Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give.

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It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here with today's guest, Seth Stevens Dividowitz.

Seth is trained as an economist.

He did his PhD in economics at Harvard. He worked for a while as a data scientist at Google,

is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, and very recently published a book titled Everybody Lies, Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet

Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Seth, welcome to rationally speaking.

Thanks so much for having me, Jillio.

One thing that really attracted me to your book, Seth, is, well, first of all, I just love

clever experimental design and kind of clever ways of tricking the world

into giving up information to us, which your book falls squarely into that category. I have this

whole folder of examples of clever experiments and clever studies on my computer that I happily

added your work to. And more particularly, a big update that has been happening for me in the last

few years is that we just can't trust people to honestly and accurately report how they're feeling

and what they believe and why they do the things they do. And if we want accurate answers to those questions, we kind of have to get cleverer

and infer those answers from clever and original sources of data.

Like, for example, people's Google searches, which is where your research comes in.

So my first question for you is just, how did you first start, or why did you first start looking at sources of data like people's Google searches? What was interesting about that kind of data?

Yeah. So it started when I was doing my PhD program, when I was in my PhD program, and

I was kind of a little lost and burnt out. I didn't really have dissertation topic. And then I found

...