Everybody Lies

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

De: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Narrado por: Timothy Andrés Pabon

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 on 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.

Light on math, heavy on politics

Very interesting book, and a very quick read at about 4th grade level. Makes very sweeping generalizations, my favorite being that all Trump supporters are Racists. Then a lot of sex conclusions from Pornhub data. Great way to sell books, but not scientific. Makes it all the way to part 6 before mentioning the difference between correlation and causation, well after making his conclusions. Needs to read “How not to be Wrong”.

The author needs to get out of the way

The book may have been much better if it did not demonstrate a basic principle of statistics so well... the impact of survey bias on statistics. If the author stopped injecting political perspectives into the book it may have been tolerable.

Interesting

I enjoyed the first half of this book the most. Good content but hard to focus on without stories.

The best book ever.

I’m a data scientist for the past two years
And now - passionate about data as I never was. The new Freakonomics indeed!

The most fascinating book I’ve read in a long time!

Everyone should be required to read this book. He uses Google and PORNHUB data to uncover insights into society. Soooooo so good.