Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Overview

funny, dark, informative, inspiring, reflective

Pacing? Medium
Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

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.

Review (3.5/5 stars)

I remember going to Dalhousie University for a brief lecture about big data while attending the Humanities for Young People program. The concept of big data was a world-altering, ground-breaking technological advance that would push the human race forward. That was when I was about fifteen, so around seven years ago. Reading Everybody Lies now was exceptionally informative, while simultaneously stating the obvious. It both asked you to challenge your natural instincts about how the world works, and said that sometimes, according to the data — prejudices are factual. Basically, one of the biggest lessons from this book is to test everything before accepting it as a fact.

Something I liked about this book was that the author acknowledged their own bias, and practiced what they preached by declaring that they were an unreliable narrator. I thought it was all very meta, especially at the end of the final chapter, where Seth stated that according to the data most people don’t finish non-fiction novels, instead taking a few points from the beginning and middle and moving on with their lives. So he ended with something a bit lacklustre, assuring himself that according to the data, nobody was reading that far. I admire the craftiness of this conclusion, considering that one of the biggest points of the book was that big data isn’t entirely accurate and shouldn’t be solely relied upon.

While I found the concept and research behind Everybody Lies significant and informative, I thought it was a touch redundant to continue to repeat similar big data cases. I felt the text was repeating itself at times to make the book longer or to hammer down a point. Also, I couldn’t tell if the author was sex-crazed or if the big data surrounding human Google searches was sex-crazed. According to the book, sex isn’t searched that often in comparison to most searches, and yet the book continued to return to sexuality and pornography. Is Seth a sex-obsessed hermit, an unreliable narrator trying to prove a point, or is this an example of the “Coin 361” rule he speaks of when trying to pinpoint correlations in data? (I don’t remember the exact number of the coin, but it was something close to that.)

Something else I disliked about the book was the very obvious political agenda. When I read non-fiction, I favour those novels that have a clear attempt to stay away from their own biased political views. From the beginning of this book, it was constantly labelling Trump and his voters as racist, and constantly reprimanding Trump. I thought it was interesting how big data pointed to cities that searched the “N word” the most as those cities that also voted for Trump, and I liked how the book doubled back on itself later by mentioning that just because two things are correlated doesn’t always make them true, however the narrative took a consistent negative stand toward multiple political leaders in a way that I felt was unnecessary to the overarching message. (This is coming from someone who generally detests Trump’s whole vibe. I felt the same way about Michelle Obama’s memoir.)

Overall, though, I think Everybody Lies opened my eyes to just how useful big data can be; and simultaneously, how meaningless.

Notable Quotes

“Netflix learned a similar lesson early on in its life cycle: don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do.”

“Many people underreport embarrassing behaviors and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.”

“Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”

Content Warnings

Graphic: N/A

Moderate: Suicide, sexual content, disturbing imagery

Minor: N/A