Contemporary Authors

• Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are Dey St. (New York, NY), 2017

https://lccn.loc.gov/2017297094 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, author. Everybody lies : big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are / Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. First edition. [New York, NY] : Dey St., an imprint of William Morrow, [2017]©2017 xi, 338 pages : illustrations (some color), maps ; 22 cm QA76.9.D343 S68515 2017 ISBN: 9780062390851 (hardcover)0062390856 (hardcover)

• Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - http://sethsd.com/

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has used data from the internet -- particularly Google searches -- to get new insights into the human psyche.

  Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics.

  His 2017 book, Everybody Lies, published by HarperCollins, was a New York Times bestseller; a PBS NewsHour Book of the Year; and an Economist Book of the Year.

  Seth worked for one-and-a-half years as a data scientist at Google and is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. He is a former visiting lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

  He received his BA in philosophy, Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard.

  In high school, Seth wrote obituaries for the local newspaper, the Bergen Record, and was a juggler in theatrical shows. He now lives in Brooklyn and is a passionate fan of the Mets, Knicks, Jets, Stanford football, and Leonard Cohen.

  Seth also speaks. Some testimonials on his talks are below.

  For speaking engagements, Seth is exclusively represented by The Lavin Agency.
  For inquiries contact Charles Yao, Director of Intellectual Talent
  cyao@thelavinagency.com | www.thelavinagency.com/speakers/seth-stephens-davidowitz

  “We couldn’t be happier with Seth’s presentation to our Digital Marketing, Content Creation and IT teams at Abbott’s recent E-Summit. He was great to work with, focusing on those areas of his research we felt would resonate best with our colleagues. His delivery was sharp, engaging and funny and he received a perfect five of five stars from all attendees who answered the conference survey. We hope he is available next time we need an engaging speaker.”

  — Thomas F Poelking, senior manager, Abbott

  “Seth’s curious intellect leaves no subject unturned – his talk was both wonderfully educational and entertaining backed by real data and thorough research.
  ”

  — Grace Hung, CLSA, Global Content Director

  “Seth’s research will take what you think you know about yourself and your peers and flips it on its head. A compelling narrative for any marketer seeking to better understand the real wants and needs of their consumers. ”

  — Scott Galloway, Founder, L2

• Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-stephens-davidowitz-b7053918/

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  3rd degree connection3rd
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  Brooklyn, New York 500+ 500+ connections

  NYT Bestselling Author of Everybody Lies; Contributing Op-Ed Writer at The New York Times; Keynote Speaker
  Seth’s Articles & Activity
  2,355 followers
  A former Google data scientist looked at what searches correlate to unemployment. "Jobs" isn't the answer.

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on LinkedIn
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  Why I geek out about data and human and cultural insights. Because they can help us, as marketers and humans, be the change we wish to see in the world. #marketing #bigdata #bethechange Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Seth liked
  Picked up an incredible book when I got to the Sacramento International Airport this afternoon and haven’t been able to put it down. Understanding the human thought process through big data analytics. We are in a knowledge economy now and knowledge of how others obtain information is the currency which will make you valuable and is how you are able to stay competitive in the market. I highly recommend Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s New York Times Bestseller “#EverybodyLies: Big Data, New Data, and What The Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” to anyone, especially those in business development and marketing. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

  Seth liked a comment
  Picked up an incredible book when I got to the Sacramento International Airport this afternoon and haven’t been able to put it down. Understanding the human thought process through big data analytics. We are in a knowledge economy now and knowledge of how others obtain information is the currency which will make you valuable and is how you are able to stay competitive in the market. I highly recommend Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s New York Times Bestseller “#EverybodyLies: Big Data, New Data, and What The Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” to anyone, especially those in business development and marketing. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

  Seth liked a comment

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  Experience

  The New York Times
  Contributing Op-Ed Writer
  Company Name The New York Times
  Dates Employed Nov 2013 – Present Employment Duration 4 yrs 5 mos
  Location New York, NY

  I try to uncover secrets of human nature hidden in Big Data. I do original research on sex, anxiety, depression, child abuse, racism, sexism and many other topics.
  The Wharton School
  Visiting Lecturer
  Company Name The Wharton School
  Dates Employed Jan 2017 – Apr 2017 Employment Duration 4 mos

  I designed and taught a course on Big Data.
  Google
  Data Scientist
  Company Name Google
  Dates Employed Apr 2013 – Dec 2014 Employment Duration 1 yr 9 mos

  I did research on how to combine traditional surveys with new internet data sources. I also helped develop new methods to measure advertising effectiveness.

  Education

  Harvard University
  Harvard University

  Degree Name PhD

  Field Of Study Economics

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2007 – 2013
  New York University
  New York University

  Degree Name Special student

  Field Of Study Mathematics

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2006 – 2007
  Stanford University
  Stanford University

  Degree Name BA

  Field Of Study Philosophy

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2000 – 2004

  Activities and Societies: Phi Beta Kappa
  University of Oxford
  University of Oxford

  Degree Name Stanford in Oxford Program

  Field Of Study Philosophy; Political Science; Psychology

  Dates attended or expected graduation 2003 – 2003

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• Harper Collins - https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-123544/seth-stephens-davidowitz

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Photo by Jim Hauser
  Biography

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, a lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. His research has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. He lives in New York City.

  www.everybodyliesbook.com

• Everybody Lies - http://deystreet.harpercollins.com/everybodylies/

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, a lecturer at Wharton, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a PhD in economics from Harvard. His research—which uses new, big data sources to uncover hidden behaviors and attitudes—has appeared in The Journal of Public Economics and other prestigious publications. He lives in New York City.

