Pat Stuart

"Everybody Lies." The book title almost jumped out at me from a library shelf.  It’s subtitle was less titillating but provided a hint at an explanation for the claim: Big Data. New Data. And What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

It’s no news, of course, that everyone lies.  We all, sometimes, avoid answering questions that will take us where we don’t want to go with lies that close the subject.  As in the response of “fine” to the question “How are you?”  

The thing is, we just don’t have the energy to explain that the dogs got out and ate the neighbors chickens and that we woke up with a headache and that ... You know. 

We also take it for granted that politicians lie on everything from the “big lie” to cooking statistics to make themselves and their policies look good. What else is new?

Well ... Data crunchers haunting the internet now have access to truths about chronic and inveterate lying beyond what I suspected ... and I’m one of the world’s worst cynics.

Yes. There are people (I mean real people, not just the algorithms) who do nothing but crunch figures on the number of times we click on just about anything on the internet. Seriously. People not only make money doing this but make a lot of money.  

Want an answer to any question from the price of sugar to who starred in some film to the best  breed of dog? Click and someone makes a note then matches your click to every other click in the whole world on the same or a similar question. Then, they draw conclusions.  Sugar, they say, is in trouble. People are using substitutes. Or, re the star, maybe people are playing more Trivial Pursuit. As for the best breed? Maybe, they decide that “people are going to the dogs.” (I’m joking.)

Not only that but a lot of these data crunchers write learned papers that appear in the kinds of journals you and I don’t read, making reputations among a select few. Most such folks belong to one or another subsets of social scientists (which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one). Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists (another oxymoron), statisticians, historians ... you name it, they’ve found a way to turn our internet browsing into personal profit.

Even on the question of lying. The author, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, certainly seems to have with his book, which his publisher styles “ground-breaking.” Whether that claim is true or not, Seth’s statistics on the extent and degree of our everyday lying goes way beyond the realm of social lies and is persuasive.  

According to our own internet searches, people tell serious lies on really important things. Like tax returns. Now, we all probably suspect that rich people go to extremes to “adjust” their books or just plain fabricate figures to reduce their taxes. No surprise. They do. But who knew that large numbers of the lower middle class adjust their incomes in order to pay no taxes.

As for a subject like sex?  Well, again, I’ve taken it for granted that men lie about their sexual encounters. I just didn’t realize they skew the truth in such a major way ... and that women do it, too.

People lie, seriously, on polls, particularly on topics like whether they’re registered to vote, whether they actually do vote, if they have a library card, whether or not they give to charity, if they’re racist, whether they look at porn sites and what kinds of those sites, if they use drugs ... The list goes on and on.

So what?

So, it’s sort of refreshing to consider these hidden aspects of human nature as we suffer through the very serious “in your face” kind of blatant lying that we’ve been seeing all around us during the run-up to this November’s election.  Puts it all in context, doesn’t it.