Everybody Lies

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Economists and other social scientists are always hunting for new sources of data, so let me be blunt: I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

People are actually more likely to seek out jokes when things are going well in life than when they aren’t.

You don’t always need a ton of data to find important insights. You need the right data.

“Seth, you need a nice girl. Not too pretty. Very smart. Good with people. Social, so you will do things. Sense of humor, because you have a good sense of humor.”

Good data science is less complicated than people think. The best data science, in fact, is surprisingly intuitive. What makes data science intuitive? At its core, data science is about spotting patterns and predicting how one variable will affect another. People do this all the time.

Having a common core group of friends, the researchers found, is a strong predictor that a relationship will not last.

As you can see, our intuition alone, when we stay away from the computers and go with our gut, can sometimes amaze. But it can make big mistakes. Grandma may have fallen into one cognitive trap: we tend to exaggerate the relevance of our own experience. In the parlance of data scientists, we weight our data, and we give far too much weight to one particular data point: ourselves.

First, because poor men tend to end up shorter. Scholars have long known that childhood health care and nutrition play a large role in adult health. This is why the average man in the developed world is now four inches taller than a century and a half ago. Data suggests that Americans from poor backgrounds, due to weaker early-life health care and nutrition, are shorter.

The Big Data revolution is less about collecting more and more data. It is about collecting the right data.

In people’s teens, they’re drinking. In their twenties, they are working. In their thirties and onward, they are praying.

People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives. They lie to themselves.

On Google, there are sixteen times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk.

In Facebook world, it seems every young adult is at a cool party Saturday night. In the real world, most are home alone, binge-watching shows on Netflix.

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, says that great businesses are built on secrets, either secrets about nature or secrets about people.

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

Areas that spend more on education provide a better chance to poor kids. Places with more religious people and lower crime do better.

American women in the top 1 percent of income live, on average, ten years longer than American women in the bottom 1 percent of income. For men, the gap is fifteen years.

Rich people everywhere tend to develop healthier habits—on average, they exercise more, eat better, smoke less, and are less likely to suffer from obesity. Rich people can afford the treadmill, the organic avocados, the yoga classes.

There is a large amount of research showing that habits are contagious. So poor people living near rich people may pick up a lot of their habits.

It demonstrated that, when it comes to figuring out who will cheat on their taxes, the key isn’t determining who is honest and who is dishonest. It is determining who knows how to cheat and who doesn’t.

having more college graduates in an area is a strong predictor of the success of the people born there.

One of the fields where college towns are most successful in producing top dogs is music. A kid in a college town will be exposed to unique concerts, unusual radio stations, and even independent record stores. And this isn’t limited to the arts. College towns also incubate more than their expected share of notable businesspeople. Maybe early exposure to cutting-edge art and ideas helps them, too.

These are just correlations, but they do suggest that growing up near big ideas is better than growing up with a big backyard.

Search rates for “how to roll a joint” peak between 1 and 2 A

The media bombard us with correlation-based studies seemingly every day. For example, we have been told that those of us who drink a moderate amount of alcohol tend to be in better health. That is a correlation. Does this mean drinking a moderate amount will improve one’s health—a causation? Perhaps not. It could be that good health causes people to drink a moderate amount.

Life is not a video game. You can’t replay it under different scenarios until you get the results you want.

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

People adapt to their experience, and people who are going to be successful find advantages in any situation. The factors that make you successful are your talent and your drive.

For this book, that big point is this: social science is becoming a real science. And this new, real science is poised to improve our lives.

Certainly, if you turned math into a game, students would have more fun, learn more, and do better on tests. Right? Wrong. Students who were taught fractions via a game tested worse than those who learned fractions in a more standard way.

Everybody lies. Every narrator is unreliable.