Everybody Lies

by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

At the privacy of their keyboards, people confess the strangest things,

people’s search for information is, in itself, information.

The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else.

We are living through an explosion in the amount and quality of all kinds of available information.

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

A major reason that Google searches are so valuable is not that there are so many of them; it is that people are so honest in them.

Perhaps hanging out every night with your partner and the same small group of people is not such a good thing; separate social circles may help make relationships stronger.

we tend to exaggerate the relevance of our own experience.

We tend to overestimate the prevalence of anything that makes for a memorable story.

I sometimes suspect that inside every data scientist is a kid trying to figure out why his childhood dreams didn’t come true.

Error Bot, which of course does not have a subconscious, was just as likely to make errors that could be perceived as sexual as real people were.

If a monkey types long enough, he will eventually write “to be or not to be.” If a person types long enough, she will eventually write “penistrian.”

Offering up new types of data is the first power of Big Data.

In the pre-digital age, people hid their embarrassing thoughts from other people. In the digital age, they still hide them from other people, but not from the internet and in particular sites such as Google and PornHub, which protect their anonymity.

Big Data allows us to finally see what people really want and really do, not what they say they want and say they do. Providing honest data is the second power of Big Data.

Allowing us to zoom in on small subsets of people is the third power of Big Data.

Allowing us to do many causal experiments is the fourth power of Big Data.

The point here is that Google didn’t dominate search merely by collecting more data than everyone else. They did it by finding a better type of data.

Or imagine a country that elected its leaders based on their pedigrees. We’d be led by people like George W. Bush. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Perhaps one day horse cardiologists and hematologists will solve these mysteries. But for now it doesn’t matter. Seder is in the prediction business, not the explanation business. And, in the prediction business, you just need to know that something works, not why.

One of the ways a man signals that he is attracted is obvious: he laughs at a woman’s jokes. Another is less obvious: when speaking, he limits the range of his pitch.

It turns out that, for a man looking to connect, the most beautiful word you can hear from a woman’s mouth may be “I”: it’s a sign she is feeling comfortable.

Men and women have always spoken in different ways. But, for tens of thousands of years, this data disappeared as soon as the sound waves faded in space. Now this data is preserved on computers and can be analyzed by computers.

Facebook data scientists have shown one exciting possibility. They can estimate a country’s Gross National Happiness every day.

If we are going to really code Gross National Happiness, we should use more sources than just Facebook status updates.

The owners of the American press, instead, are primarily giving the masses what they want so that the owners can become even richer.

The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!)