Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Last updated
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Born
Seth Isaac Stephens-Davidowitz

(1982-09-15) September 15, 1982 (age 41)
Englewood, New Jersey
NationalityAmerican
Education Stanford University
Harvard University
Known forResearch using Google Trends to study human behavior
Scientific career
Fields Data science
Economics
Institutions Google
Thesis Essays Using Google Data  (2013)
Doctoral advisor Alberto Alesina
Website sethsd.com

Seth Isaac Stephens-Davidowitz (born September 15, 1982) [1] is an American data scientist, economist, and author. He has worked as a New York Times op-ed contributor, a data scientist at Google, [2] as well as a visiting lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. [3] [4] He has published research using Google Trends search data, as well as data from Wikipedia and Facebook, to gain real-time insights into people's thoughts and beliefs that they may be unwilling to admit publicly. [5] [6] [7]

Contents

His first book Everybody Lies was published by HarperCollins in 2017. The book subsequently became a New York Times bestseller, and was named a book of the year by both PBS NewsHour and the Economist . [8]

Biography

Stephens-Davidowitz was born on September 15, 1982, in Englewood, New Jersey [1] into a Jewish family, [9] son of Esther Davidowitz and Mitchell Stephens. [10] He grew up in Alpine, New Jersey, and attended Tenafly High School in Tenafly, graduating in 1999. [11] He went on to earn his B.A. in philosophy from Stanford University before enrolling at Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in economics in 2013. [3] [10]

Everybody Lies

Everybody Lies was published by HarperCollins in 2017. The book has received several reviews and other coverage, [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] was a New York Times bestseller, and was named a book of the year by both PBS NewsHour and the Economist . [8]

The overriding theme of the book is that people aren't as honest about their true natures when responding to standard questionnaires as they are when searching the internet, on the assumption that search is a private activity. Of particular note is the empirical chapter, Chapter 4: Digital Truth Serum, derived from extensive Big Data analysis of search engine search histories (primarily Google's) on sensitive subject matters such as prejudice, violence, and sexuality. The remainder of the book addresses the surrounding issues of methodology, epistemology, and moral philosophy.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alpine, New Jersey</span> Borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States

Alpine is a borough in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, approximately 15 miles (24 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. It is the easternmost community in New Jersey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tenafly, New Jersey</span> Borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States

Tenafly is a borough in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States census, the borough's population was 15,409, an increase of 921 (+6.4%) from the 2010 census count of 14,488, which in turn reflected an increase of 682 (+4.9%) from the 13,806 counted in the 2000 census. Tenafly is a suburb of New York City.

HarperCollins Publishers LLC is an American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster. HarperCollins is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google</span> American multinational technology company

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company focusing on artificial intelligence, online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, and consumer electronics. It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and as one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of artificial intelligence. Alongside Amazon, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies.

Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing and especially relate to mass surveillance.

<i>Freakonomics</i> 2005 nonfiction book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. Based on the success of the original book, Levitt and Dubner have grown the Freakonomics brand into a multi-media franchise, with a sequel book, a feature film, a regular radio segment on National Public Radio, and a weekly blog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Books</span> Service from Google

Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.

Tenafly High School is a four-year comprehensive community public high school in Tenafly in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, serving students in ninth through twelfth grades as the lone secondary school of the Tenafly Public Schools. Students from the neighboring community of Alpine attend the school as part of a sending/receiving relationship with the Alpine Public School.

Google Trends is a website by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharyl Attkisson</span> American writer, journalist, television reporter/correspondent

Sharyl Attkisson is an American journalist and television correspondent. She hosts the Sinclair Broadcast Group TV show Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.

The Edge Foundation, Inc. is an association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Its main activities are reflected on the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. The site is a critically noted online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Big data</span> Information assets characterized by high volume, velocity, and variety

Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with higher complexity may lead to a higher false discovery rate. Though used sometimes loosely partly due to a lack of formal definition, the best interpretation is that it is a large body of information that cannot be comprehended when used in small amounts only.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathryn Schulz</span> American journalist and author

Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Filter bubble</span> Intellectual isolation involving search engines

A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches. Personalized searches utilize website algorithms to selectively curate search results based on information about the user, such as their location, past click-behavior, and search history. Consequently, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles, resulting in a limited and customized view of the world. The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream.

