Everybody Lies

Every day we continually search the internet or we 'google it'.  What we search is accumulating over eight trillion gigabytes of data daily.  This truly staggering amount of information, which is certainly unprecedented in history - can tell us a lot about who we are:  What we fear, desire, and behaviors and habits that drive us and the calculated and uncalculated decisions we all make in every interaction or situation.   From the extraordinary to the ordinary, we can gain remarkable and sometimes surprising insight into our psyche, personality and subconscious that less than a decade ago seemed incomprehensible.  

I recently read Everbody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - a trained economist and a philosopher.  Seth offers fascinating, surprising and sometimes scary insights into everything from finance to ethics to sports to ethnicity to sexuality, and more, all pulled from the world of big data.   

He asks remarkably captivating questions:  
What percentage of white voters didn't vote for Barack Obama because he's black?  
Does where you go to school affect how successful you are in life?  Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls?  
Do violent films affect crime rate?  
Can you beat the stock market?  
How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and whose more self-conscious about sex, men or women?  

And so many other questions.  

Seth's book investigates these questions as well as many others.  The revelations of Everbody Lies can help us understand ourselves and our lives better.   He attempts to draw on studies and analyses on how we live and think and further demonstrates in the fascinating and often funny way the extent to which all the world is admittedly a big laboratory.  

Some of his conclusions are ranging from really strange but valid to a very thought-provoking to sometimes even disturbing.  

Everybody Lies the power of this digital truth and its profound potential - reveals biases deeply embedded within us, the information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we are often afraid to ask that might be essential to our physical and emotional health.  

Ultimately the book challenged me to think differently about how I understand and perceive big data and its influence and also how I see the world.  In fact, big data isn't intrinsically dangerous or harmful, and it can be extraordinarily valuable and engaging.  

 You won't be able to put it down once you start reading it.  ​