Name: Ainsley Jeffery's review of Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Item: Everybody Lies
Rating: 5
Author: Ainsley Jeffery

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Reveals About Who We Really Are

Everybody Lies

Iulia Lupu

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.

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

Ainsley Jeffery

Very well could make my top books I’ve read this year. I find it so interesting to consider data sets that have been taken from our mind and digitized. The study of data has always been a rather skeptical topic for me. Stephens-Davidowitz uses relevant examples, mixed bag of humour, and some fascinating research to extend his study of Big Data. 

I particularly enjoyed the themes of social desirability bias in the book. Something I’ve thought about a lot. People lie; how can we make them tell the truth. How can EVERYTHING not be taken with a grain of salt? I feel this way about literature and fiction often too. The link between humans and quantitative study is very intriguing under this scope. 

Some faults of the book, maybe simply due to lack of space to delve into the topic include; complicity in the magnitude of biases presented by data source itself. Take for example his dissertation on Google Trends; there is a “godification” of google as a data presenter and search engine. Written in 2017, parts already feel outdated. Internet is an endless web that is growing tremendously everyday. Social media too. Could add a bit more depth now with recent revelations. My world will change when comms research includes social media beyond Facebook and Twitter. The day data is presented to me via the form of Snapchat for children in their formative years is a day I yearn for. 

A lot of the data considered here early in the book takes into factors that the data set doesn’t offer. You can track the location of the search but you can’t track the circumstance it’s made necessarily. The magnitude of factors we can consider is outstanding. I loved this book and how it makes my brain spiral.

This book is filled with interesting facts about our behaviors, but I believe it could have been summarized more effectively. It's highly likely that your experience will differ if you approach the book with a different goal in mind. However, in my experience, it was quite repetitive.

Raúl Barroso Moreno

Sanjay Krishna 

It's good to have your whole perspective changed or shattered once in a while and this books does exactly that.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 'This book is about a whole new way of studying the mind ... Endlessly fascinating' Steven Pinker 'A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche' Economist Everybody lies, to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters – and to themselves. In Internet searches, however, people confess the truth. Insightful, funny and always surprising, Everybody Lies explores how this huge collection of data, unprecedented in human history, could just be the most important ever collected. It offers astonishing insights into the human psyche, revealing the biases deeply embedded within us, the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being, and the information we can use to change our culture for the better.

The New York Times Bestseller

John Elbing

The author does a great job of showing how big data can help understand how we tick. He shows that there is a lot of data out there that is ripe for analysis on any kind of subject. He also explains what big data can't do, what it shouldn't do and the pitfalls of combing through that much data.
His writing has a very readable, first-person-storytelling style which gets you through some subtle concepts. Do read his perfect conclusion to the end!
If you are interested in human behaviour or big data, or both, this book is for you.

Andrew Canion

An enjoyable read that is let down by its extreme US-centricity.

David V.

Seth is exploring a brave new world of honests dataset and his favorite being Google searches he come sto quite a few surprising conclusions. Inspired by Freakonomics, and bringing it to next level.

Jeni Enjaian

I nerded out on this book, big time. The only reason it took more than two days to finish was because of a four day field trip to Washington DC with my students.
Because of said field trip, I did manage to forget significant portions of the first 60% of the book that I read before the field trip although I do remember referencing something I read in the book in conversation with a few of my students.
As a self-proclaimed data nerd, I rapidly consumed this book. I loved nearly all of the examples he gave and the pithy conclusions he drew from his various examples.
The primary reason I gave this book four stars instead of five is because his self-deprecating comments, while endearing at first, became almost overwhelming in the conclusion. Well, that and the fact that after less than a week, I remember few specifics.

I do, however, strongly recommend this book.

Lauren

Luca Conti

Smart and entertaining. Good and simple book about big data analysis with real cases

manav 

Alberto Marcías

Sadie Kimbrough

Gigi V

Joakim Nordlund

Jenn Lee

Aaron Chiandet

Lin Mimi

Aaron

Marcello Faiazza

Adi Suresh 

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR'This book is about a whole new way of studying the mind ... Endlessly fascinating' Steven Pinker'A whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche' EconomistEverybody lies, to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters - and to themselves. In Internet searches, however, people confess the truth.Insightful, funny and always surprising, Everybody Lies explores how this huge collection of data, unprecedented in human history, could just be the most important ever collected. It offers astonishing insights into the human psyche, revealing the biases deeply embedded within us, the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being, and the information we can use to change our culture for the better.

Iulia Lupu &
Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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Iulia Lupu &Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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Iulia Lupu &
Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz