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A New York Times Bestseller
An audacious, irreverent investigation of human behavior—and a first look at a revolution in the making
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Our personal data has been used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us stuff we don’t need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we truly are.
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For centuries, we’ve relied on polling or small-scale lab experiments to study human behavior. Today, a new approach is possible. As we live more of our lives online, researchers can finally observe us directly, in vast numbers, and without filters. Data scientists have become the new demographers.
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In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook "likes" can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person’s sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requests; and why you must have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of America’s most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter. He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey? What do black women think about Simon & Garfunkel? (Hint: they don’t think about Simon & Garfunkel.) Rudder also traces human migration over time, showing how groups of people move from certain small towns to the same big cities across the globe. And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.
�
Visually arresting and full of wit and insight, Dataclysm is a new way of seeing ourselves—a brilliant alchemy, in which math is made human and numbers become the narrative of our time.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1617444 in Books
- Published on: 2014-09-09
- Released on: 2014-09-09
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 6
- Dimensions: 5.90" h x 1.10" w x 5.08" l,
- Running time: 450 minutes
- Binding: Audio CD
Amazon.com Review
Q&A with Christian Rudder, cofounder of OkCupid and author of Dataclysm
As more of our social interaction happens on social media, how much can researchers learn about us from our online interactions?
Well, they can only learn what we tell them, but in the age of Facebook and Google, that’s become pretty much everything. To the extent that friendship, anger, sex, love, and whatever else happen online, we can investigate them.
Your search history tells us what kind of jokes you like. Your Facebook network reveals not just your friendships, but in some cases the state of your marriage. Your preferences on OkCupid tell us what you find sexy, and your reaction to the strangers the site offers up tells us how you judge people. The articles you “like” tell us not just about your politics, but even predict your intelligence.
You fold in data points like these for millions and millions of people, and you start to get a whole new picture of humankind.
In Dataclysm you’re taking this flood of information and putting it to an entirely new use: understanding human nature. So what have you found?
I tried really hard to avoid the numerical dog and pony show. There are of course lots of interesting one-off factoids, but I mostly found what I (and probably you) have always known: that people are gentle, mean, stupid, lusty, lonely, kind, foolish, shrewd, shallow, and endlessly complex. Dataclysm’s central idea isn’t necessarily what we can see using big data; it’s the fact of the vision itself. That we can get real data on even the most private moments in people’s lives is an astounding thing. It’s like the second advent of reality television, but this time without the television part. Just the reality.
Are you worried about any of this?
I have mixed feelings about the implications. I myself almost never tweet, post, or share anything about my personal life. At the same time, I’ve just spent three years writing about how interesting all this data is, and I cofounded OkCupid. My hope is that this ambivalence makes me a trustworthy guide through the thicket of technology and data. I admire the knowledge that social data can bring us; I also fear the consequences.
You have a lot to say about race in the book, and you use data to shed light on the many ways it affects the way we interact with one another. What surprised you about your research in this area? Did you find anything unsurprising?
The data on race was surprising only in its stubborn predictability—for all the glitzy technology, the results could’ve been from the 1950s. I grew up in Little Rock and graduated from Central High, the first school in the South to be integrated: Eisenhower, the National Guard, mobs of white people screaming at nine black children, that’s Central. The school embraces its history and is now over half black. I’m no brave crusader, but race (and racism) were part of my education. So when, in researching the book, I unpacked three separate databases and found that in every one white people gave black people short-shrift, I wasn’t shocked, you know? Asians and Latinos apply the same penalty to African Americans that white folks do, which says something about how even (relatively) recent additions to the “American experience” have acquired its biases.
What makes this moment in time—and this set of data—different from the massive data surveys of the past, such as Pew, Gallup, or the Kinsey Institute?
The data in my book is almost all passively observed—there’s no questionnaire, no contrived experiment to simulate “real life.” This data is real life. Online you have friends, lovers, enemies, and intense moments of truth without a thought for who’s watching, because ostensibly no one is—except of course the computers recording it all. This is how digital data circumvents that old research obstacle: people’s inability to be honest when the truth makes them look bad. Digital data’s ability to get at the private mind like this is unprecedented and very powerful.
Review
An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Globe & Mail Best Book of 2014
A Brain Pickings Best Science Book of 2014
A Bloomberg Best Book of 2014
One of Hudson Booksellers' 5 Best Business Books of 2014
Goodreads Semifinalist for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Most data-hyping books are vapor and slogans. This one has the real stuff: actual data and actual analysis taking place on the page. That’s something to be praised, loudly and at length. Praiseworthy, too, is Rudder’s writing, which is consistently zingy and mercifully free of Silicon Valley business gabble."
