus of search terms run through that site, "a bizarre dataset" that often yields uncomfortable results, revealing hidden reservoirs of racism, sexual insecurity, hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty. For instance, he writes, so-called undecided voters usually aren't undecided at all; if researching political issues using phrases such as "Trump Clinton taxes," one's vote will almost always go to the candidate named first. Pollsters predicted a heavy turnout of African-American voters in favor of Hillary Clinton, but those voters didn't show up. Meanwhile, the data that Stephens-Davidowitz sifts through reveal a strongly racially motivated vote on the part of whites, speaking to "a nasty, scary and widespread rage that was waiting for a candidate to give voice to it," even though those same people would profess publicly to being beyond issues of race and indeed "postracial," in that quaint term of yore. Some of the author's other findings concern social "tells," in the language of gambling, such as the hedge words someone might use in conversation: "Fellas, if a woman…‘sorta' likes her drink or ‘kinda' feels chilly…you can bet that she is ‘sorta' ‘kinda' ‘probably' not into you." Yet this book has broader implications than one's chances of success at a singles mixer. Stephens-Davidowitz looks, for example, at the statistics surrounding political assassination and what happens to a government afterward, recidivism among prison inmates (the harsher the conditions, the more likely a return to crime), the correlation of education and financial success, the keywords of lying, and other big-picture questions. Statistics wonks will find much of interest in this survey. For the rest of us, this book offers as many reasons to be dispirited about the human condition as the daily headlines.

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Kirkus Reviews

Bibliography Index/Note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-318) and index.

Reading Level: 9.0

Interest Level: 9+

An Economist Best Book of the Year

A PBS NewsHour Book of the Year

An Entrepeneur Top Business Book

An Amazon Best Book of the Year in Business and Leadership

New York Times Bestseller

Foreword by Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature

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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