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mallorycarson 's review for:
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Steven Pinker, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
I chose this book as part of Book Riot's 2018 Read Harder challenge for a book about social science. I really wanted to give this book 2 stars, maybe 2.5 stars because I found myself really just wanting to get through it. I'm not sure if that is 100% the book's fault or partly mine because I wanted to move on. Either way, here we are.
In general, I did not care for this book. Mainly, the structure, writing style, and immense biased and arrogance that is dripping from this book. First, this book felt like chaos. I'd be reading a paragraph about his thoughts on what "Big Data" says about raising your kid in a certain area and the next sentence would dive straight in to a study he did on what people googled about pregnancy.
There were some very interesting "facts" in here, that really should be called "insights" maybe. There were a lot of things that really any one can draw from Google Trends but the author makes very bold proclamations from it. Other times, there were very interesting facts backed by other studies and science.
Maybe this just wasn't for me. I've read a few books about social science but this one just didn't sit well. It felt like stream of consciousness a lot of times with some graphs throughout, with a lot of sports stories and sex. Either way, lots of people loved it so it may be 30% me and 70% this book.
In general, I did not care for this book. Mainly, the structure, writing style, and immense biased and arrogance that is dripping from this book. First, this book felt like chaos. I'd be reading a paragraph about his thoughts on what "Big Data" says about raising your kid in a certain area and the next sentence would dive straight in to a study he did on what people googled about pregnancy.
There were some very interesting "facts" in here, that really should be called "insights" maybe. There were a lot of things that really any one can draw from Google Trends but the author makes very bold proclamations from it. Other times, there were very interesting facts backed by other studies and science.
Maybe this just wasn't for me. I've read a few books about social science but this one just didn't sit well. It felt like stream of consciousness a lot of times with some graphs throughout, with a lot of sports stories and sex. Either way, lots of people loved it so it may be 30% me and 70% this book.