—Jordan Ellenberg, Washington Post
"As a researcher, Mr. Rudder clearly possesses the statistical acumen to answer the questions he has posed so well. As a writer, he keeps the book moving while fully exploring each topic, revealing his graphs and charts with both explanatory and narrative skill. Though he forgoes statistical particulars like p-values and confidence intervals, he gives an approachable, persuasive account of his data sources and results. He offers explanations of what the data can and cannot tell us, why it is sufficient or insufficient to answer some question we may have and, if the latter is the case, what sufficient data would look like. He shows you, in short, how to think about data."
—Wall Street Journal
"Rudder is the co-founder of the dating site�OKCupid�and the data scientist behind its now-legendary�trend analyses, but he is also — as it becomes immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly cross-disciplinary references — a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that�make us human�and that, importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble the hard data with dimensional insight into the richness of the human experience...an extraordinarily unusual and dimensional lens on what Carl Sagan memorably called ‘the aggregate of our joy and suffering.’"
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
"Fascinating, funny, and occasionally howl-inducing...[Rudder] is a quant with soul, and we’re lucky to have him."
—Elle
�
"There's another side of Big Data you haven't seen—not the one that promised to use our digital world to our advantage to optimize, monetize, or systematize every last part our lives. It's the big data that rears its ugly head and tells us what we�don't�want to know. And that, as Christian Rudder demonstrates in his new book,�Dataclysm, is perhaps an equally worthwhile pursuit. Before we heighten the human experience, we should understand it first."
—TIME
"At a time when consumers are increasingly wary of online tracking, Rudder makes a powerful argument in Dataclysm that the ability to tell so much about us from the trails we leave is as potentially useful as it is pernicious, and as educational as it may be unsettling. By explaining some of the insights he has gleaned from OkCupid and other social networks, he demystifies data-mining and sheds light on what, for better or for worse, it is now capable of."
—Financial Times
"Dataclysm is a well-written and funny look at what the numbers reveal about human behavior in the age of social media. It’s both profound and a bit disturbing, because, sad to say, we’re generally not the kind of people we like to think — or say — we are."
—Salon
"For all its data and its seemingly dating-specific focus,�Dataclysm�tells the story set forth by the book's subtitle, in an entertaining and accessible way. Informative, eye-opening, and (gasp) fun to read. Even if you’re not a giant�stat head."
—Grantland
"[Rudder] doesn’t wring or clap his hands over the big-data phenomenon (see N.S.A., Google ads, that sneaky Fitbit) so much as plunge them into big data and attempt to pull strange creatures from the murky depths."�
—The New Yorker
"A�hopeful and exciting journey into the heart of data collection...[Rudder's] book delivers both insider access and a savvy critique of the very machinery he is employed by. Since he's been in the data mines and has risen above them, Rudder becomes a singular and trustworthy guide.
—The Globe and Mail
"Compulsively readable — including for those with no particular affinity for numbers in and of themselves — and surprisingly personal. Starting with aggregates, Rudder posits, we can zoom in on the details of how we live, love, fight, work, play, and age; from numbers, we can derive narrative. There are few characters in the book, and few anecdotes — but the human story resounds throughout."
—Refinery29
"Rudder’s lively, clear prose…makes heady concepts understandable and transforms the book’s many charts into revealing truths…Rudder teaches us a bit about how wonderfully peculiar humans are, and how we go about hiding it."
—Flavorwire
"Dataclysm�is all about what we can learn about human minds and hearts by analyzing the massive ongoing experiment that is the internet."
—Forbes
"The book reads as if it's written (well) by a curious child whose parents beg him or her to stop asking "what-if" questions. Rudder examines the data of the website he helped create with unwavering curiosity. Every turn presents new questions to be answered, and he happily heads down the rabbit hole to resolve them."
—U.S. News
"A wonderful march through infographics created using data derived from the web…a fun, visual book—and a necessary one at that."
—The Independent (UK), 2014's Best Books on the Internet and Technology
"This is the best book that I've read on data in years, perhaps ever. If you want to understand how data is affecting the present and what it portends for the future, buy it now."