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Print Marked Items
NEW AND NOTABLE: Listing does
not preclude future review
Kendrick Frazier and Benjamin Radford
Skeptical Inquirer.
42.2 (March-April 2018): p62+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Full Text:
EVERYBODY LIES: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Foreword by Steven Pinker. Yes, everybody lies, and now we have ways of quantifying it. The author, a former Google data scientist, uses Google search tools, mainly Google Trends and Google AdWords, plus his own algorithm developed as his PhD dissertation, to study how frequently words or phrases are searched for in different locations and times. The results tell us things public opinion polls and other conventional tools can't, some of them disturbing--like actually how and when many people search for racist terms (much more frequently than you'd think) and where they live, not just in the South but across parts of the East and upper Midwest east of the Mississippi. People reveal more about their sexual concerns in their online searches than in any polling. The revelations keep coming, he says, about mental illness, child abuse, abortion, religion, and health. We have an entirely new, enormous dataset that offers "surprising new perspectives" on all these fields. "Let me blunt," says the author: "I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche." This book is the result of his mining that treasured dataset and many others: Facebook, Wikipedia, and others. The data are all anonymous but, when analyzed, extraordinarily revealing. Harper Collins, 2017,338 pp., $27.99.
LEONARDO DA VINCI. Walter Isaacson. Today Leonardo seems best known for his Mona Lisa and The Last Supper paintings, but he was of course a highly original Renaissance genius of broad interests and deep curiosity who in everything he did combined art and science, an aesthetic sense with a desire to understand the most basic workings of nature. In this fresh and
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reader-friendly new biography, Walter Isaacson emphasizes the unique ways of thinking Leonardo brought to all of his work, with deep study and understanding of light, shadows, and optics, dissection of bodies to understand their underlying musculature, and study of the behavior of water, including eddies and vortexes. He made detailed, systematic observations and designed and carried out clever experiments. Isaacson examines each of Leonardo's paintings and each of the topics Leonardo studied, showing his unique abilities to illustrate the inner workings of everything from complex machines to the anatomy, neurology, and physiology of the human body. His anatomical dissections and his studies of eddies in fluids enabled him to understand how the aortic valve works centuries before others reached the same insights. The paradox: In his hundreds of surviving notebooks totaling 7,200 pages, Leonardo documented all his studies, with beautiful and creative illustrations. But he didn't publish any of this, leaving future generations to rediscover and appreciate his extraordinary insights. With color images of 144 of Leonardo's drawings and painting. Simon & Schuster, 2017, 599 pp., $35.
MEMORY WARP: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die. Mark Pendergrast. Pendergrast is author of about a dozen books, several of them on false memories (including Victims of Memory and the recent The Most Hated Man in America, about the accusations against Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky). Though the heyday of false memories (often linked to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s) is gone, this book is a timely warning to those who thought that the memory wars had been won--or at least settled. As Pendergrast demonstrates, discredited theories of repressed memory are still very much with us in modern America. To psychologists and skeptics, the notion of repressed memories has been thoroughly discredited, due in large part to the pioneering research of Elizabeth Loftus, recipient of the Maddox Prize [see SI, March/April 201?). But--like homeopathy, faith healing, and so many other topics well-known to the scientifically knowledgeable as baseless--the vast majority of Americans are unaware of this fact. Due in part to well-intentioned but misguided [and enormously influential) "victim support" books such as The Courage to Heal, bogus claims about repressed memories are still very much with us and still victimizing innocent people. Upper Access Books, 201?, 444 pp., $19.95.
NO SACRED COWS: Investigating Myths, Cults, and the Supernatural. David G. McAfee. With a foreword by Yvette d'Entremont--better known as SciBabe. In seventeen chapters, McAfee (author of several books on secular and atheist topics) covers a wide range of skeptical subjects, including ghosts, psychics, aliens, conspiracy theories, psychological biases, science communication, and much more. McAfee includes interviews with luminaries such as Banachek (a newly elected CSI fellow and one of the two Project Alpha mentalists who fooled scientists under the direction of the Amazing Randi); Nate Phelps (social activist fighting intolerance); Jim
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Underdown (Independent Investigations Group leader); Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic magazine], and others. But he also interviews some true believers including self-styled psychics as well. This is done not in service of false equivalence but instead to let them explain their worldviews; it provides insight into how they think and therefore into how best to approach their claims and perchance change their minds. McAfee's stint as "Suroh the Seer" is reminiscent of Ray Hyman's early foray into palm reading as well. An informed and enlightening read blending personal experience with the majortenets of organized skepticism. Pitchstone Publishing, 2017, 444 pp., $17.95.
THE TRUTH SEEKER'S HANDBOOK: A Science-Based Guide. Gleb Tsipursky. In 26? oversized pages, Tsipursky (creator of the Intentional Insights project and an assistant professor at Ohio State University) and nine collaborators attempt to provide pragmatic tools to help you improve your rationality by discarding false beliefs and developing a clearer version of reality. This, explains Tsipursky, may help avoid what most people do: "let their thoughts, feelings, and behavior patterns drift on waves of life experience, buffeted by storms of dramatic events and floating calmly in more quiet times." The fifty-one chapters are based on research in behavioral science; you can read all the cited papers from links given in the digital version. Intentional Insights Press, 201?, 267 pp., $19.99.
UNDEAD UPRISING: Haiti, Horror, and the Zombie Complex. John Cussans.
In pop culture, zombies now rival vampires in popularity; television, books, films, and graphic novels are rife with these undead characters, from World War Z to The Walking Dead. Stories and legends of spirits and the undead have been with us for millennia, but as John Cussans reveals, the zombie has a very specific history rooted in the Vodou folklore of Haiti. Involvingf igures as disparate as Anton Mesmer, Wes Craven, ethnobotantist Wade Davis, and dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Cussans examines how the zombie figure has been exploited and co-opted by Hollywood, used to justify xenophobia and racism, and much more. In explaining the phenomenon, Cussans proposes the "Zombie Complex, a range of ethica, psychological, and political thought-problems clustered around the central figure of the living corpse." Skeptics interested in cryptozoology and folklore will enjoy this fascinating look at the cultural, historical, and political origins of the Haitian zombie. Strange Attractor/The MIT Press, 2017, 404 pp., $26.95.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Frazier, Kendrick, and Benjamin Radford. "NEW AND NOTABLE: Listing does not preclude
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future review." Skeptical Inquirer, Mar.-Apr. 2018, p. 62+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530817588/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8182609e. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530817588
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Truth, all the truth-and statistics; Information technology
The Economist.
423.9042 (May 27, 2017): p74(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Big Data is remodelling social science just as the microscope transformed medicine
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. By Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Dey Street; 288 pages. To be published in Britain by Bloomsbury in July
TO MANY people Big Data is less shiny than it was a year ago. After Hillary Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, her vaunted analytics team took much of the blame for failing to spot warnings in the midwestern states that cost her the presidency. But according to research by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, Mrs Clinton's real mistake was not to rely too much on newfangled statistics, but rather too little.
Mrs Clinton used the finest number-crunchers. But their calculations still relied largely on traditional sources, such as voter files and polls. In contrast, Mr Stephens-Davidowitz turned to a novel form of data: Google searches. In particular, he counted the frequency of queries for the word "nigger", America's most toxic racial slur. Contrary to the popular perception that overt racism is limited to the South, the numbers showed comparatively high interest in the term across the Midwest and the rustbelt relative to the rest of the country. In the Republican primaries in 2016 that variable outperformed all others in predicting which geographic areas would support Mr Trump over his intraparty rivals. Had Mrs Clinton's team made better use of such information, they might have concluded, before it was too late, that the foundations of her "blue firewall" were cracking.
This is just one of the striking findings in "Everybody Lies", a whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche using search data as its guide. Some of the book's discoveries reaffirm conventional wisdom, like the concentration of queries about do-it-yourself abortions and about men who are confused about their sexual orientation in America's socially conservative South. Some turn it on its head: although rags-to-riches narratives are widespread in basketball, the data show that growing up in poverty actually reduces a boy's chances of making the National Basketball Association--perhaps because poor children are less likely to grow tall enough to play in it. Some results are both disturbing and perplexing, such as the prevalence of searches on pornographic sites for videos depicting sexual violence against women, and the fact that women themselves seek out these scenes at least twice as often as men do. Other results are just weird:
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why are adult men in India so eager to have their wives breastfeed them?
The empirical findings in "Everybody Lies" are so intriguing that the book would be a page- turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list. But Mr Stephens-Davidowitz also puts forward a deft argument: the web will revolutionise social science just as the microscope and telescope transformed the natural sciences.
Modern microeconomics, sociology, political science and quantitative psychology all depend to a large extent on surveys of at most a few thousand respondents. In contrast, he says, there are "four unique powers of Big Data": it provides new sources of information, such as pornographic searches; it captures what people actually do or think, rather than what they choose to tell pollsters; it enables researchers to home in on and compare demographic or geographic subsets; and it allows for speedy randomised controlled trials that demonstrate not just correlation but causality. As a result, he predicts, "the days of academics devoting months to recruiting a small number of undergraduates to perform a single test will come to an end." In their place, "the social and behavioural sciences are most definitely going to scale," and the conclusions researchers will be able to reach are "the stuff of science, not pseudoscience".
Mr Stephens-Davidowitz is not just any knee-jerk cheerleader for the Big Data revolution. He devotes ample space both to the ways that quantitative findings can lead decision-makers astray, and to the risk that the nearly omniscient owners of such data sets may find ways to abuse them. If liking motorcycles turns out to predict a lower IQ, he asks, should employers be allowed to reject job applicants who admit to liking motorcycles? As a result, he calls for extreme caution in extending the use of Big Data from large groups of people to making decisions about individuals. On the whole, however, the author is an optimist. As a result of improvements in information technology, he writes, humans will "be able to learn a lot more" about themselves "in a lot less time".
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.
By Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Truth, all the truth-and statistics; Information technology." The Economist, 27 May 2017, p.
74(US). Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492775397 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ed101671. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492775397
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Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth: EVERYBODY LIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth EVERYBODY LIES Dey Street/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-06-239085-1
If your pal swears to God that he'll repay a loan, write it off: a tour of the many things that big data can tell us about ourselves.Trained as an economist and a philosopher, Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, ventures into sociology and psychology with his look at the corpus of search terms run through that site, "a bizarre dataset" that often yields uncomfortable results, revealing hidden reservoirs of racism, sexual insecurity, hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty. For instance, he writes, so-called undecided voters usually aren't undecided at all; if researching political issues using phrases such as "Trump Clinton taxes," one's vote will almost always go to the candidate named first. Pollsters predicted a heavy turnout of African-American voters in favor of Hillary Clinton, but those voters didn't show up. Meanwhile, the data that Stephens-Davidowitz sifts through reveal a strongly racially motivated vote on the part of whites, speaking to "a nasty, scary and widespread rage that was waiting for a candidate to give voice to it," even though those same people would profess publicly to being beyond issues of race and indeed "postracial," in that quaint term of yore. Some of the author's other findings concern social "tells," in the language of gambling, such as the hedge words someone might use in conversation: "Fellas, if a woman...'sorta' likes her drink or 'kinda' feels chilly...you can bet that she is 'sorta' 'kinda' 'probably' not into you." Yet this book has broader implications than one's chances of success at a singles mixer. Stephens-Davidowitz looks, for example, at the statistics surrounding political assassination and what happens to a government afterward, recidivism among prison inmates (the harsher the conditions, the more likely a return to crime), the correlation of education and financial success, the keywords of lying, and other big-picture questions. Statistics wonks will find much of interest in this survey. For the rest of us, this book offers as many reasons to be dispirited about the human condition as the daily headlines.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth: EVERYBODY LIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668432/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2902e39c. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668432
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Frazier, Kendrick, and Benjamin Radford. "NEW AND NOTABLE: Listing does not preclude future review." Skeptical Inquirer, Mar.-Apr. 2018, p. 62+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530817588/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8182609e. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. "Truth, all the truth-and statistics; Information technology." The Economist, 27 May 2017, p. 74(US). Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492775397/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ed101671. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. "Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth: EVERYBODY LIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668432/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2902e39c. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.

• CBS News
  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/everybody-lies-book-data-science-seth-stephens-davidowitz/
  Word count: 414

  Can what you Google reveal your true self?

  Tech giant IBM says two and a half quintillion bytes of data are generated every day – equivalent to 90 years of HD video. To put that in perspective, that's a 2 and a 5 with 17 zeroes behind them.
  book-cover.jpg

  A new book examines what all this data reveals about us. Data scientist and New York Times op-ed contributor Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are." He joined "CBS This Morning" to discuss some of his wide-ranging insights into human behavior, as told by our digital footprint.

  Stephens-Davidowitz calls Google searches the most important data set collected on the human psyche.

  "People lie consistently to just about everybody but they tend to be really really honest to Google. Something about that little white box people feel comfortable telling things they might not tell to anyone else and it serves as kind of a digital truth serum," he said.

  Stephens-Davidowitz, who has studied Google search data for five years said, "You can see from what people are searching what they really think, what they really want and what they really desire."
  top-google-searches-2016.jpg
  CBS News

  Not just that, but "a lot of our stereotypes, a lot of what we think about the world is dead wrong."

  One example of this is seen in analysis of anxiety levels. The data scientist was surprised to find the highest stress levels not in big cities typically associated with a stressful lifestyle, like New York City, but instead in rural areas, according to Google search data analysis.
  anxiety-levels.jpg
  CBS News

  He also looked at how social media posts about husbands differ from Google searches about husbands. On social media, husbands tend to be described as "the best" or "my best friend," while Google searches focus on more negative terms like "a jerk" or "annoying." ("Amazing" makes both lists.)

  "It's really interesting when you compare social media versus Google because social media, in some sense, we're the biggest liars because we're trying to impress our friends."
  husband-search.jpg
  CBS News

  For more revelations, including one that "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King still finds hard to believe, watch the above video.
  © 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/05/01/526399881/what-our-google-searches-reveal-about-who-we-really-are
  Word count: 448

  What Our Google Searches Reveal About Who We Really Are
  28:20

  Transcript

  May 1, 20179:01 PM ET

  Tara Boyle

  Jennifer Schmidt
  Shankar Vedantam 2017 square

  Shankar Vedantam
  Rhaina Cohen

  Rhaina Cohen
  Renee Klahr

  Renee Klahr
  Maggie Penman

  Maggie Penman

  Taken in aggregate, the billions of online searches we make every day say a lot about our most private thoughts and biases.
  Lee Woodgate/Getty Images/Ikon Images

  When we have a question about something embarrassing or deeply personal, many of us don't turn to a parent or a friend, but to our computers: We ask Google our questions.
  Hidden Brain
  Who We Are At 2 a.m.

  As millions of us look for answers to questions, or things to buy, or places to meet friends, our searches produce a map of our collective hopes, fears, and desires.

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, analyzes the information we leave behind on search engines, social media, and even pornography sites. He's the author of the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

  "I think there's something very comforting about that little white box that people feel very comfortable telling things that they may not tell anybody else about: Their sexual interests, their health problems, their insecurities. And using this anonymous aggregate data we can learn a lot more about people than we've really ever known," he said.

  By mining data from the Internet, Stephens-Davidowitz has found surprising correlations that tell a far different story than those presented by surveys. Online data allow him, for example, to estimate the percentage of American men who are gay; predict the unemployment rate weeks before the federal government releases official statistics; and uncover parents' unconscious biases against girls.

  It's not just researchers like Stephens-Davidowitz who have figured out big data's ability to reveal truth. Companies already use big data to predict our behavior — from whether we'll pay back a loan to which movies we'll watch on the weekend.

  These new forms of data are so valuable, Stephens-Davidowitz argues, because they understand us better than we understand ourselves.

  Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

  Please take our brief audience survey.

• Medium
  https://medium.com/@franticrock/summarized-summaries-ep17-everybody-lies-seth-stephens-davidowitz-96b01068591c
  Word count: 1194

  Everybody Lies (Seth Stephens-Davidowitz) — Summaries: EP17

  We all lie, or at-least don’t tell the full story in our everyday lives, especially when no one is looking. This book attempts to expose some of the truths behind the big data search queries at Google, by analyzing trends and patterns and understanding peoples preferences and search habits.

  Insights from big data relate to the state of our health, to weird habits, to strange human quirks, to many randomized, controlled experiments.

  “Big data” means: vast amounts of data for which a computational power is required to be able to comprehend it. Surprisingly, data science is quite intuitive, and everyday people already practice it to some extent.
  For example, Seth’s 88 year old grandma suggested that his ideal wife would be clever, nice, funny, sociable and pretty. This suggestion was based on many years of observation of successful and failed relationships, and prediction of how different variables would affect one another.
  Intuition, however, is not data science. Historical data needs to be used correctly to prove or disprove our original gut feel and predictions.
  Seth’s grandma also thought that couples which share many common friends would be more successful at staying together, based her own experience with her husband, who shared many of her friends. However, a study of Facebook data by Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg proves the opposite. People were more likely to change their status from “In a relationship” to “single”, when they had more common friends between them.
  Data Science is not just about the amount of data gathered, but about the appropriate use of it. Not all data can reveal trends or make predictions. Before google establish the “PageRank” algorithm, the frequency of the keyword on a page would determine how early on the search results it appeared. But PageRank made Backlinks to a site dictate the relevancy of the search result, instead of keyword frequency.
  Google queries can now be used to calculate the current unemployment, instead of relying on the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can also learn about the infection rates of illnesses, instead of relying on the Centres for Disease Control. Jeremy Ginsberg tracked both of these using big data. He monitored searches for “flu symptoms” to indicate where outbreaks were happening, and how influenza was spreading across geographical locations over time.
  When graduating students were surveyed about their GPAs at the university of Maryland, only 2.5% admitted of having GPAs below 2.5. However, official records indicated that that number was much higher, at 11%. So surveying is far from perfect, because people lie.
  “Social Desireability Bias” is when people adapt their answers, because they want to look more desirable to others, than they really are. Also, sometimes candidates are unwilling to contribute certain types of feedback, such as drug experiences. This is the case even when surveys are anonymous. Therefore, using surveys to understand thoughts, desires, beliefs, and behavior is unreliable.
  The reason big data doesn’t lie, is because people don’t have any questioner when entering search terms into a search engine.
  Seth analyzed PornHub data, and found that some women search for “Anal Apple”, something they most likely would not share with anyone else.
  Big data also allows us to zoom in or a subset of data to analyze for trends. Harvard professor Raj Chetty used big data to investigate how likely could people with poor parents get rich, in the United States. The study revealed that Denmark and Canada had much better percentages of that happening (11.7% and 13.5% respectively), whilst in the US, that chance was only 7.5%.
  Analyzing the same data by state, however, showed that in San Jose, California, a poor American had a 12.9% chance of getting rich, but in Charlotte, North Carolina, that chance was only 4.4%.
  Correlations, such as a specific food to a disease, seem credible at first, but do not necessarily mean a cause and effect relationship. To establish causality, you need to run A/B tests , which are randomized, controlled experiments.
  A study might say that people who only moderately drink alcohol, are usually healthy. But shouldn’t mean that drinking alcohol makes you healthier, right? If you wanted to prove or disprove something like this, you would need completely random individuals split in two groups. The first group would drink a glass of red wine a day, and the second group wouldn’t drink at all. Their health would have to be measured at the start of the test, and then again after a year. Big data makes it easy to conduct A/B tests like this.
  Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign used A/B testing to determine which layouts of images and text was most useful for making people sign up and donate on his website.
  Disadvantages of big data, however, include: having a high amount of variables. Robert Plomin, in 1998, thought that he found gene IGF2r, that was linked to IQ levels. His dataset was several hundred students, and he observed that this gene occurred twice as much with people with High IQ, vs people with Low IQ. However, this was a fluke correlation. When repeating the test two years later, this correlation was no longer there. There is always possibility for coincidental matches just by mere chance.
  “Small Data” is about the human experience, and is something that Facebook uses smaller-scale surveys to capture. It can’t be captured by measuring clicks and likes. These are unique, non measurable user experiences, that sometimes can be obtained with sociologists’ or psychologists’ help.
  There are 3.5 million suicide related Google searches every month in the US, but only 4,000 actual suicides a month. Local governments do not operate on a regional level, because allowing governments access to an individual’s data would be invasion of privacy.
  Researchers Christine Ma-Kellams, Flora Or, Ji Hyun Baek, and Ichiro Kawachi found in a 2016 study, that suicide related google searches were in-fact linked with actual suicide rates. But this was only done on a state level. Therefore governments could target TV commercials and tips to spread information about “where to get help” for people considering suicide.

  Big DataGoogleFacebookSurveysGoogle Search

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• The UC Santa Barbara Current
  http://www.news.ucsb.edu/events/seth-stephens-davidowitz-everybody-lies-big-data-new-data-and-what-internet-can-tell-us-about
  Word count: 189

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who You Really Are”
  Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - 19:30 to 21:00
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who You Really Are”
  In his groundbreaking work, Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist and New York Times writer Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that much of what we thought about people has been dead wrong. The reason? People lie, to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys – and themselves. For his book Everybody Lies, Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating and even pornography sites, using the digital goldmine to learn what people really think, what they really want and what they really do. Whether his findings make you laugh, shock you or disturb you, they will make you think. “Time and again my preconceptions about my country and my species were turned upside-down... Endlessly fascinating.” – Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature Books will be available for purchase and signing
  https://events.ucsb.edu/event/seth-stephens-davidowitz-everybody-lies-big-data-n...

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/6/27/15873072/google-porn-addiction-america-everybody-lies
  Word count: 2322

  Proof that Americans are lying about their sexual desires
  What Google searches for porn tell us about ourselves.
  By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Updated Jan 2, 2018, 9:37am EST
  Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

  Last year, I interviewed Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies, a new book that uses data on America’s Google habits as an insight into our national consciousness.

  Two findings from the book dominated the conversation: America is riddled with racist and selfish people, and there may be a self-induced abortion crisis in this country.

  But there was plenty more revelatory data in the book that we didn’t cover. So I wanted to follow up with Stephens-Davidowitz to talk about some of the other provocative claims he is making.

  I was particularly interested in sexuality and online porn. If, as Stephens-Davidowitz puts it, “Google is a digital truth serum,” then what else does it tell us about our private thoughts and desires? What else are we hiding from our friends, neighbors, and colleagues?

  A lot, apparently.

  Among other things, Stephens-Davidowitz’s data suggests that there are more gay men in the closet than we think; that many men prefer overweight women to skinny women but are afraid to act on it; that married women are disproportionately worried their husband is gay; that a lot of straight women watch lesbian porn; and that porn featuring violence against women is more popular among women than men.

  I asked Stephens-Davidowitz to explain the data behind all of this. Here’s what he told me.
  Sean Illing

  Last time we spoke, I asked you about the most surprising or shocking finding in your research. We talked about racism and the possibility of a self-induced abortion crisis in America. Here I want to dive into something a little lighter: sexuality and online porn.

  What did you learn about this?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Porn is the biggest development in sexuality research ever. I don't understand how social scientists weren't begging Pornhub for their data. I was one of the only ones. I sent some of my results to some of the most famous sociologists and sex researchers in the world. Many of them had no interest.
  Sean Illing

  Why does porn data offer such unique insight?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Well, to learn about sex, the main approach was to ask people. But people lie on sensitive topics such as sex.
  Sean Illing

  You combed through the data — what did it say about us?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  There’s a lot of variation in what people like. Probably 30 percent of people exclusively watch stuff that you would find disgusting.
  Sean Illing

  Why focus on sex? Were you initially interested in this, or did the data lead you to it?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  It’s a book about human nature. Sex is a big part of human nature. Some reviews of Everybody Lies have criticized me for being obsessed with sex. Everybody is obsessed with sex. If they say they're not, they're lying.
  Sean Illing

  You point to some interesting data in the book about sexual orientation.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  It’s clear that a lot of gay men remain in the closet. In places where it's hard to be gay, such as Mississippi, far fewer men say that they are gay than in places where it's easy to be gay, such as New York. But gay porn searches are about the same everywhere.
  Sean Illing

  This doesn’t necessarily tell us how many people are gay in these areas, but it’s a revealing data point.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I look at the data a whole bunch of ways and conclude about 5 percent of men are predominantly attracted to men.
  Sean Illing

  Can you really draw concrete conclusions from this sort of data? People search for things for all kinds of reasons, right?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I think porn is a pretty good measure of people’s sexual fantasies, even if they never act on them.
  Sean Illing

  What’s your response to people who are skeptical of inferring anything from this stuff?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I think watching a porn video is a lot more telling than answering a survey question. I agree you should be cautious in how you interpret it, though.
  Sean Illing

  Let’s talk about what married people are up to online.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  The number one question that women have about their husbands is whether he is gay. And these questions are much higher in the Deep South, where my research suggests there are indeed more gay men married to women.
  Sean Illing

  Do you think women are justified in their curiosity here? Is this a question they should be asking more often?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I think women are too obsessed with their husbands' sexuality. Women are eight times more likely to ask Google if their husband is gay than if he is an alcoholic and 10 times more likely to ask Google if their husband is gay than if he is depressed. It is far more likely that a woman is married to a man who is secretly an alcoholic or secretly depressed than secretly gay. About 98 percent of women’s husbands are really straight. Trust me.
  Sean Illing

  What are husbands secretly worrying about?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Whether their wives are crazy.
  Sean Illing

  What should husbands be asking Google? What would they ask if they knew what their wives were Googling?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Whether their wives are more physically attracted to women than men.
  Sean Illing

  Tell me about America’s suppressed sexual desires.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  There are still sexual preferences that people hide today, even in socially liberal places. About one in 100 porn searches are for the elderly. Hundreds of thousands of young men are predominantly attracted to elderly women. But very few young men are in relationships with elderly women.
  Sean Illing

  I’m not sure what I think about that. Any theories?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  It’s interesting. Some sexual preferences I first learned about on The Jerry Springer Show, which featured really poor, uneducated people. People attracted to animals or family members or the elderly. But, now from seeing porn data, I realize those preferences also exist among wealthy, educated people. Wealthy, educated people are more cognizant of contemporary social norms, which means if you have such an attraction, you hide it.
  Sean Illing

  I recall something in the book about the sexual preferences we hide largely for cultural reasons or for fear of being judged. Can you talk about that?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  If you define being in the closet as picking partners based on what society wants rather than what you want, many people are in the closet. For example, I am certain a large number of men are more attracted to overweight women than skinny women but try to date skinny women to impress their friends and family members.

  Porn featuring overweight women is surprisingly common among men. But the data from dating sites tells us that just about all men try to date skinny women. Many people don’t try to date the people they’re most attracted to. They try to date the people they think would impress their friends.
  Sean Illing

  That says something truly awful about our cultural pathologies. People should be free to like whatever they want, but the pressures to conform are overwhelming — and ultimately unhealthy.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  It’s also inefficient. There are a lot of single men and single overweight women who would be sexually compatible. But they don’t date, while the man tries and fails to date a skinny woman even though he’s less attracted to her. And then there are women who practically starve themselves to remain skinny so their husbands won’t leave, even though their husbands would be more attracted to them if they weighed more. The desire to impress people causes all kinds of inefficiency.
  Author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
  Sean Illing

  All right, give me a couple of unusual desires you noticed — one from men and one from women.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  It is really amazing how much tastes can vary. There are women who just watch porn featuring short, fat men with small penises. There are men who just watch porn featuring women with enormous nipples.
  Sean Illing

  How about other countries?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  The number one Google search in India that starts "my husband wants ..." is "my husband wants me to breastfeed him." Porn featuring adult breastfeeding is higher in India than anywhere else. In just about every country, just about every Google search looking for advice on breastfeeding is looking how to breastfeed a baby. In India, Google searches looking for breastfeeding advice are about equally split between how to breastfeed a baby and how to breastfeed a husband.

