Everybody Lies

Everybody Lies will expand your mind about the true nature of human beings by explaining what big data is, how it came to be, and how we can use it to understand ourselves better.

The term big data refers to amounts of information so big that we need massive computational power to understand it.

We might, for example, use Google searches to determine popular foods in a region. It’s actually rather intuitive, at least in some regards. With this understanding, we can all see that in some ways we’re all data scientists.

We like to rely on our intuition but it’s not really scientific. We’re right to gather information and try to make sense of it to make predictions, but we need to do it correctly. When we have the right data, we get facts to back up our ideas so that our understanding of how the world works is correct.

One experience the author had with his grandmother is a good example of this. She once began giving him relationship advice, suggesting all the traits to look for in a companion. His potential partner needed to be funny, clever, and pretty, just to name a few.

Looking at this from a data science perspective, she was simply using her 88 years of experience, and the information it had given her, to come to these conclusions. Over the years she’d seen the traits of successful relationships and was simply passing that down. But not all of her conclusions were accurate.

She firmly believed that for a long-lasting relationship couples should have a lot of mutual friends. However, she wasn’t taking information from enough people’s experiences.

But in 2014 a study identified, with a large enough sample size from big data, that more mutual friends on Facebook made a couple more likely to eventually split up.

One university recently asked students in a poll to share their GPA. Just 2% of the participants mentioned their 2.5 or lower GPA. But when the school checked the official records, the actual number was over five times that amount at 11%! It’s pretty obvious from this that people lie on surveys. We do this because we want to look good, even in the face of someone that we don’t know. This is also known as social desirability bias. And people don’t just lie to become liked, either. They’ll also try to impress whoever is asking the survey questions. Regardless of how well we know someone, this psychological bias takes over and we try to make a good impression. Just think if someone that looked similar to your dad was asking you about your drug use in college. You probably wouldn’t be very willing to…