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

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062390875
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	257,192
File size:	5 MB

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.

Table of Contents

Foreword Steven Pinker xi

Introduction: The Outlines of a Revolution 1

Part I Data, Big and Small

1 Your Faulty Gut 25

Part II The Powers of Big Data

2 Was Freud Right? 45

3 Data Reimagined 55

Bodies as Data 62

Words as Data 74

Pictures as Data 97

4 Digital Truth Serum 105

The Truth About Sex 112

The Truth About Hate and Prejudice 128

The Truth About the Internet 140

The Truth About Child Abuse and Abortion 145

The Truth About Your Facebook Friends 150

The Truth About Your Customers 153

Can We Handle the Truth? 158

5 Zooming In 165

What's Really Going On in Our Counties, Cities, and Towns? 172

How We Fill Our Minutes and Hours 190

Our Doppelgangers 197

Data Stories 205

6 All the World's a Lab 207

The ABCs of A/B Testing 209

Nature's Cruel-but Enlightening-Experiments 221

Part III Big Data: Handle with Care

7 Big Data, Big Schmata? What It Cannot Do 243

The Curse of Dimensionality 246

The Overemphasis on What Is Measurable 252

8 Mo Data, Mo Problems? What We Shouldn't Do 257

The Danger of Empowered Corporations 257

The Danger of Empowered Governments 266

Conclusion: How Many People Finish Books? 271

Acknowledgments 285

Notes 289

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

This book is about a whole new way of studying the mind . . . an unprecedented peek into people’s psyches . . . Time and again my preconceptions about my country and my species were turned upside-down by Stephens-Davidowitz’s discoveries . . . endlessly fascinating.” — Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

“Move over Freakonomics. Move over Moneyball. This brilliant book is the best demonstration yet of how big data plus cleverness can illuminate and then move the world. Read it and you’ll see life in a new way.” — Lawrence Summers, President Emeritus and Charles W. Eliot University Professor of Harvard University

“Everybody Lies relies on big data to rip the veneer of what we like to think of as our civilized selves. A book that is fascinating, shocking, sometimes horrifying, but above all, revealing.” — Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants

“Brimming with intriguing anecdotes and counterintuitive facts, Stephens-Davidowitz does his level best to help usher in a new age of human understanding, one digital data point at a time.” — Fortune, Best New Business Books

“Freakonomics on steroids—this book shows how big data can give us surprising new answers to important and interesting questions. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz brings data analysis alive in a crisp, witty manner, providing a terrific introduction to how big data is shaping social science.” — Raj Chetty, Professor of Economics at Stanford University

“Everybody Lies is a spirited and enthralling examination of the data of our lives. Drawing on a wide variety of revelatory sources, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will make you cringe, chuckle, and wince at the people you thought we were.” — Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm

“A tour de force—a well-written and entertaining journey through big data that, along the way, happens to put forward an important new perspective on human behavior itself. If you want to understand what’s going on in the world, or even with your friends, this is one book you should read cover to cover.” — Peter Orszag, Managing Director, Lazard and former Director of the Office of Management and Budget

“Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, has spent the last four years poring over Internet search data . . . What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity.” — New York Post

“Everybody Lies is an astoundingly clever and mischievous exploration of what big data tells us about everyday life.  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is as good a data storyteller as I have ever met.” — Steven Levitt, co-author, Freakonomics

“A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche using search data as its guide. . . . The empirical findings in Everybody Lies are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list.” — The Economist

“Pivotal . . . A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakanomics.” — Library Journal

From the Publisher

A tour de force—a well-written and entertaining journey through big data that, along the way, happens to put forward an important new perspective on human behavior itself. If you want to understand what’s going on in the world, or even with your friends, this is one book you should read cover to cover.

Peter Orszag

Move over Freakonomics. Move over Moneyball. This brilliant book is the best demonstration yet of how big data plus cleverness can illuminate and then move the world. Read it and you’ll see life in a new way.

Lawrence Summers

Brimming with intriguing anecdotes and counterintuitive facts, Stephens-Davidowitz does his level best to help usher in a new age of human understanding, one digital data point at a time.

Best New Business Books Fortune

Everybody Lies is a spirited and enthralling examination of the data of our lives. Drawing on a wide variety of revelatory sources, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will make you cringe, chuckle, and wince at the people you thought we were.

Christian Rudder

A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche using search data as its guide. . . . The empirical findings in Everybody Lies are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list.

The Economist

Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, has spent the last four years poring over Internet search data . . . What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity.

New York Post

This book is about a whole new way of studying the mind . . . an unprecedented peek into people’s psyches . . . Time and again my preconceptions about my country and my species were turned upside-down by Stephens-Davidowitz’s discoveries . . . endlessly fascinating.

Steven Pinker

Everybody Lies relies on big data to rip the veneer of what we like to think of as our civilized selves. A book that is fascinating, shocking, sometimes horrifying, but above all, revealing.

Tim Wu

Everybody Lies is an astoundingly clever and mischievous exploration of what big data tells us about everyday life.  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is as good a data storyteller as I have ever met.

Steven Levitt

Freakonomics on steroids—this book shows how big data can give us surprising new answers to important and interesting questions. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz brings data analysis alive in a crisp, witty manner, providing a terrific introduction to how big data is shaping social science.

Raj Chetty

Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, has spent the last four years poring over Internet search data . . . What he found is that Internet search data might be the Holy Grail when it comes to understanding the true nature of humanity.

New York Post

07/01/2017
"Fake news" may be the current buzz words, but personal truths have never been so tangible thanks to data scientists. Stephens-Davidowitz (former Google data scientist and current New York Times columnist) unpacks this telling data, explaining exactly how people lie every day. Mining data from Google Searches to niche sites such as PornHub, it becomes quickly evident that digital data reveals more human truths than any formally conducted survey. Be warned; some of this information may be disturbing as there is no doctoring the digital accuracy when it comes to queries on sex, race, gender, and politics. These hidden revelations shed light on the potential for even deeper exploration of the human psyche as more academics embrace the use of Big Data for research. After reading this pivotal work, personal Google searches will never be the same. As for our author, he is banking that human curiosity outweighs self-censor for he has more big lies to explore. VERDICT A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakanomics.—Angela Forret, Clive P.L., IA

Library Journal

2017-03-21
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.

Kirkus Reviews