Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller

There is no grand conspiracy. There is just capitalism.

The days of structured, clean, simple, survey-based data are over. In this new age, the messy traces we leave as we go through life are becoming the primary source of data.

“Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.”

many of our adult behaviors and interests, even those that we consider fundamental to who we are, can be explained by the arbitrary facts of when we were born and what was going on in certain key years while we were young.

Another factor that plays into our lying to surveys is our strong desire to make a good impression on the stranger conducting the interview, if there is someone conducting the interview, that is.

Women use the word “tomorrow” far more often than men do, perhaps because men aren’t so great at thinking ahead.

Americans, for instance, search for “porn” more than they search for “weather.”

There is, in other words, outsize value, for scholars and entrepreneurs alike, in utilizing all the new types of data now available, in thinking broadly about what counts as data. These days, a data scientist must not limit herself to a narrow or traditional view of data.

What’s the issue with all of these claims? The curse of dimensionality. The human genome, scientists now know, differs in millions of ways. There are, quite simply, too many genes to test.