  After I published this finding, some journalists interviewed people in India. Everyone denied this. But I am sure, based on the data, that there are a reasonable number of adult Indian men desiring to be breastfed. It is really amazing that this desire can develop in one country without ever being openly talked about.
  Sean Illing

  Any other findings from countries not named America?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Japanese men have recently become obsessed with tickling porn. More than 10 percent of Pornhub searches by young Japanese men are for “tickling.”
  Sean Illing

  So basically all of humanity is united in its weirdness?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Yeah, basically. Some people respond to Indian men wanting to be breastfed and are like, “Indian men are so weird." That's not the right response. The data from porn tells us that everybody is weird. Thus, nobody is weird.
  Sean Illing

  And yet we all feel weird because we assume (wrongly) that no one else is as weird as we are.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Sometimes I think it would be a good thing if everyone’s porn habits were released at once. It would be embarrassing for 30 seconds. And then we’d all get over it and be more open about sex.
  Sean Illing

  Any other surprising findings about women in America?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  About 20 percent of the porn women watch is lesbian porn. A lot of straight women watch lesbian porn.
  Sean Illing

  That’s not very surprising.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women. It is far more popular among women than men. I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact. Fantasy life isn't always politically correct.

  The rate at which women watch violent porn is roughly the same in every part of the world. It isn’t correlated with how women are treated.
  Sean Illing

  Let me ask you this: Has all of this research changed how you think about sexuality in general?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I have always wondered how homosexuality made it through evolution. Like, isn't evolution supposed to make people desire heterosexual sex with fertile people? But after studying porn, I realized homosexuality is hardly the only desire that doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective.

  Less than 20 percent of porn watched these days features vaginal sex to completion among two people who can conceivably have a healthy baby. Cartoons, anal sex to completion, oral sex to completion, foot sex to completion, incest, elderly porn, tickling, animal porn, sex with objects, etc.
  Sean Illing

  Sex is clearly about a lot more than procreation, and I’d say a lot of needless suffering has resulted from our confusion about this.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I think the reason is we are growing up under very different conditions than we evolved under. Hunter-gatherer kids didn't watch The Simpsons. And hunter-gatherer adults didn't watch Simpsons porn. I think we are evolved so that if we grew up in hunter-gatherer conditions, just about all people would have an overwhelming desire for vaginal sex. But modern conditions take sexuality in all kinds of directions. I'm becoming more convinced of that the more data I look at.
  Sean Illing

  So what’s the future of online porn? Where is it going?
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  I think anal sex will pass vaginal sex in porn within three years. That's what my data models suggest.
  Sean Illing

  Somehow that feels like a perfect point on which to end.
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  People should buy my book. There’s a lot more!
  Next Up In Conversations

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  Can Mueller force Trump to testify? I asked 9 legal experts.
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• Quartz
  https://qz.com/1233483/beer-made-by-genetically-engineered-yeast-can-taste-bitter-without-the-hops/
  Word count: 1201

  How big data tells us when the “United States” literally became one
  Jasper John's painting of the US flag.
  Many or one? (AP/Lefteris Pitarakis)
  Written by
  Dan Kopf
  Obsession
  Machines with Brains
  August 05, 2017

  “The United States is increasingly divided” or “The United States are increasingly divided”? To most, the former seems more grammatically correct than the latter. Referring to the United States as a singular noun is now common usage—the plural sounds strange to modern ears.

  It wasn’t always this way. In his recently published book Everybody Lies, data scientist and New York Times opinion writer Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explains that “the United States are” was standard usage through the first half of the 19th century. Many historians speculated that the shift took place after the Civil War, which established that the nation was truly indivisible. But it was impossible to answer the question with much accuracy, because comprehensive data on language use going back this far wasn’t readily available.

  The mystery was finally solved, Davidowitz writes, by biologists Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. They used Google Ngrams, Google’s service that allows users to search for the prevalence of words and phrases in books going back to 1800, to show that the United States didn’t become singular in literature until the 1880s. “Military victories happen quicker than changes in mindsets,” Davidowitz writes.

  Davidowitz’s new book is a celebration of the power of data. Though the book is called Everybody Lies, it is not so much focused on people’s prevarications as all the ways in which access to new forms of data help us understand the truth.

  In a conversational tone, reminiscent of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, Davidowitz walks us through how new forms of data—like Google searches, Facebook likes, satellite imagery, and digitized text—combined with creative analysis methods now allow us to solve mysteries that once seemed impossible. The book is a combination of Davidowitz’s original analysis as well as the work of others he admires.

  These are three of our other favorite examples of data sleuthing highlighted in Everybody Lies.

  1️⃣ Using a combination of Google search data and Facebook information, Davidowitz estimates that about 5% of men in the US are gay. This contrasts with the 2-to-3% of men that self-identify as gay in representative surveys.

  His method relies on Facebook self-identification data and Google searches for porn. Davidowitz finds that although twice as many men identify as gay in the state of Rhode Island, a relatively liberal state, than in Mississippi, the percentage of searches for gay-male porn is only slightly higher in Rhode Island (5.2%) than Mississippi (4.8%). The slightly higher rate of searches in Rhode Island is likely a result of gay men choosing to move to a place where their sexuality is more publicly accepted.

  Davidowitz also examined the relationship between the acceptance of gay marriage in a state and the percentage of men self-identifying as gay. He estimates that if acceptance for gay marriage was at 100%, self identification as a gay man would reach 5%.

  Given the consistency of the search data with this statistical relationship, Davidowitz is confident his 5% estimate is more accurate than the surveys. The larger point of this analysis, he says, is to show that people’s online behavior reveals more about them than their statements.

  2️⃣ Davidowitz relays the story of how the race horse analyst Jeff Seder used modern data collection methods and statistical correlation to predict the greatness of racehorses, most notably 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah.

  Historically, horses were judged by their pedigree. If a horse’s parents or siblings were great performers, then it was thought they also had a shot at success on the racetrack, and would sell for a lot of money at auction. Agents might also examine a young horse’s size or gait.

  But Seder, who has an MBA and law degree from Harvard University, found that none of these factors were all that predictive of greatness. Armed with a variety of tools, including a portable ultrasound machine, he went on the hunt for more telling factors.

  After years of collecting data on the attributes of young horses and comparing them to their earnings on the track, Seder found one unusual physical attribute that was highly predictive: the size of the horse’s left ventricle. American Pharoah had an enormous left ventricle. Along with the fact that all of his other attributes were in the range of what’s expected of a good thoroughbred, this made American Pharoah a good bet to be a great horse.
  Attributes of American Pharaoh as a 1-year-old
  Attribute Percentile
  Height 56
  Weight 61
  Pedigree 70
  Left Ventricle size 96.6

  Davidowitz uses this story to make the point that new data sources are most powerful in domains where deep data analysis has been rare. There is not as much to learn from new data in analytics-saturated fields like finance or baseball, but there are still plenty of fields, like horse racing, that still rely heavily on traditions and gut feel.

  3️⃣ Another of Davidowitz’s analysis shows that privilege is everywhere, even where you might least expect it, like the National Basketball Association (NBA).

  He analyzed a variety of datasets—including the US Census, the stats site Basketball Reference, and Ancestry.com—to show that professional basketball players, the vast majority of whom are black Americans, are more likely to come from middle-income families than poor ones. This defies the narrative that the NBA is made up of black men who grew up in poverty and saw basketball as the only way out. Family financial resources make success in nearly any field more likely.

  Davidowitz builds his case in three parts. First, he used census data to show that young men from wealthier counties are more likely to make it to the NBA than those from poor ones. Second, Davidowitz collected data on the family background of the 100 players born in the 1980s who have scored the most points; these players were 30% less likely than the average black American of a similar age to have been born to a single or teenage mother. Third, he found that the most common names of NBA players, like Kevin and Chris, were names typically given by parents with higher incomes.

  Davidowitz points out that this analysis did not rely on any “big” data, per se. It is not just the massive, comprehensive datasets that allow data scientists to answer heretofore unanswerable questions, but a clever use of the plethora of smaller collections of information now available.

  In the latter portion of the book, Davidowitz warns of the risks inherent in a world overflowing with data—privacy issues, spurious correlations, and an overemphasis on what is measurable. But mostly, he is excited by all the things we will learn. For the empirically minded problem-solver, there has never been a better time to be alive.

• Financial Review
  http://www.afr.com/brand/boss/truth-lies-and-damn-statistics-20171113-gzk5s7
  Word count: 477

  Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows only Google knows the real you
  Author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: "This new, real science is set to dramatically improve our lives."
  Author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: "This new, real science is set to dramatically improve our lives."
  Jessica Sier AFR Woodcut

  by Jessica Sier

  Everybody lies. We lie to our lovers. We lie to our colleagues. We lie to our friends and the police and the guy at Woolies, when we say our day is going all right, thanks. But, it turns out, we rarely lie to Google.

  Breaking down Google’s treasure trove of human secrets is the enthralling narrative that underpins Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book, Everybody Lies, which he originally wanted to title, How Big Is My Penis?

