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1-Page Summary of Everybody Lies

Introduction

Many Americans were shocked when Donald Trump was elected president. Polls had been clear, but he won anyway. Why? People lie about their intentions, and polls are easy to manipulate. Perhaps some people who intended to vote for Hillary Clinton ended up not showing up on Election Day because they lied to themselves that they couldn’t make it or forgot about the election altogether.

Big data is a powerful tool that can be used to make better decisions. Big data has its limitations, but it also provides valuable insights into our decision-making process.

Was Freud Right?

Big data is powerful for many reasons. First, it allows us to gather information from new sources like the internet and social media sites. Second, big data gives us a better understanding of things we couldn’t before such as human sexuality and even our own personalities.

Big data also provides honest information. People lie to protect their reputations, but they don’t lie on the internet. Search results provide an accurate view of how people truly feel.

The amount of data available has increased so much that we can now target specific groups. This is especially true when it comes to location, gender, race, or sexual orientation. It was more difficult before big data because gathering enough information from those subsets would be time-consuming and expensive.

Data Reimagined

There are various methods to view data.

Words as data

Words are a key part of culture, but it used to be difficult to gather them in large quantities. Now that we can digitize text, we have a wealth of data from which to draw conclusions about language and communication. To understand how impressive this is, consider the amount of words available on various digital platforms: newspapers, scientific journals, books and social media posts. This doesn’t even include movies or speeches or conversations transcribed into text.

Nowadays, we can search for specific words in a digital text by using computer technology. We no longer have to read the entire document; instead, we can find out if a word was used just by conducting an instantaneous search.

Social scientists wanted to know if they could predict whether two people would go out on another date after their first one. They did this by studying the words that were used in a conversation between them.

Scientists were able to discover the correlation between word usage and a second date. For example, women who use noncommittal terms such as “I guess” and “sort of” during their first dates are less likely to want a second date.

Pictures as data

In order to understand the economic growth of developing nations, an academic paper called “Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space” used a new kind of data: photographs.

The authors of the study hypothesized that there would be a direct correlation between how much light a country uses at night and their economic success. They used satellite photographs taken by the U.S. Air Force to prove this hypothesis, which was true for many countries including Indonesia during its financial crisis in 1998. There are countless new ways to gather data about humanity that can provide immense value to businesses if they’re willing to use them.

Digital Truth Serum

Despite what people say, surveys can be inaccurate. For example, when surveyed about their pornography habits, only 25% of men and 8% of women admitted to watching it. However, there were more Google searches for “porn” than there are for the weather in the United States. Since Google doesn’t lie or distort information like a survey does, we can trust its data rather than what people say they do.