Everybody lies – or – the personal life of a 30 something New Yorker bent on using Google Analytics to Get Social Proof for his Anxieties.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

I ordered the Kindle edition of Everybody Lies with high hopes; finally, I said to myself, I’ll learn who I really am – and what better place to learn that, then the sacred INTERNET and the GOD of all data small and big – Google.

It turns out – based on the ground breaking big data work – that we are:

• Obsessed with sex and not having enough of it;
• More racist then we care to admit;
• Less rational and more biased then we perceive ourselves to be

And my answer to that is: COME ON – do we need BIG DATA to know that????

If sex wasn’t selling – would half the ads on TV, newspapers, the Internet and billboards be sexual?

If people were rational would TESLA be trading at the current price?

Do we need to read a book and learn that from big data?

My Gestalt coach, in response to my discussing social sciences questions, once told me that the research in the social/psychological field often gives us a window to the mind of the researcher more than anything else. In other words – if Freud argues that elongated objects appearing in dreams are all phallic symbols – then that’s his problem.

In that context it is clear to see what a single young urbanite, in and upbeat New York neighborhood is focused on: sex and sex and sex and sex; not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;-)

Do we need big data to know that colleges lie to us – and that it doesn’t make any sense to pay north of $200K to go to an Ivy League college – but the narrative is so strong and so embedded in our culture that we are afraid to face our children and tell them as much???

What truly is disturbing is our new Data Religion – there are several revelations in the book worthy of attention; the most important one is the subtext of the book and that is indeed troubling!

In order to further explain I’ll lean on a much great and more articulate thinker then myself: Read what philosopher Yuval Noah Harari (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari ) has to say about the data religion:

Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.

Dataists further believe that given enough biometric data and computing power, this all-encompassing system could understand humans much better than we understand ourselves. Once that happens, humans will lose their authority, and humanist practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as rain dances and flint knives.

Read more here:

Yuval Noah Harari on big data, Google and the end of free will

https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c

In my humble opinion, Dataism, and the author who is a true believer, fail to ask the important questions:

• What will be the impact of AI on our well-being?
• Are the aliens watching us right now?
• Will Google dominate the search market in 10 years
• s True happiness important?
• Is Global warming for real?
• Do Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin share the same facial complexion
• Why is 42 the answer for our existence?

Maybe people aren’t asking Google that, since they know she can’t answer?

I can’t complete this post without giving personal life-coach advise to the author – here are several questions you could ask Google to improve your life:

• Who should you love? Should he/she be like your father or like your mother?
• Should you have a spouse? Will your marriage work? Should you have children? What is your sexual preference?

Good Luck!

https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Lies-Internet-About-Really/dp/0062390856