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.
