Everybody Lies

Publisher's Summary

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 reveal about ourselves and our world - provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early 21st 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 20 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 every day, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2017 Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

Might be worth it to get the book

Overall, this audiobook has some interesting insights and explains methods clearly. However, there were a lot of visuals referenced that are lost in an audio-only version, so if this is a topic you're really interested in, probably best to get the book.

12 of 12 people found this review helpful

Interesting but not flawless

Interesting book, easy to listen to. The problem is the author likes to jump to conclusions he can't substantiate. And he even knows it, as in some cases he explains how the data is not enough. And he still does it anyway.

36 of 40 people found this review helpful

Good, but not Freakanomics great

I very much enjoyed this audiobook, but I was a little disappointed because he did not live up to the personal expectation I had after having heard the author in a handful of podcasts. I was under the impression the book was going to be filled with an endless amount of conclusions drawn from Big Data. instead, the audiobook is predominantly a polemic in favor of the use of big data sprinkled with little bits of information.

Still, I very much enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone I know.

25 of 28 people found this review helpful

Could have been shorter for information contained

I thought the reader possibly changed the author's meaning with tonality. The author​ seems full of himself, but there's good information there and it's a quick, fun, read.

17 of 19 people found this review helpful

A high level overview of the potential use of big data analysis in the social sciences

Everybody Lies gives a brief overview of the potential uses of big data in the study of human behavior and the social sciences.
The examples given are simple and should be easy to understand to for most readers. However, the author gives the impression that the use of the scientific methods explored in the book are in their infancy and not being widely applied at least in academic circles.
I believe the use of these techniques are being applied more in the business and marketing disciplines than is implied in the book.
As a reader of non-fiction technical material I would have preferred that the author share more details about his workflow and data analytics processes.
In general, an easy, enjoyable read - no profound revelations though.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

yes that includes you

very interesting use of big Data to work out how people actually think and do. recommend.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Yet another data book

These data stories are getting old. Freakinomics and the Heath brothers thought this style of books was an easy way to tell a few stories with data that this author himself called a possible fallacy of dimensionality. It's not a bad book, but it should've been an article not a book.

5 of 6 people found this review helpful

Exciting new insights

Great and interesting content. I read a lot of pop science and non fiction and sometimes it's hard to be surprised by anything as you come across a lot of similar themes. This book felt like a lot of genuinely new information.

It's very engaging and though the topics I found slightly less interesting as the book went on its definitely worth a listen.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Weak Conclusion

The book started off strong and vaguely interesting. It got sorta just started crumbling like the author just stopped caring or ran out of juice. I rarely give up on books, but this dude shits on my loyalty and perserverance by wrapping it up like a first timer at Chipotle. The book devolves from big data and big data insights to him writing about him writing. It was so frustratingly meta. Leaving me with a feeling of bafflement. I showed up because it came off the Navy Reading List. I feel like they didn't even read the ending, which the author mentioned most people wouldn't. Lame. I'm refunding this crap.

12 of 16 people found this review helpful

Beyond interesting!

I was skeptical as to the interest of a book that focuses on data. Needless to say, the information given is presented in a very interesting way. There’s so much to learn here, and a lot to enjoy along the way.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful