Everybody Lies

On an average day, humans will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data searching the internet. Seth Stephen-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, shows your students how that data can be mined for valuable insight, from the hilarious to the horrifying. In the spirit of Freakonomics , Everybody Lies challenges our preconceived notions on how people think and explores how big data can be used in new and innovative ways. Freshman Common Read: Hamline University

#8220;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*.”

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

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.

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 Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’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.

Zusammenfassung

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 from Big Data now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our worldprovided 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 informationunprecedented in historycan tell us a great deal about who we arethe fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, this new approach to social science allows us to 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 using surprising sources like internet search data, 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 potentialrevealing biases deeply embedded within the human psyche, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our healthboth 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.

What secrets are hidden in our internet searches?

• Digital Truth Serum: Discover what people confess to a search engine that they would never admit to a pollster, from secret political biases to surprising sexual anxieties.
• Human Behavior, Unfiltered: Explore surprising truths about everything from the real effects of violent movies to whether parents secretly favor sons over daughters.
• Behavioral Economics in the Wild: Go beyond theory to see what trillions of data points reveal about our conscious and unconscious decisions in economics, sports, ethics, and more.
• The Science of Google Trends: Learn how the simple act of searching for information becomes the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche, revealing the world as it truly is.