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659 reviews for:
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
3.82 AVERAGE
659 reviews for:
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
3.82 AVERAGE
An interesting book that brings up a good point about different data sources to mine. But this book also demonstrates the danger of bringing preconceived ideas into the analysis. The author's conclusions could be the right ones, but he doesn't spend much time talking about alternative ways the same data could be interpreted. So to me, this book becomes an entertaining but ultimately light way to look at google searches.
informative
medium-paced
Entertaining, but didn't change my mind regarding social sciences as soft sciences.
For social sciences to have the same respect as physics, biology, and mathematics, their conclusions must be repeatable. If anything, Everybody Lies shows that many of the conclusions are only correlated for that moment in time. Ten years from now, those conclusions won't be relevant. Just like much of [b:Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything|1202|Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything|Steven D. Levitt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1550917827s/1202.jpg|5397] has aged out of favor, most of Stephens-Davidowitz's conclusions using google data will follow suit.
So why the 4 stars? I was thoroughly entertained! How could I not be when there's a book about using PornHub data?
For social sciences to have the same respect as physics, biology, and mathematics, their conclusions must be repeatable. If anything, Everybody Lies shows that many of the conclusions are only correlated for that moment in time. Ten years from now, those conclusions won't be relevant. Just like much of [b:Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything|1202|Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything|Steven D. Levitt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1550917827s/1202.jpg|5397] has aged out of favor, most of Stephens-Davidowitz's conclusions using google data will follow suit.
So why the 4 stars? I was thoroughly entertained! How could I not be when there's a book about using PornHub data?
Overall, I found this book to be an enjoyable and fairly informative introduction to "Big Data" and why data analytics matters and will continue to be absolutely vital to the social sciences (and all other sciences and fields of study, really). The author's main focus of study was data from Google searches and also the website PornHub. If you're squeamish about human sexuality then I would not recommend this book, but if such things interest you (and other crazy truths about humanity and our country that can be revealed from internet searches), then I definitely recommend it. I can also see fans of Malcolm Gladwell enjoying this book. I know that the author kept a lot of the details of the math/stats out of the book to make it easier for a general audience to read, but every now and then it seemed to me that point A did not connect to point B and I was left wondering exactly how he reached a certain conclusion. However, this is probably me being nit-picky. Anyway--I laughed. I gawked. And I seriously have to hand it to data scientists that theirs is probably the most crucial field of all right now and in the future.
The book surely provided an overview on why people should look into big data, however the practical takeaways were missing for me.
Not bad, an interesting overview of what's going on with the analysis possible with some of today's big data sets. There are some stylistic quirks, most notable in the conclusion, which is hopelessly meta. Just write your book. There's also a bit of the usual cishet normativeness of these techie books, unfortunately. The author seems possibly aware of the unbiased perspective but doesn't quite achieve it.
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
funny
informative
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
A look at how all of the data that we put on the Internet can be used in various social sciences to answer some interesting questions about what really makes us tick.