Everybody Lies - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Everybody Lies

By Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  • Release Date: 2017-05-09
  • Genre: Social Science
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 198 Ratings

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.

Reviews

  • Utterly fascinating

    5
    By ArthurPJohnson
    Not since FREAKONOMICS have I read a nonfiction pop science book as utterly fascinating as EVERYBODY LIES.
  • New Data Point, Seth?

    5
    By Symphony Crack Orchestra
    The fact that I was able to click the “I’m Finished” button at the end of this book (well, of course it says that it was a very well written and structured book... and/or it just says that I’m incredibly interested in the subject matter...) it says that there’s a data point available for us to use to empirically test those statements between the parentheses. We could use this in conjunction with the highlight data and narrow it down to just non-fiction books and find out what features make a non-fiction book “finishable.” Or would there be too many data points that we would suffer from the curse of dimensionality? Read this book and you too will begin to form questions like the above as well as ideas on how to test your hypotheses on them.
  • For any freakonomics fan

    4
    By Prandawg
    A good intro to the applications of data science. Definitely a lot of “pop” statistics but the author makes a very important point: much of the freely available data we have today is much more reliable than expensive survey data. A good read overall.
  • A great Read

    5
    By southwindshm
    Any book that I enjoy reading, that stretches my mind, is a great read. Thanks for the work.
  • Everyone should read this

    5
    By CateKendall
    Eye opening.
  • Lets conclude

    5
    By Dan81223
    Feeling sorry for those who didn't make it to the end, great book!
  • Hope you enjoyed the beer

    5
    By NeedsATaxi
    Quite thought provoking I read it over the weekend not able to stop. It gives you list of topics you want to read and think about more.