A review by sholmstedt
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

3.0

I chose to purchase this book because I wanted to know what the Internet could tell us about lies. Intro and first chapter: so far, so good, interesting stuff. Then, inexplicably, we were taken into a chapter about whether athletes who come from poverty perform better than athletes who come from the middle class. And therein is the problem with this book: It's trying to be Freakonomics (or The Signal and The Noise) and not sticking to the really juicy thing we want to know more about: lying, shame, Americans leading secret lives. It wavers back and forth between search/social data, and big data questions in general. This is really on the editor (the conclusion also meanders and contains a lot of self-aggrandizing fluff that could have been chopped.) If you're a Freakonomics fan hungry to hear about horse heart ventricles, knock yourself out. If you want information on what Americans lie about, you might be doing a lot of skipping around.