  The economist and former Google data scientist has put together a thorough and engaging look at what kind of answers we are searching for. His primary sources are Google Trends, Google AdWords, Wikipedia, Facebook and Pornhub, but he also scraped many of the more smaller, niche sites that pique our collective interest.
  Shocking questions

  In his chatty, engaging prose, Stephens-Davidowitz has found we are asking some pretty dark and shocking questions.

  Our attitudes towards racism, sexism, abortion, child abuse and a host of philosophically challenging and deeply divisive topics make appearances in this book. His clear-eyed, honest appraisal of how they differ from popular conceptions, makes for thoughtful, and sometimes uncomfortable, reading.

  “I’m naturally a pessimist and am drawn to the darker side of human nature,” Stephens-Davidowitz told BOSS magazine on a recent trip to Australia.

  “And delving into the big data around what people search for at three o’clock in the morning, drunk, has thrown up some intense observations into what a sad, weird bunch we are.”
  Big data has 4 central virtues

  According to Stephens-Davidowitz, big data has four central virtues.

  First, he says, it’s a digital truth serum: it retrieves honest results about things people would lie about on surveys.
  Second, it’s an absurdly cheap way of running large-scale, randomised controlled experiments.
  Third, the data sets are enormous, enabling us to pinpoint subsets and draw precise conclusions.
  Fourth, it provides new types of information and paints fresh pictures of human behaviour.

  Some of the conclusions are beautifully touching, others downright absurd (the correlation between hurricanes and the consumption of strawberry Pop-Tarts, for example) or desperately sad, but Stephens-Davidowitz’s main claim is difficult to fault: “Social science is becoming a real science,” he says.

  “We have evidence to explain some of our behaviour and I think this new, real science is set to dramatically improve our lives.”

  Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

• Campaign
  https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/everybody-lies-seth-stephens-davidowitz/1455421
  Word count: 753

  Tom Laranjo
  March 02, 2018
  How long?
  2-3 minutes

  8/10

  Reviewed by Tom Laranjo, managing director, Total Media

  Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens- Davidowitz

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing

  In Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, the author delves into the depths of our psyches as exposed by our Google searches, to provide a fuller, more disturbing - and ultimately more accurate - picture of what people really think.

  It would be an entertaining and enlightening read for anyone, but I would argue that for those in the business of persuasion – i.e. the entire advertising industry - it's a must read.

  Stephens-Davidowitz contends that the power of Google search data is that people will happily tell the Google search bar truths about themselves that they wouldn’t tell their nearest and dearest.

  However Google is not the only entry point into understanding human truths. Stephens-Davidowitz also examines the data gleaned from Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, white supremacist site Stormfront, Pornhub and other sources of big data, both online and offline, with varying degrees of success.

  As part of his adventures in big data, Stephens-Davidowitz has a word of warning which the advertising industry would do well to heed: big isn’t necessarily best - it's what you do with it (advice the men featured in chapter four, worrying about their penis size, would also do well to heed). Specifically, that to get the most out of big data you need to ask the right questions, which may not be those that you would ask in traditional surveys. To master big data Stephens-Davidowitz contends that "data science takes a natural and intuitive human process—spotting patterns and making sense of them—and injects it with steroids, potentially showing us that the world works in a completely different way from how we thought it did".

  Stephens-Davidowitz proves the impact of advertising by comparing the effect of a film ad shown during the Superbowl in areas where more or less people are watching the game

  The title of the book comes to life in chapter four, where Stephens-Davidowitz discusses "social desirability" bias - the need to appear good - even in anonymous surveys. This is one of the reasons why marketers should be sceptical of self-reported data - whether that be surveys, or as Stephens-Davidowitz goes on to explain, Facebook, which is the ultimate arena where "everybody lies". One such example is lying about sexuality in a state or country that is less accepting, which Stephens-Davidowitz proves by comparing out and proud gay men on Facebook and corresponding Google and Pornhub searches for gay porn in the same areas.

  What may be the most interesting element of the book comes in the sixth chapter, where Stephens-Davidowitz proves the impact of advertising by comparing the effect of a film ad shown during the Superbowl in areas where more or less people are watching the game. In the area where more people were watching the game and the ads, there was a resultant and proportionate increase in ticket sales. So if for no other reason, surely that’s cause enough to read.
  Six takeaways

  Marketing can change the world. Kodak got people to smile in photos as they wanted people to take regular photos, instead of one-off portraits, so their advertising began linking photographs with sharing happy moments. This goes a long way to explaining the visual world we live in today.
  Understanding human nature can lead to business success. Facebook’s success is built on understanding human nature. At the time of the introduction, users complained the newsfeed was creepy. However Mark Zuckerberg knew that people’s curiosity would lead to further growth.
  Big data enabled A/B testing. This went a long way into making internet platforms addictive, as it became possible to carry out truly randomised experiments in a short time frame.
  The Filter Bubble is being pierced. Stephens-Davidowitz argues that liberals and conservatives are more likely to meet online than in real life.
  Men care about the size of their penis more than women do. In fact, women’s main concern is about the size being too large.
  Racism is alive and well in the US. Especially in the eastern states. This "Racism map" is the truest indicator of the areas where Trump won in 2016 and where Barack Obama struggled in 2008 and 2012.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/09/everybody-lies-how-google-reveals-darkest-secrets-seth-stephens-davidowitz
  Word count: 6028

  Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets

  What can we learn about ourselves from the things we ask online? US data scientist Seth Stephens‑Davidowitz analysed anonymous Google search results, uncovering disturbing truths about our desires, beliefs and prejudices

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  Sun 9 Jul 2017 04.30 EDT
  Last modified on Fri 16 Mar 2018 06.11 EDT
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz photographed in New York.
  ‘Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought’ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz photographed in New York. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

  Everybody lies. People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when they’re not. They say they’ll be in touch when they won’t. They say it’s not about you when it is. They say they love you when they don’t. They say they’re happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. 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. And they damn sure lie to surveys. Here’s my brief survey for you:

  Have you ever cheated in an exam?

  Have you ever fantasised about killing someone?

  Were you tempted to lie?

  Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias. An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered. Even though nobody gave their names, people, in large numbers, exaggerated their voter registration status, voting behaviour, and charitable giving.

  The word 'gay' is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin 'Is my husband...' than the word 'cheating'

  Has anything changed in 65 years? In the age of the internet, not owning a library card is no longer embarrassing. But, while what’s embarrassing or desirable may have changed, people’s tendency to deceive pollsters remains strong. A recent survey asked University of Maryland graduates various questions about their college experience. The answers were compared with official records. People consistently gave wrong information, in ways that made them look good. Fewer than 2% reported that they graduated with lower than a 2.5 GPA (grade point average). In reality, about 11% did. And 44% said they had donated to the university in the past year. In reality, about 28% did.
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  Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.

  The more impersonal the conditions, the more honest people will be. For eliciting truthful answers, internet surveys are better than phone surveys, which are better than in-person surveys. People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.

  How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Certain online sources get people to admit things they would not admit anywhere else. They serve as a digital truth serum. Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.

  The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else. Google was invented so that people could learn about the world, not so researchers could learn about people, but it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the internet are tremendously revealing.

  I have spent the past four years analysing anonymous Google data. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.
  The Truth About Sex

  How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinsey’s famous estimate – based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes – that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are. But sexual preference has long been among the subjects upon which people have tended to lie. I think I can use big data to give a better answer to this question than we have ever had.

  First, more on that survey data. Surveys tell us there are far more gay men in tolerant states than intolerant states. For example, according to a Gallup survey, the proportion of the population that is gay is almost twice as high in Rhode Island, the state with the highest support for gay marriage, than Mississippi, the state with the lowest support for gay marriage. There are two likely explanations for this. First, gay men born in intolerant states may move to tolerant states. Second, gay men in intolerant states may not divulge that they are gay. Some insight into explanation number one – gay mobility – can be gleaned from another big data source: Facebook, which allows users to list what gender they are interested in. About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.
  Green digits on a computer monitor
  ‘How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data.’ Photograph: Thomas M Scheer/Getty Images/EyeEm

  And Facebook too shows big differences in the gay population in states with high versus low tolerance: Facebook has the gay population more than twice as high in Rhode Island as in Mississippi. Facebook also can provide information on how people move around. I was able to code the home town of a sample of openly gay Facebook users. This allowed me to directly estimate how many gay men move out of intolerant states into more tolerant parts of the country. The answer? There is clearly some mobility – from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.

  If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google, with which so many people have proved willing to share so much.

