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mj123 '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
This book is just okay. It has some interesting facts and ideas but there is a lot of repetitive commentary which really isn’t all the interesting, he’s just not that great a writer. While the idea of analyzing google searches is interesting and novel he hypes it a lot at the expense of previous methods. He seems to think that people are more honest in google searches and even in a few instances gives complementary information to support this, but overall were expected to just accept it’s “digital truth serum.” I found some of his reasoning to be particularly weak, for example when trying to explain that when people search for “nigger” they aren’t searching for rap lyrics because rap lyrics use “nigga”. While that may be true, he’s conflating the search word with the actual word in the lyrics. I mean, how do we know people know to search for “nigga” when looking for rap lyrics? I came away wondering whether I could trust his results and if I really learned anything.