Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller

Sometimes our gut, when not guided by careful computer analysis, can be dead wrong. We can get blinded by our own experiences and prejudices.

Numbers can be seductive. We can grow fixated with them, and in so doing we can lose sight of more important considerations.

You have become another victim of one of the most diabolical aspects of “the curse of dimensionality.” It can strike whenever you have lots of variables

We might call this—taking a simple method and utilizing Big Data to perform an analysis several hundred times in a short period of time—science at scale. Yes, the social and behavioral sciences are most definitely going to scale.

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.

Levitt was telling us that a combination of curiosity, creativity, and data could dramatically improve our understanding of the world. There were stories hidden in data that were ready to be told and this has been proven right over and over again.

Popper is hardly the only person to have made this distinction. Just about everybody agrees that physicists, biologists, and chemists are real scientists. They utilize rigorous experiments to find how the physical world works. In contrast, many people think that economists, sociologists, and psychologists are soft scientists who throw around meanin

These experiments demonstrate the potential of Big Data to replace guesses, conventional wisdom, and shoddy correlations with what actually works—causally.

Yes, even a spectacularly successful Big Data organization like Facebook sometimes makes use of the source of information much disparaged in this book: a small survey.