  Countrywide, I estimate – using data from Google searches and Google AdWords – that about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states. In Mississippi, I estimate that 4.8% of male porn searches are for gay porn, far higher than the numbers suggested by either surveys or Facebook and reasonably close to the 5.2% of pornography searches that are for gay porn in Rhode Island.

  So how many American men are gay? This measure of pornography searches by men – roughly 5% are same-sex – seems a reasonable estimate of the true size of the gay population in the United States. Five per cent of American men being gay is an estimate, of course. Some men are bisexual; some – especially when young – are not sure what they are. Obviously, you can’t count this as precisely as you might the number of people who vote or attend a movie. But one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.

  It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” The word “gay” is 10% 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 10 times more common than “depressed”.

  Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husband’s sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.
  Magnifying glass over a Google search box
  What do our searches reveal about us? Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/Photothek via Getty Images

  Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. When it comes to sex, people keep many secrets – about how much they are having, for example. Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. You might therefore think this means they are just saying they use condoms more often during sex than they actually do. The evidence suggests they also exaggerate how frequently they are having sex to begin with. About 11% of women between the ages of 15 and 44 say they are sexually active, not currently pregnant, and not using contraception. Even with relatively conservative assumptions about how many times they are having sex, scientists would expect 10% of them to become pregnant every month. But this would already be more than the total number of pregnancies in the United States (which is one in 113 women of childbearing age).

  In our sex-obsessed culture it can be hard to admit that you are just not having that much. But if you’re looking for understanding or advice, you have, once again, an incentive to tell Google. On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.

  And Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend won’t have sex than that a girlfriend won’t have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is “My boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but since the previous analysis said that 95% of men are straight, we can guess that not many “boyfriend” searches are coming from men.)

  How should we interpret this? Does this really imply that boyfriends withhold sex more than girlfriends? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, Google searches can be biased in favour of stuff people are uptight talking about. Men may feel more comfortable telling their friends about their girlfriend’s lack of sexual interest than women are telling their friends about their boyfriend’s. Still, even if the Google data does not imply that boyfriends are really twice as likely to avoid sex as girlfriends, it does suggest that boyfriends avoiding sex is more common than people let on.

  Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.

  Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partner’s penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that it’s small. More than 40% of complaints about a partner’s penis size say that it’s too big. “Pain” is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase “___ during sex.” Yet only 1% of men’s searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller.

  Google search data can give us a minute-by-minute peek into eruptions of hate-fuelled rage

  Men’s second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly. In fact, the most common concern women have related to a boyfriend’s orgasm isn’t about when it happened but why it isn’t happening at all.

  We don’t often talk about body image issues when it comes to men. And while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male. Among all searches with “how to” related to breasts, about 20% ask how to get rid of man breasts.
  The Truth About Hate and Prejudice

  Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets. Many people are, for good reason, inclined to keep their prejudices to themselves. I suppose you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google, where users sometimes ask questions such as “Why are black people rude?” or “Why are Jews evil?”

  A few patterns among these stereotypes stand out. For example, African Americans are the only group that faces a “rude” stereotype. Nearly every group is a victim of a “stupid” stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims. The “evil” stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians. Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists. When a Muslim American plays into this stereotype, the response can be instantaneous and vicious. Google search data can give us a minute-by-minute peek into such eruptions of hate-fuelled rage.

  Consider what happened shortly after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on 2 December, 2015. That morning, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik entered a meeting of Farook’s co-workers armed with semi-automatic pistols and semi-automatic rifles and murdered 14 people. That evening, minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters’ Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word “Muslims” in it at the time was “kill Muslims”. And overall, Americans searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe” and “migraine symptoms”.

  In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with “Islamophobia”, another was searching for “kill Muslims”. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.

  Four days after the shooting, President Obama gave a prime-time address to the country. He wanted to reassure Americans that the government could both stop terrorism and, perhaps more importantly, quiet this dangerous Islamophobia. Obama appealed to our better angels, speaking of the importance of inclusion and tolerance. The rhetoric was powerful and moving. The Los Angeles Times praised Obama for “[warning] against allowing fear to cloud our judgment”. The New York Times called the speech both “tough” and “calming”. The website ThinkProgress praised it as “a necessary tool of good governance, geared towards saving the lives of Muslim Americans”. Obama’s speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?

  Google search data suggests otherwise. Together with Evan Soltas, then at Princeton, I examined the data. In his speech, the president said: “It is the responsibility of all Americans – of every faith – to reject discrimination.” But searches calling Muslims “terrorists”, “bad”, “violent”, and “evil” doubled during and shortly after the speech. President Obama also said: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%. Obama asked Americans to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear”. Yet searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obama’s speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.

  In other words, Obama seemed to say all the right things. 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. Sometimes we need internet data to correct our instinct to pat ourselves on the back.

  So what should Obama have said to quell this particular form of hatred currently so virulent in America? We’ll circle back to that later. First we’re going to take a look at an age-old vein of prejudice in the United States, the form of hate that in fact stands out above the rest, the one that has been the most destructive and the topic of the research that began this book. In my work with Google search data, the single most telling fact I have found regarding hate on the internet is the popularity of the word “nigger”.

  Either singular or in its plural form, the word is included in 7m American searches every year. (Again, the word used in rap songs is almost always “nigga”, not “nigger”, so there’s no significant impact from hip-hop lyrics to account for.) Searches for “nigger jokes” are 17 times more common than searches for “kike jokes”, “gook jokes”, “spic jokes”, “chink jokes”, and “fag jokes” combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news. Among the periods when such searches were highest was the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when television and newspapers showed images of desperate black people in New Orleans struggling for their survival. They also shot up during Obama’s first election. And searches rose on average about 30% on Martin Luther King Jr Day.

  The frightening ubiquity of this racial slur throws into doubt some current understandings of racism. Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice – and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.

  Academics invented an ingenious way to test for such a bias. It is called the implicit association test. The tests have consistently shown that it takes most people milliseconds longer to associate black faces with positive words, such as “good”, than with negative words, such as “awful”. For white faces, the pattern is reversed. The extra time it takes is evidence of someone’s implicit prejudice – a prejudice the person may not even be aware of.

  There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they won’t confess – certainly not in a survey. That’s what the search data seems to be saying. There is nothing implicit about searching for “nigger jokes”. And it’s hard to imagine that Americans are Googling the word “nigger” with the same frequency as “migraine” and “economist” without explicit racism having a major impact on African Americans. Prior to the Google data, we didn’t have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obama’s vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.
  Google begins removing private medical records from search results
  Read more

  And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed. To be provocative and to encourage more research in this area, let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes”.
  The Truth About Girls

  The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility. But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.

  It’s hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited by the thought that their kids might be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting “Is my two-year-old…,” the most common next word is “gifted”. But this question is not asked equally about boys and girls. Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like “Is my son a genius?”

  Are parents picking up on legitimate differences between young girls and boys? Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls. In fact, on every search term related to intelligence I tested, including those indicating its absence, parents were more likely to be inquiring about their sons rather than their daughters. There are also more searches for “is my son behind” or “stupid” than comparable searches for daughters. But searches with negative words like “behind” and “stupid” are less specifically skewed toward sons than searches with positive words, such as “gifted” or “genius”.

  What then are parents’ overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a child’s weight. Parents Google “Is my daughter overweight?” roughly twice as frequently as they Google “Is my son overweight?” Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same. Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see – or worry about – overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.

  Liberal readers may imagine that these biases are more common in conservative parts of the country, but I didn’t find any evidence of that. In fact, I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than we’d care to believe.
  Can We Handle the Truth?

  I can’t pretend there isn’t a darkness in some of this data. It has revealed the continued existence of millions of closeted gay men; widespread animus against African Americans; and an outbreak of violent Islamophobic rage that only got worse when the president appealed for tolerance. Not exactly cheery stuff. If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

  But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives. First, there can be comfort in knowing you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behaviour. Google searches can help show you are not alone. When you were young, a teacher may have told you that if you have a question you should raise your hand and ask it, because if you’re confused, others are too. If you were anything like me, you ignored your teacher and sat there silently, afraid to open your mouth. Your questions were too dumb, you thought; everyone else’s were more profound. The anonymous, aggregate Google data can tell us once and for all how right our teachers were. Plenty of basic, sub-profound questions lurk in other minds, too.

  The second benefit of digital truth serum is that it alerts us to people who are suffering. The Human Rights Campaign has asked me to work with them in helping educate men in certain states about the possibility of coming out of the closet. They are looking to use the anonymous and aggregate Google search data to help them decide where best to target their resources.

  The final – and, I think, most powerful – value in this data is its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. With more understanding, we might find ways to reduce the world’s supply of nasty attitudes. Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.”