Lorien Legacies is a series of young adult science fiction books, written by James Frey, Jobie Hughes, and formerly, Greg Boose, under the collective pseudonym Pittacus Lore.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oyster (company)</span> Commercial streaming service for digital e-books

Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pornhub</span> Pornographic video sharing website owned by MindGeek

Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography website. It is one of several pornographic video-streaming websites owned by MindGeek. As of November 2022, Pornhub is the 13th-most-trafficked website in the world and the second-most-trafficked adult website after XVideos.

The murder of Seth Rich occurred on July 10, 2016, at 4:20 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Rich died about an hour and a half after being shot twice in the back. The perpetrators were never apprehended; police suspected he had been the victim of an attempted robbery.

<i>Think Big and Kick Ass</i> 2007 book by Donald Trump and Bill Zanker

Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and in Life is a non-fiction book by Donald Trump, then head of The Trump Organization and later President of the United States, and Bill Zanker, The Learning Annex entrepreneur, first published in hardcover in 2007 by HarperCollins. Another edition was subsequently published in paperback in 2008 under the title Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life. Trump and Zanker had prior business ventures together before writing the book; Zanker's company helped gain Trump speaking engagements around the world with large audiences.

As of 2018, several firms in the United States rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley.

References

  1. 1 2 "Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Harvard University Department of Economics. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 January 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  2. ↑ Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth (9 July 2017). "Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets". the Guardian.
  3. 1 2 "Seth Stephens-Davidowitz". Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  4. ↑ Shermer, Michael (1 June 2018). "Web Searches Reveal (in Aggregate) What We're Really Thinking". Scientific American . Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  5. ↑ Illing, Sean (13 June 2017). "Persuasive proof that America is full of racist and selfish people". Vox . Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  6. ↑ Stein, Joel (15 June 2017). "That Time an Algorithm Whisperer Took Me to the Heart of Darkness". Time . Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  7. ↑ Ell, Kellie (24 April 2018). "Users don't seem to mind Google has more data than Facebook". CNBC . Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  8. 1 2 "Books of the Year 2017". The Economist. ISSN   0013-0613 . Retrieved 2022-06-27.
  9. ↑ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (20 December 2014). "What We're Searching For". The New York Times . Retrieved 7 March 2019.
  10. 1 2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth (2013). Essays Using Google Data (Ph.D.). Harvard University. p. viii. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  11. ↑ Palmer, Joanne (15 February 2018). "Big data is watching you". Jewish Standard . Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  12. ↑ "That Time an Algorithm Whisperer Took Me to the Heart of Darkness". Time Magazine . Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  13. ↑ Shaywitz, David. "No Lie: Engaging New Book Brings Behavioral Science Into The Era of Big Data". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  14. ↑ Hall, Eugene L. (July 2018). "Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2017). Everybody lies: Big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 352 pp., $27.99". Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. 44 (3): 556–557. doi:10.1111/jmft.12325. S2CID   51606276.
  15. ↑ "Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz review – what internet searches reveal". the Guardian . 2017-08-17. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  16. ↑ Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth (2017-07-09). "Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets". the Guardian . Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  17. ↑ "Everybody Lies". Kirkus Reviews.
  18. ↑ Sussman, Lisa (2019). "Everybody lies: Big data, new data and what the internet can tell us about who we really are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. New York: HarperCollins, 2017, 338 pp". International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. 16 (3): 203–205. doi:10.1002/aps.1612. ISSN   1556-9187. S2CID   197731421.
  19. ↑ Mouncey, Peter (2018-05-01). "Book review: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody lies: What the Internet can tell us about who we really are". International Journal of Market Research. 60 (3): 323–326. doi:10.1177/1470785318770312. ISSN   1470-7853. S2CID   169287708.
  20. ↑ "Can what you Google reveal your true self?". www.cbsnews.com. May 10, 2017. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  21. ↑ Duncan, Anna. ""Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz – a review – theGIST" . Retrieved 2020-12-08.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.