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Everybody Lies

Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Nov 13, 2017tjdickey rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
"Google searches are the most important data set ever collected on the human psyche." The author, an economist and former Google data scientist, begins from this premise and examines the way that data analysis can reveal more about humanity than our answers to surveys (and certainly more than our self-conscious and image-conscious Facebook posts). As one telling example, Stephens-Davidowitz shows that Americans use the n-word in Google searches at an alarming rate (despite both polls and conventional wisdom about race relations), and that this behavior is spread equally across both political parties and across Eastern states. Parents ask Google twice as often if a daughter is overweight than a son (despite more overweight boys in the population); Google searches potentially also reveal data about sexual behaviors and hang-ups, about suicide rates, and about cannabis use. Methodologically speaking, the author seems to place too much trust on pornography site searches as evidence of sexual tastes across humanity, but his overall introduction to "big data" analysis for social questions is strong and easy for the layperson to follow.