  After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists”, “extremists”, or “refugees”. It was “athletes”, followed by “soldiers”.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterwards. 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.
  Does it matter if Google is rewiring our minds? Ask Plato
  Steven Poole
  Read more

  Two months after that speech, Obama gave another televised speech on Islamophobia, this time at a mosque. Perhaps someone in the president’s office had read Soltas’s and my Times column, which discussed what had worked and what hadn’t, for the content of this speech was noticeably different.

  Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance. Instead, he focused overwhelmingly on provoking people’s curiosity and changing their perceptions of Muslim Americans. Many of the slaves from Africa were Muslim, Obama told us; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran; a Muslim American designed skyscrapers in Chicago. Obama again spoke of Muslim athletes and armed service members, but also talked of Muslim police officers and firefighters, teachers and doctors. And my analysis of the Google searches suggests this speech was more successful than the previous one. Many of the hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours afterwards.

  There are other potential ways to use search data to learn what causes, or reduces, hate. For example, we might look at how racist searches change after a black quarterback is drafted in a city, or how sexist searches change after a woman is elected to office. Learning of our subconscious prejudices can also be useful. We might all make an extra effort to delight in little girls’ minds and show less concern with their appearance. Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche. This is at times, I admit, difficult to face. But it can also be empowering. We can use the data to fight the darkness. Collecting rich data on the world’s problems is the first step toward fixing them.

  Extracted from: Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, published by Bloomsbury, £20. To order for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will be speaking in London at the Royal Society of Arts on Tuesday and at Second Home on Wednesday
  Q&A with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
  ‘The degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking’: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

  What’s your background?
  I’d describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it. I know that when people first see Google data, they say “Oh this is weird, this isn’t perfect data”, but I knew that perfect data didn’t exist. The traditional data sets left a lot to be desired.

  What would your search records reveal about you?
  They could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, it’s better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.

  You worked at Google?
  For about a year and a half. I was on the economics team and also the quantitative marketing team. Some was analysis of advertising, which I got bored of, which is one of the reasons I stopped working there.

  Did working there give you an understanding that helped this book?
  Yeah, I think it did. All this data I’m talking about is public. But from meeting the people who know more about this data than anyone in the world, I’m much more confident that it means what I think it means.

  Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised?
  Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now it’s gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking.

  When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldn’t sleep because they’re so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasn’t a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship – they’re not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.

  Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win?
  I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.

  What’s next?
  I want to keep on exploring this, whether in academia, journalism or more books. It’s such an exciting area: what people are really like, how the world really works. I may just research sex for the next few months. One thing I’ve learned from this book, people are more interested in sex than I thought they were.

  Interview by Killian Fox
  Topics

  Google
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• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/17/everybody-lies-seth-stephens-davidowitz-review
  Word count: 1318

  Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz review – what internet searches reveal

  Do web porn clicks deliver data that ‘Freud and Foucault would have drooled over’, or are we not as weird as our online behaviour suggests?

  Galen Strawson

  Thu 17 Aug 2017 02.30 EDT
  Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.33 EST
  The easy availability of pornography 'is turning out to be one of the great tragedies of human history'.
  The easy availability of pornography ‘is turning out to be one of the great tragedies of human history’. Photograph: Alamy

  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wanted to call his new book How Big Is My Penis?, but his publishers demurred. He settled for Everybody Lies. The book is subtitled What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are and it’s a polished display of some of the early fruits of “big data” science. Its principal defect, perhaps, is that it doesn’t say enough about how many of these fruits are rotten.

  Stephens-Davidowitz’s first source, when he set up as a data scientist, was Google Trends, which records the relative frequency of particular searches in different places at different times. He soon added Google Adwords, which registers the actual number of searches. Then he moved on to other vastnesses: Wikipedia, Facebook and then PornHub, one of the largest pornographic sites in the world. PornHub gave him its complete data set, duly anonymised: every single search and video view. He also “scraped” many other sites, including neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront, which account for the internet’s resemblance to the box jellyfish, a highly poisonous predator with 60 anuses.
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  Ignoble metadata flowed in. He found that searches for racist jokes rise about 30% on Martin Luther King Day in the US, and that in the recent Republican primaries, regions that supported Donald Trump in the largest numbers made the most Google searches for “nigger”. Data from Prosper, a peer-to-peer loan website, showed that there are five expressions in particular that one should beware of when reviewing applications for loans: “God”, “promise”, “will pay”, “hospital” and “thank you”. Making promises “is a sure sign that someone will … not do something”. “God” is particularly bad news.

  There are many such facts waiting to be harvested. For a social scientist such as Stephens-Davidowitz, big data has four central virtues. First, it’s a “digital truth serum”: it supplies honest data on matters people lie about in surveys, for instance racist attitudes, but above all (to quote Mick Jagger) “sex and sex and sex and sex”. Second, it offers the means to run large-scale randomised controlled experiments – which are usually extremely laborious and expensive – at almost no cost, and in this way uncover causal linkages in addition to mere correlations. Third, the sheer quantity of data allows us to zoom in precisely on small subsets of people in a way that was previously impossible. Finally, it provides new types of data.

  Stephens-Davidowitz thinks searches of internet pornography habits are probably “the most important development … ever … in our ability to understand human sexuality”. They deliver data that “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault would have drooled over”.

  Some of his sexual facts are depressing, others are funny and touching. Some are engaging because we find them extraordinary, others because we find them all-too-human. The search data suggests that hundreds of thousands of young men are predominantly attracted to elderly women. Many heterosexual men feel about their partner what William Wordsworth felt about his wife Mary (they wish she’d put on weight). Anal sex is on course to overtake vaginal sex in pornography before the end of the decade. Pornography “in which violence is perpetrated against a woman … almost always appeals disproportionately to women”. More than 75% of searches of the form “I want to have sex with my …” are incestuous. Men search for ways to perform oral sex on themselves as often as they search for how to give a woman an orgasm.

  Big data isn’t intrinsically dangerous or evil, and it can be extraordinarily valuable and engaging

  There are many unwavering specialisations. For some women, only short fat men with small penises will do; for some men, only massive nipples. Thirty per cent only ever watch pornography of the ugliest kind. But many of us are not as weird as our online behaviour may suggest. Distortion is introduced by the fact that certain types of Google searches “skew towards the forbidden”, and there are numerous subtleties and traps when it comes to the interpretation of data, many of which Stephens-Davidowitz expounds clearly. For all that the numbers are big, and they add up.

  “The next Foucault will be a data scientist. The next Freud will be a data scientist. The next Marx will be a data scientist.” This is unlikely, I think, but these future individuals will do well to work with data scientists, and by the end of Everybody Lies Stephens-Davidowitz has almost earned his flourishes (“What constitutes data has been wildly reimagined … Everything is data!”). What he hasn’t done is say enough about the dangers. I expected a reference to Cathy O’Neil, who shows in her book Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) how programs based on big data introduce a frightening new efficiency into predatory advertising, “distort higher education, drive up debt, spur mass incarceration, pummel the poor at nearly every juncture, and undermine democracy”. Programs designed with the very best intentions fall into deadly self-confirming feedback loops that confirm their efficacy even as they spiral away from the truth and increase injustice.

  One of the greatest dangers of the internet, noted by Daniel Kahneman in his valuable book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), arises from the fact that “people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers”. This isn’t any sort of exaggeration (witness the fact that some people deny the existence of consciousness); the trouble is that any belief – any prejudice or hatred – can now find a large supporting community on the internet.

  Stephens-Davidowitz has a reply to these worries. He’s a social scientist, and malignant programs aren’t data science in his sense of the term. Their creators aren’t simply trying to describe and explain human behaviour; they’re directing it and manipulating it. Big data isn’t intrinsically dangerous or evil, and it can be extraordinarily valuable and engaging. New facts spring up everywhere. Some of the results – such as the correlation between hurricanes and the consumption of strawberry Pop-Tarts – are agreeably surreal. For him “the big point is this: social science is becoming a real science. And this new, real science is poised to improve our lives”.

  I like Stephens-Davidowitz’s suggestion in a recent interview: “Sometimes I think it would be a good thing if everyone’s porn habits were released at once. It would be embarrassing for 30 seconds … then we’d all get over it and be more open about sex.” But I don’t share his general optimism. I suspect the easy availability of pornography is turning out to be one of the great tragedies of human history, destructive of the best kind of sexual relations. If we had an infallible happyometer that could measure the overall gains and losses to human existence caused by the internet, I think we’d find that the balance was – will increasingly be – negative.

  • Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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