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

Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth

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9781538416907: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are

ISBN 10: 1538416905 ISBN 13: 9781538416907

Publisher: HarperAudio, 2017

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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 on 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 whites 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 were 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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From the Back Cover

How much sex are people really having?
How many Americans are actually racist?
Is America experiencing a hidden back-alley abortion crisis?
Can you game the stock market?
Does violent entertainment increase the rate of violent crime?
Do parents treat sons differently from daughters?
How many people actually read the books they buy?

In this groundbreaking work, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist, and New York Times writer, argues that much of what we thought about people has been dead wrong. The reason? People lie, to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys—and themselves.

However, we no longer need to rely on what people tell us. New data from the internet—the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating, and even pornography sites—finally reveals the truth. By analyzing this digital goldmine, we can now learn what people really think, what they really want, and what they really do. Sometimes the new data will make you laugh out loud. Sometimes the new data will shock you. Sometimes the new data will deeply disturb you. But, always, this new data will make you think.

Everybody Lies combines the informed analysis of Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, the storytelling of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and the wit and fun of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics in a book that will change the way you view the world. There is almost no limit to what can be learned about human nature from Big Data—provided, that is, you ask the right questions.

About the Author

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at the Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a PhD in economics from Harvard. His research-which uses new, big data sources to uncover hidden behaviors and attitudes-has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. He lives in New York City.

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