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Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library | Book | QA76.9 .D343 S685155 2018 | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Foreword by Steven Pinker
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 world--provided 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 information--unprecedented in history--can tell us a great deal about who we are--the 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 didn't vote for Barack Obama because he's 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 who's 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 potential--revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our health--both 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.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
If your pal swears to God that he'll repay a loan, write it off: a tour of the many things that big data can tell us about ourselves.Trained as an economist and a philosopher, Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, ventures into sociology and psychology with his look at the corpus of search terms run through that site, "a bizarre dataset" that often yields uncomfortable results, revealing hidden reservoirs of racism, sexual insecurity, hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty. For instance, he writes, so-called undecided voters usually aren't undecided at all; if researching political issues using phrases such as "Trump Clinton taxes," one's vote will almost always go to the candidate named first. Pollsters predicted a heavy turnout of African-American voters in favor of Hillary Clinton, but those voters didn't show up. Meanwhile, the data that Stephens-Davidowitz sifts through reveal a strongly racially motivated vote on the part of whites, speaking to "a nasty, scary and widespread rage that was waiting for a candidate to give voice to it," even though those same people would profess publicly to being beyond issues of race and indeed "postracial," in that quaint term of yore. Some of the author's other findings concern social "tells," in the language of gambling, such as the hedge words someone might use in conversation: "Fellas, if a womansorta' likes her drink or kinda' feels chillyyou can bet that she is sorta' kinda' probably' not into you." Yet this book has broader implications than one's chances of success at a singles mixer. Stephens-Davidowitz looks, for example, at the statistics surrounding political assassination and what happens to a government afterward, recidivism among prison inmates (the harsher the conditions, the more likely a return to crime), the correlation of education and financial success, the keywords of lying, and other big-picture questions. Statistics wonks will find much of interest in this survey. For the rest of us, this book offers as many reasons to be dispirited about the human condition as the daily headlines. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
"Fake news" may be the current buzz words, but personal truths have never been so tangible thanks to data scientists. Stephens-Davidowitz (former Google data scientist and current New York Times columnist) unpacks this telling data, explaining exactly how people lie every day. Mining data from Google Searches to niche sites such as PornHub, it becomes quickly evident that digital data reveals more human truths than any formally conducted survey. Be warned; some of this information may be disturbing as there is no doctoring the digital accuracy when it comes to queries on sex, race, gender, and politics. These hidden revelations shed light on the potential for even deeper exploration of the human psyche as more academics embrace the use of Big Data for research. After reading this pivotal work, personal Google searches will never be the same. As for our author, he is banking that human curiosity outweighs self-censor for he has more big lies to explore. VERDICT A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen -Dubner's -Freakanomics.-Angela Forret, Clive P.L., IA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Foreword | p. xi |
Introduction: The Outlines of a Revolution | p. 1 |
Part I Data, Big and Small | |
1 Your Faulty Gut | p. 25 |
Part II The Powers of Big Data | |
2 Was Freud Right? | p. 45 |
3 Data Reimagined | p. 55 |
Bodies as Data | p. 62 |
Words as Data | p. 74 |
Pictures as Data | p. 97 |
4 Digital Truth Serum | p. 105 |
The Truth About Sex | p. 112 |
The Truth About Hate and Prejudice | p. 128 |
The Truth About the Internet | p. 140 |
The Truth About Child Abuse and Abortion | p. 145 |
The Truth About Your Facebook Friends | p. 150 |
The Truth About Your Customers | p. 153 |
Can We Handle the Truth? | p. 158 |
5 Zooming In | p. 165 |
What's Really Going On in Our Counties, Cities, and Towns? | p. 172 |
How We Fill Our Minutes and Hours | p. 190 |
Our Doppelgangers | p. 197 |
Data Stories | p. 205 |
6 All the World's a Lab | p. 207 |
The ABCs of A/B Testing | p. 209 |
Nature's Cruel-but Enlightening-Experiments | p. 221 |
Part III Big Data: Handle with Care | |
7 Big Data, Big Schmata? What It Cannot Do | p. 243 |
The Curse of Dimensionality | p. 246 |
The Overemphasis on What Is Measurable | p. 252 |
8 Mo Data, Mo Problems? What We Shouldn't Do | p. 257 |
The Danger of Empowered Corporations | p. 257 |
The Danger of Empowered Governments | p. 266 |
Conclusion: How Many People Finish Books? | p. 271 |
Acknowledgments | p. 285 |
Notes | p. 289 |
Index | p. 319 |