Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

This is a book about big data specifically the big data gleaned from services such as Google and Facebook. It has a look about how big data from these sites can reveal people’s true behaviour.

This book took awhile to get comfortable. The author’s chapters were a bit disorganized. It lacked cohesion because each chapter was more focused on data themes and ideas and not on any specific topic. One chapter is “Is Freud right?” and it has a few facts on people’s sexual desires and phallic objects. The next chapter “Data Reimagined” has tidbits on the flu, unemployment rate, Google, and horse racing. Once you got use to this jumping around, there were some interesting insights on how this data can be used in social science. I also got use to the author’s wry and tongue-in-cheek tone.

I listen to a lot of economics podcasts and read books by economists. If only I was this interested in economic ten years ago when I was actually in uni. I do think there some are interesting and insightful information when I read these books. However, I need to be more careful since I seem to request a lot of these books, but they aren’t always as informative or good as reviews lead me to believe. I have no regrets about picking up this book. It was a quick read and does show an aspect of human behaviour not explicitly studied in traditional academic social sciences. I like the ides in it and if the topics were more focussed, I would read another book by the same economist.

Read Sept 13-19, 2018.

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