Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are:
“The next Freud will be a data scientist. The next Marx will be a data scientist. The next Salk might very well be a data scientist.”
“I sometimes suspect that inside every data scientist is a kid trying to figure out why his childhood dreams didn't come true.”
“Netflix learned a similar lesson early on in its life cycle: don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do.”
“Silver noticed that the areas where Trump performed best made for an odd map. Trump performed well in parts of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, as well as the South. He performed notably worse out West. Silver looked for variables to try to explain this map. Was it unemployment? Was it religion? Was it gun ownership? Was it rates of immigration? Was it opposition to Obama? Silver found that the single factor that best correlated with Donald Trump’s support in the Republican primaries was that measure I had discovered four years earlier. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for “nigger.”
“I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche. This”
“Facebook is digital brag-to-my-friends-about-how-good-my-life-is serum. In Facebook world, the average adult seems to be happily married, vacationing in the Caribbean, and perusing the Atlantic. In the real world, a lot of people are angry, on supermarket checkout lines, peeking at the National Enquirer, ignoring the phone calls from their spouse, whom they haven’t slept with in years.”
“If you can't understand a study, the problem is with the study, not with you.”
“People frequently lie—to themselves and to others. In 2008, Americans told surveys that they no longer cared about race. Eight years later, they elected as president Donald J. Trump, a man who retweeted a false claim that black people are responsible for the majority of murders of white Americans, defended his supporters for roughing up a Black Lives Matters protester at one of his rallies, and hesitated in repudiating support from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The same hidden racism that hurt Barack Obama helped Donald Trump.”
“Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”
“Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.”
“As with Google, so with everyone else trying to use data to understand the world. The Big Data revolution is less about collecting more and more data. It is about collecting the right data. But”
“For example, we have been told that those of us who drink a moderate amount of alcohol tend to be in better health. That is a correlation. Does this mean drinking a moderate amount will improve one’s health—a causation? Perhaps not. It could be that good health causes people to drink a moderate amount. Social scientists call this reverse causation. Or it could be that there is an independent factor that causes both moderate drinking and good health. Perhaps spending a lot of time with friends leads to both moderate alcohol consumption and good health. Social scientists call this omitted-variable bias.”
“Sometimes new data reveals cultural differences I had never even contemplated. One example: the very different ways that men around the world respond to their wives being pregnant. In Mexico, the top searches about “my pregnant wife” include “frases de amor para mi esposa embarazada” (words of love to my pregnant wife) and “poemas para mi esposa embarazada” (poems for my pregnant wife). In the United States, the top searches include “my wife is pregnant now what” and “my wife is pregnant what do I do.”
“Many people underreport embarrassing behaviors and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.”
“I am going to get a beer with some friends and stop working on this damn conclusion. Too few of you, Big Data tells me, are still reading.”
“The success of college towns and big cities is striking when you just look at the data. But I also delved more deeply to undertake a more sophisticated empirical analysis. Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!) If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans. What”
“The Big Data revolution is less about collecting more and more data. It is about collecting the right data.”
“Eredetileg azt a címet akartam adni a könyvnek, hogy: Mekkora a péniszem? Mit tudhatunk meg a Google-keresésekből az emberi természetről? De a szerkesztőm figyelmeztetett, hogy egy ilyen könyvet kemény kihívás lenne eladni. Szerinte az embereknek kínos lenne megvenni egy könyvet ezzel a címmel, mondjuk, a reptéri könyvesboltban.”
“A férfiak ugyanannyiszor keresnek rá [a Google-ban] önmaguk orális kielégítésére, mint arra, hogy miként juttassanak el az orgazmusig egy nőt.”
“If more people are making searches saying they want to do something, more people are going to do that thing.”
“Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden. But what is really interesting about doppelganger searches, considering their power, is not how they’re commonly being used now. It is how frequently they are not used. There are major areas of life that could be vastly improved by the kind of personalization these searches allow.”
“The state with the highest rate of Google searches for self-induced abortions is Mississippi, a state with roughly three million people and, now, just one abortion clinic.”
“Data science takes a natural and intuitive human process—spotting patterns and making sense of them—and injects it with steroids, potentially showing us that the world works in a completely different way from how we thought it did.”
“One potential reason students struggle so much is that teachers don’t show up consistently. On a given day in some schools in rural India, more than 40 percent of teachers are absent.”
“Between the key ages of fourteen and twenty-four, numerous Americans will form their views based on the popularity of the current president. A popular Republican or unpopular Democrat will influence many young adults to become Republicans. An unpopular Republican or popular Democrat puts this impressionable group in the Democratic column. And those views, in these key years, will, on average, last a lifetime.”
“The first three—religion, environment, and health insurance—do not correlate with longer life spans for the poor. The variable that does matter, according”
“Rags to Riches (rise) Riches to Rags (fall) Man in a Hole (fall, then rise) Icarus (rise, then fall) Cinderella (rise, then fall, then rise) Oedipus (fall, then rise, then fall)”
“People adapt to their experience, and people who are going to be successful find advantages in any situation. The factors that make you successful are your talent and your drive. They are not who gives your commencement speech or other advantages that the biggest name-brand schools offer.”
“In the pre-digital age, people hid their embarrassing thoughts from other people. In the digital age, they still hide them from other people, but not from the internet and in particular sites such as Google and PornHub, which protect their anonymity.”
“I have spent just about every day of the past four years analyzing Google data. This included a stint as a data scientist at Google, which hired me after learning about my racism research. And I continue to explore this data as an opinion writer and data journalist for the New York Times. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness; human sexuality; child abuse; abortion; advertising; religion; health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. Economists and other social scientists are always hunting for new sources of data, so let me be blunt: I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.”
