Sublime

valuing each pull at a constant fraction of the previous one, which is something that a variety of experiments in behavioral economics and psychology suggest people don’t do.

When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help, it turns out, can tell us a lot more about what they really think, really desire, really fear, and really do than anyone might have guessed.

Once we find the counterintuitive result, we can use more data science to help us explain why the world is not as it seems.

Most important, to squeeze insights out of Big Data, you have to ask the right questions. Just as you can’t point a telescope randomly at the night sky and have it discover Pluto for you, you can’t download a whole bunch of data and have it discover the secrets of human nature for you. You must look in promising places—Google searches that begin “m

Some 73 percent of Americans, according to a Pew Research report, believe that search results are both accurate and impartial.

“The algorithms know you better than you know yourself,”

Academics, consultants, policy wonks, and other symbolic analysts

Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer