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A review by mexscrabbler
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
5.0
Wow.
I was extremely impressed by this book, which I picked up after reading one of the author's columns in the NYT. The author is a data scientist who is applying his skills and techniques to the social "sciences," which up to now have not been very scientific. This is possible because of the availability of new, massive data sources (such as google queries) which can be used to analyze anonymized human behavior. His findings apply to marketing, sales, sociology, psychology, health, etc.
Here are some things I particularly found interesting, especially backed up by numbers:
- Deep, ingrained racism is alive and well in the US
- Prejudices towards girls and women are alive and well in the US
- People use social media to project an idealized image of themselves
- People's behavior is far from ideal!
- Some early childhood events can be shown to correlate with adult behaviors
- Depending on specific geography, some parts of the US are still the land of opportunity
- Doppelganger analysis (search for similarity) is useful in both baseball and the health industry
- The use of A/B testing by companies is making the internet more and more addictive
- The value of an Ivy league education is overestimated
Over the next few years, as more data scientists focus on these resources, we will start to glean more quantifiable insights into people's behavior.
Highly recommended
I was extremely impressed by this book, which I picked up after reading one of the author's columns in the NYT. The author is a data scientist who is applying his skills and techniques to the social "sciences," which up to now have not been very scientific. This is possible because of the availability of new, massive data sources (such as google queries) which can be used to analyze anonymized human behavior. His findings apply to marketing, sales, sociology, psychology, health, etc.
Here are some things I particularly found interesting, especially backed up by numbers:
- Deep, ingrained racism is alive and well in the US
- Prejudices towards girls and women are alive and well in the US
- People use social media to project an idealized image of themselves
- People's behavior is far from ideal!
- Some early childhood events can be shown to correlate with adult behaviors
- Depending on specific geography, some parts of the US are still the land of opportunity
- Doppelganger analysis (search for similarity) is useful in both baseball and the health industry
- The use of A/B testing by companies is making the internet more and more addictive
- The value of an Ivy league education is overestimated
Over the next few years, as more data scientists focus on these resources, we will start to glean more quantifiable insights into people's behavior.
Highly recommended