About this item
Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our worldprovided we ask the right questions. By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of informationunprecedented in historycan tell us a great deal about who we arethe fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable. Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didnt vote for Barack Obama because hes black Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls Do violent films affect the crime rate Can you beat the stock market How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and whos more self-conscious about sex, men or women Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potentialrevealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions were afraid to ask that might be essential to our healthboth emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
About the Author
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a PhD in economics from Harvard. His research--which uses new, big data sources to uncover hidden behaviors and attitudes--has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. He lives in New York City.www.everybodyliesbook.com