—Huffington Post
"Rudder draws from big data sets – Google searches, Twitter updates, illicitly obtained Facebook data passed shiftily between researchers like bags of weed – to draw out subtle patterns in politics, sexuality, identity and behaviour that are only revealed with distance and aggregation…Dataclysm�will entertain those who want to know how machines see us. It also serves as a call to action, showing us how server farms running everything from home shopping to homeland security turn us into easily digested data products. Rudder's message is clear: in this particular sausage factory, we are the pigs.”�
—New Scientist
"Dataclysm offers both the satisfaction of confirming stereotypes and the fun of defying them…Such candor is disarming, as is Mr. Rudder’s puckish sense of humor."�
–Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Studying human behavior is a little like exploring a jungle: it's messy, hard, and easy to lose your way. But Christian Rudder is a consummate guide, revealing essential truths about who we are. Big Data has never been so fun."
—Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational
�
"Dataclysm is a book full of juicy secrets—secrets about who we love, what we crave, why we like, and how we change each other’s minds and lives, often without even knowing it. Christian Rudder makes this mathematical narrative of our culture fun to read and even more fun to discuss: You will find yourself sharing these intriguing data-driven revelations with everyone you know."
—Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken
�
"In the first few pages of Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses massive amounts of actual behavioral data to prove what I always believed in my heart: Belle and Sebastian is the whitest band ever. It only gets better from there."
—Aziz Ansari
"It’s unheard of for a book about Big Data to read like a guilty pleasure, but Dataclysm does. It’s a fascinating, almost voyeuristic look at who we really are and what we really want."
—Steven Strogatz, Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics, Cornell University, author of The Joy of x
"Smart, revealing, and sometimes sobering, Dataclysm affirms what we probably suspected in our darker moments: When it comes to romance, what we say we want isn't what will actually make us happy. Christian Rudder has tapped the tremendous wealth of data that the Internet offers to tease out thoughts on topics like beauty and race that most of us wouldn’t cop to publicly. It's a riveting read, and Rudder is an affable and humane guide."
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
"Christian Rudder has written a funny and profound book about important issues. Race, love, sex—you name it. Are we the sum of the data we produce? Read this book immediately and see if you can answer the question."
—Errol Morris
"Big Data can be like a 3D movie without 3D glasses—you know there's a lot going on but you're mainly just disoriented. We should feel fortunate to have an interpreter as skilled (and funny) as Christian Rudder. Dataclysm is filled with insights that boil down Big Data into byte-sized revelations."
—Michael Norton, Harvard Business School, coauthor of Happy Money
"With a zest for both the profound and the wacky, Rudder demonstrates how the information we provide individually tells a vast deal about who we are collectively. A visually engaging read and a fascinating topic make this a great choice not just for followers of Nate Silver and fans of infographics, but for just about anyone who, by participating in online activity, has contributed to the data set."
—Library Journal
"Demographers, entrepreneurs, students of history and sociology, and ordinary citizens alike will find plenty of provocations and, yes, much data in Rudder's well-argued, revealing pages."
—Kirkus Reviews
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Christian Rudder is cofounder and president of OkCupid and the author of the popular blog OkTrends. He graduated from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in math and later served as creative director for SparkNotes. He has appeared on NBC’s Dateline and NPR’s All Things Considered and his work has been written about in the New York Times and the The New Yorker, among other places. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Truisms are true no matter the hue
By M. T. Crenshaw
Dataclysm is a fun popular approach to scientific data analysis and interpretation. This a very enjoyable fascinating reading. There are many good things about this book: it deals with data in a passionate and entertaining way, and makes something a priori not that interesting to people who do not love data, really interesting! The book does so in a very clear and approachable language. Besides, Rudder is an insider who knows what he is talking about first hand so everything he says is worth listening to. After all he is not one of those lorikeets who repeat data analysis and statistics without understanding anything about them or even questioning the results. Rudder comes trough as a lovely chap, inquisitive mind, and passionate about the work he does. Most importantly, he comes through also as an unpretentious guy who wants to connect with the reader.
Perhaps the main take from the book to me is that mathematicians and data analysts are coming down to something that Social Sciences and Humanities wanted them to come to decades ago, and, most importantly, they now have the tools to deal with humongous amounts of real-life real-people's life to do that.
The most interesting parts of the book, at least to me, are chapters 12 (Know your Place) and chapter 14 (Bread crumbs). The first because it shows, even at an embryonary level, that geographical maps are sometimes just lines drawn on a piece a paper, while other factors, beyond the place you live, have way more importance. The Dolly project seems to me the most fascinating thing in the world and I would have loved more details about it. The later chapter is, by far, the most interesting (to me) because Rudder is an insider and anything and everything he has to say about the collection, storage and use of our data or meta-data is relevant and important and needs to be taken into consideration. I would have loved that chapter way more developed and detailed. Rudder is just very clear about how things are and should be, or perhaps should not be, and I wanted more. Also, I wanted to know his opinion on the use of IP blinders, and the use of browsers like Mozilla or Duckduckgo, which are not that keen on recording our data or sharing it with anybody.
