4.0

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The bigger the effect, the fewer the number of observations necessary to see it. You only need to touch a hot stove once to realise that it’s dangerous. You may need to drink coffee thousands of times to determine whether it tends to give you a headache


What is the book about?



Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are is written by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a New York Times op-ed contributor and former Google data scientist. He is a graduate from Stanford and a post-doc in economics from Harvard.

This book is not about the TV series ‘House’ even though it uses the same catchphrase. Everybody Lies covers the power and implications of Big Data. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz calls his book the next level of Freakonomics. Some of the insights this books are as follows

1. We are inherently racist even in this day and age. We talk the right things but act differently. He demonstrates, using the data from Trump election, that while Americans told pollsters and surveys that they opposed his policies, this did not reflect in their voting patterns.
2.The data tells us that a man has a significantly improved chance of reaching the NBA if he is born in a middle class family who is reasonably well off and in a wealthy county. This goes against our usual thought process that people from economically disadvantaged classes are more likely to make it in big league sports like cricket or basketball.
3. Violent movies actually bring down crime.
4. The best educational institutions do not make it any easier to succeed. People who tend to succeed join them. The cause and effect are contrary to what we think.
5. People who invoke God are more likely to default on loans.
6. Everybody lies, especially on Facebook
7. Immigration accelerates success.