Welcome back to another edition of Through Conversations Podcast. This time, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz joins us. Seth is an author, data scientist, and speaker who studies what we can learn about people from new, internet data sources. His 2017 book Everybody Lies was a New York Times bestseller and an Economist Book of the Year. Seth is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times and has worked as a visiting lecturer at the Wharton School and a data scientist at Google. He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and his PhD in economics from Harvard in 2013. He is a passionate fan of the Knicks, Mets, Jets, and Leonard Cohen.
Seth is someone who will blow your mind. His most recent book “Everybody Lies” answers deep questions, such as how much sex are people really having? or are Americans still racist? We dive deep into his book and we continue the conversation around it but cover a lot of ground in many other fields including free will, artificial intelligence, government and much more. Even though this conversation was thought-provoking, I still have a lot of questions for him and I hope we can have him again as a guest on this Podcast.
His book Everybody Lies has changed the way I see Google —and why do I use it. The premise of the book can be summarized in a quote from the book:
The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else.
Think about it for a second: Who do you trust more? Your girlfriend? Your family? Your priest? Who do you seek when you look for advice? The truth is, none of the above. You always confess first to Google. This search engine gives you free access to whatever it is you seek to find, with no fear of being judged or being called names.
Why do we tell the truth to Google? As Seth put it in his book, Google gives you an incentive to tell the truth. In this search engine, you’ve found the ideal candidate for your listening ear: a non-feeling, non-judgemental Pandora’s Box waiting for you to type whatever is in your mind. What if you happen to be racist? Would you rather go around asking for N-Word jokes or search for them on Google? This is the power of the search engine, it removes the guilt or fear of satisfying your darkest needs.
Seth described the incentives given by Google during our interview:
…You have an incentive to tell the truth. So I explained in book, if you ask someone, are you gay? A lot of people in places where it’s hard to be gay don’t say they’re gay, but they will search for gay porn. If you enjoy watching gay pornography, you would have an incentive to type that into your computer. If you have a health problem, you might not have an incentive to tell a stranger that you have that health problem because they might think less of you or you might not put it listed on a dating profile. But you would have an incentive to tell Google that because they can give you help. If you enjoy racist jokes, you have an incentive to search that on Google because you’re going to get the jokes that you find really funny. So I think Google gives you an incentive to kind of confess your secrets…
If you want to dive deep into Seth’s ideas, listen to our interview and buy the book Everybody Lies : Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.
