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pennyriley 's review for:
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Full title: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Stephens Davidowitz is a data scientist with a PhD in economics from Harvard and having worked at google. The big data he uses is largely from google, Facebook, and Pornhub. It’s easy these to days to get informations on likes and searches, and much, much more. There is so much data that is so easy to access, presumably in many cases more honest thatn self-reported data and easy to use for randomised A/B trials. Much of what he uncovers is surprising (Obama’s speech well received by pundits and the press seeking to minimise hate crimes and speech, actually inflamed racists as shown by the number of race hate searches immediately after the speech, for example) Other findings were much less surprising (how often you have sex is overreported). It mines the data to discover how important race was as a factor in both the Obama and Trump elections. He clearly and carefully explains the difference between correlation and causation and how difficult it can be to determine which you are dealing with. Stephens Davidowitz shows how valuable using such big data can be, while admitting that the data set is not necessarily perfect (how many searches have you made motivated by idle curiosity rather than a genuine search for answers?) but given the sheer amount of data is confident of his results. An interesting read, sometimes amusing, sometimes deeply serious.