Everybody Lies

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Our research suggests that a person is significantly more likely to put the candidate they support first in a search that includes both candidates’ names.

But Google searches for information on voting in heavily black areas were way down. On election day, Clinton would be hurt by low black turnout.

In April 2014, Reisinger notes, Nigeria updated its GDP estimate, taking into account new sectors they may have missed in previous estimates. Their estimated GDP was now 90 percent higher.

In 1998, if you searched “cars” on a popular pre-Google search engine, you were inundated with porn sites. These porn sites had written the word “cars” frequently in white letters on a white background to trick the search engine. They then got a few extra clicks from people who meant to buy a car but got distracted by the porn.

If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

Americans, for instance, search for “porn” more than they search for “weather.”

the numbers are reversed. Adults with children are 3.6 times more likely to tell Google they regret their decision than are adults without children.

There are thousands of searches every year, for example, for “I hate cold weather,” “People are annoying,” and “I am sad.”

Surveys tell us there are far more gay men in tolerant states than intolerant states.

If a similar number of gay men are born in every state and mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role.

“Is my husband gay?” “Gay” is 10 percent more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband . . .” than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and ten times more common than “depressed.”

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

Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”

Users were filling their queues with plenty of movies. But days later, when they were reminded of the movies on the queue, they rarely clicked.

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

A Big Data update may be: “Never compare your Google searches to everyone else’s social media posts.”

When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

If his friends have a difficult background and little opportunity, he may struggle more to escape poverty.

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. So

early exposure to innovation. 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.

If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans.

New York City, Chetty’s team found, is not a particularly good place to raise a child if you want to ensure he reaches the upper middle class. It is a great place, my study found, if you want to give him a chance at fame. When you look at the factors

Usually, economists and sociologists focus on how to avoid bad outcomes, such as poverty and crime. Yet the goal of a great society is not only to leave fewer people behind; it is to help as many people as possible to really stand out.

For example, searches for “unblocked games” soar at 8 A.M. on weekdays and stay high through 3 P.M., no doubt in response to schools’ attempts to block access to mobile games on school property without banning students’ cell phones.

Search rates for “suicide” peak at 12:36 A.M. and are at the lowest levels around 9 A.M

The doppelganger search, the best methodology ever used to predict baseball player performance, said Boston should be patient with Ortiz.

when Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden.

But look how difficult it is to draw general conclusions from the Globe headlines.

The road to a clickable arrow is paved with ugly stars, faulty positionings, and gimmicky fonts.

“There are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”

this category of natural experiments—utilizing sharp numerical cutoffs—is so powerful that it has its own name among economists: regression discontinuity. Anytime there is a precise number that divides people into two different groups—a discontinuity—economists can compare—or regress—the outcomes of people very, very close to the cutoff.

People adapt to their experience, and people who are going to be successful find advantages in any situation.

A special sauce is often necessary to help Big Data work best: the judgment of humans and small surveys, what we might call small data.

For example, people who like Mozart, thunderstorms, and curly fries on Facebook tend to have higher IQs.

It is a large leap for data science to go from trying to predict the actions of a city to trying to predict the actions of an individual. Let’s

psychology got off track by trying to copy physics. Physics had success finding simple laws that held in all times and all places.

We can do this for kidney stones. We can do this for anxiety and depression and Alzheimer’s and pancreatic cancer and high blood pressure and back pain and constipation and nosebleeds.

A couple of Levitt’s studies were found to have coding errors. Levitt said some politically incorrect things about global warming. Freakonomics has gone out of favor in intellectual circles.