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Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Last accessed on Tuesday February 27, 2018

18 Highlight(s) | 2 Note(s)

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Have you ever fantasized about killing someone? _________ Were you tempted to lie? 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.

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And search rates for all these terms are at least twice as common among women as among men. If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.

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Men make as many searches looking for ways to perform oral sex on themselves as they do how to give a woman an orgasm.

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Obama seemed to say all the right things. All the traditional media congratulated Obama on his healing words. But new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it. Things that we think are working can have the exact opposite effect from the one we expect. Sometimes we need internet data to correct our instinct to pat ourselves on the back.

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Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, says that great businesses are built on secrets, either secrets about nature or secrets about people.

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

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In fact, I think Big Data can give a twenty-first-century update to a famous self-help quote: “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.”

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what we cannot do with it and, on occasion, what we ought not do with it.

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Coin 391 is your ticket to the good life! Or not. You have become another victim of one of the most diabolical aspects of “the curse of dimensionality.” It can strike whenever you have lots of variables (or “dimensions”)—in this case, one thousand coins—chasing not that many observations—in

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Social scientists call this an “out-of-sample” test. And the more variables you try, the more humble you have to be. The more variables you try, the tougher the out-of-sample test has to be. It is also crucial to keep track of every test you attempt. Then you can know exactly how likely it is you are falling victim to the curse and how skeptical

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Oakland A’s, a data-driven organization profiled in Moneyball, were giving up eight to ten wins per year in the mid-nineties because of their lousy defense. The solution is not always more Big Data. 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.

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As he invited her for a drive, there was one thing Donato, a twenty-year-old zoology student, did not know. She did not know her ex-boyfriend, twenty-two-year-old James Stoneham, had spent the previous three weeks searching for information on how to murder somebody and about murder law, mixed in with the occasional search about Donato. If she had known this, presumably she would not have gotten in the car. Presumably, she would not have been stabbed to death that evening.

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one step we should be very reluctant to take: going after individuals before any crime has been committed.

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There is a large ethical leap from protecting a local mosque to ransacking someone’s house. There is a large ethical leap from advertising suicide prevention to locking someone up in a mental hospital against his will.

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every month, there is more than one search related to suicide for every one hundred Americans. This brings to mind a quote from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Google search data shows how true that is, how common the thought of suicide is. However, every month, there are fewer than four thousand suicides in the United States. Suicidal ideation is incredibly common. Suicide is not.

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Suppose Islamophobia has skyrocketed and searches for “kill Muslims” have risen from 100 to 1,000. In this situation, math shows that the chances of a mosque being attacked has risen about fivefold, from about 2 percent to 10 percent. But the chances of an individual who searched for “kill Muslims” actually attacking a mosque remains only 1 in 10,000.

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The revolution, instead, will come piecemeal, study by study, finding by finding. Slowly, we will get a better understanding of the complex systems of the human mind and society.

Note:Social science works like a bunch of APIs talking to each other. No single equation rules over all. Maybe some loose governing flywheel though?

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most people are going to read the first fifty pages, get a few points, and move on with their lives.

Note:Mokal probably wishes this was a fifth page read

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