Book summary: Everybody lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Signals from Search

• What people search for is in itself a signal
• The order of keywords in which they search is also a signal
• Quality of google search data is better than in Facebook because
  • You are alone with no fear of being judged
  • You have an incentive to be honest

On Big data

• the needle is still the same size but the haystack has been getting bigger
• Be judicious by cutting down the sample size of the data to be used

Data science

• Trust your intuition as the initial signal but verify quantitatively to avoid narrative bias
• Correlation is most often sufficient for utilization purposes – often the explanation of why the model works comes after the fact
• critically assess the actual data underlying the narrative. At times it might tell a very different story than narrative presented
• Clustering of groups of people helps predicts behavior – Netflix and baseball
• AB testing to discover causations

Social Impact

• great business are found on:
  • secrets about nature
  • secrets about people
• Modeling
  • Physics – utilize neat equation
  • Human behavior – probabilistically via Naive Bayes classification

Managing angry people

• Lecturing them will provoke their anger
• Provoking their curiousity will cause their attention to be diverted causing anger to subside

Related readings

• Zero to one, Peter Thiel