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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
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
dark
informative
slow-paced
I wanted to read this for a supplement to work, but a lot of this was about big data in a field I would not feel comfortable sharing with my coworkers, porn. I understand why they brought it up to make a point, but it was...a lot. Other good content topics, but I wished they talked more about those and less about porn.
Will definitely bum you out with how much humanity truly sucks, but the insights and methodology are fascinating. I love content that challenges my perceptions of the world with cold hard facts and this book gets the job done. I found myself constantly learning and uncomfortable in a good way. I only give it 4 stars because it occasionally dragged on by overemphasizing technical and mathematical content.
Overall an interesting and short book but I've probably spent too much time working on big data for any of it to seem groundbreaking. Good choice if you want a casual introduction to the benefits and pitfalls of using data to figure out what people really want.
informative
slow-paced
What an interesting book! I have read quite a few popular books on specialists in a wide range of career fields and I have found I love stepping into another persons world for a few days. This one was especially interesting to me because it’s my career field. It says it’s about data science but I would say it’s more about a subfield of big data called Big Psych. This was the most interesting intersection between psychology and data science. My one complaint is that I didn’t appreciate the authors strong unveiled political biases.
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I feel a little unconvinced that google searches are a good proxy of people’s true beliefs and wishes generally except in a few cases. I also didn’t like his detached discussion of racism and violence that have real world impact. That’s not exactly a problem with his scholarship but I didn’t like it. One major issue I couldn’t shake was the bisexual erasure in discussion of who’s gay. He also talked about himself a little too much. There some standout topics he touched on that I did enjoy, largely discussing the work of other economists. His work around what things people seem worried about was interesting and his general look at voting trends was pretty clever. I’m just not convinced of a one to one definitive conclusion on the individual level from the data
I thoroughly enjoyed this book - perhaps a tad too many baseball mentions but overall it was fascinating. Google really does know everything!
The premiss (focused mostly on America) is to show how Big Data helps us to understand human nature in ways we never have been able to before. Everybody lies (thus the title): to themselves, to pollsters, on social media etc. But home alone with your anonymity and google - what are you typing into that search bar?
The millions of searches paint a far more accurate picture of what America hates, likes, enjoys, and thinks about than any other data and that ‘big data’ can be used for lots of good: medical diagnosis, stopping child abuse, proving that attending the best school instead of a solid one actually have little effect on future incomes, etc.
An ongoing theme throughout the novel is how big data predicted Trump’s ride to victory on the wave of racism that already existed, not that he created and that really ‘zooming into’ Big Data is where the heaps of information can be found.
I hope we get more from this author and his mind-blowing work!
The premiss (focused mostly on America) is to show how Big Data helps us to understand human nature in ways we never have been able to before. Everybody lies (thus the title): to themselves, to pollsters, on social media etc. But home alone with your anonymity and google - what are you typing into that search bar?
The millions of searches paint a far more accurate picture of what America hates, likes, enjoys, and thinks about than any other data and that ‘big data’ can be used for lots of good: medical diagnosis, stopping child abuse, proving that attending the best school instead of a solid one actually have little effect on future incomes, etc.
An ongoing theme throughout the novel is how big data predicted Trump’s ride to victory on the wave of racism that already existed, not that he created and that really ‘zooming into’ Big Data is where the heaps of information can be found.
I hope we get more from this author and his mind-blowing work!