I am a critical reader so I tend to question or think about what any non-fiction writer says, as much as my limited knowledge allows me. I was pleased to find that some questions or objections that I found myself making to Rudder's statements while reading, were later presented and discussed. In a way, Rudder has a Humanities sort of soul, which shines now and then when dealing with his mathematician core. I love the combo.
I also loved al the details about data collection and use, and the games that Rudder and his pals at OkCupid played, and especially Rudder's trends analysis examples. That is Rudder's forte and it does show! I loved some of his reflections on Google's auto-complete trends analysis, the healthiness of a couple by looking a the chart on dots interconnection on Facebook, or the discussion on racial attitudes in the USA.
The charts are beautifully presented and coloured, so many different styles and ways of organising the data.
Dataclysm could have been a better book on so many fronts that it is a pity that is not. The main downside of the book is the lack of proper editing. A good editor can make wonders for any book, no matter how brainy you are. A good editor works not only on making the text more readable regarding spelling, sentence and paragraph structure, but also book structure, approach and level of focus, so the book is not only polished, but also makes sense and conveys the author's message better. Unfortunately, the book is not polished and the structure does not make Rudder any favour. Mind you, the use of verbal contractions is not advisable in a published book, unless you are translating or reproducing direct speech, while it is preferred in blogging. The use of long paragraphs with bad punctuation turns a stroll by the beach into a walk through thorny bushes. You get the image.
It is a pity that the author decided or was advised to present us with the current book's structure. I do not have a problem with general non-related chapters presented as such and bunched together in three parts, because they make sense to me. However, I do have a problem with the general structure of the book, and the endnotes/notes system.
The chapter on sources and data is relegated to the end of the book, before the index. I consider this a big fall because Rudder is asking the reader to believe what he says with some sort of theological trust, while he could have easily earned the reader's trust and respect by just using the "coda" (Italian for tail or epilogue) at the very beginning. Why? Because this chapter explains exactly how he has approached data, and his methodology, what he has done and how he has done it. This is especially relevant in this book, because a good deal of its chapters are re-takes on his own blog posts, so it would have benefited him stating clearly, upfront, that those re-takes used new fresh data and the testing was done again from scratch and were not a copy-and-paste sort of thing. We have to wait to the end of the book to learn that.
I am a bit anal about footnotes/endnotes, but I understand that if you want to write a scientific book on data for the general public you cannot do that, just for practical reasons. So, I consider sensible Rudder's restrain at using endnotes. Then, we get to the bottom end of the book, and we find this statement:
"We no longer live in a world where a reader depends on endnotes for “more information”or to seek proof of facts or claims. For example, I imagine any reader interested in Sullivan Ballou will have Googled him long before"
Yes, it is true, even I do that, but it worries me that any person coming from a decent University would say that or do that in a book. We are relying more and more on what the Wikipedia is saying or the Internet (who is the Internet here?) is saying, and not on what scholarly periodicals, books or encyclopaedias, peer-reviewed, properly edited and discussed, say about anything. I would strive to provide "serious" reference material, and add as many footnotes or endnotes or references as necessary.
Them, Rudder goes bananas-ish and provides us with a "chapter" called "notes", right after the space devoted to the endnotes. Rudder wants to provide us with extra information on certain points mentioned in the book. Well, if that the case, add more footnotes/ endnotes. That is what they are used for! This is even more painful in the Kindle edition. The link from the note to the text works backwards, and takes you to the part of the text it relates to, but does not allow you to do so forward, because there is not an endnote to do so properly.
If this were my book, I would work on fixing this and introducing that information as endnotes in the text, properly. And also to link properly the references forward in the Kindle Edition.
There it comes the Index, a proper scholar index, one of those beautifully made indexes that are so awesome to have in a book. There for us... with a hard copy. Otherwise, no, because it is not properly linked in the Kindle edition, and therefore, useless. This is something easily fixable if you want to charge the client full price for any book.
The book, per se, ends when my Kindle showed 65% read. The rest is the footnotes, notes, index and info about the author and the publisher. I felt ripped off again.
Why anybody with the brilliance of Rudder could self-behead himself is something that escapes me. And here it comes the main culprit for the failure of the book, or that is my impression, of course - Rudder's struggle to please both the general public and the academia. Many of his statements about methodology strive to convey a serious scientific way of work that matters and gets the approval of his academic peers, because he is really a serious scientist. That struggle also explains why the "coda" and the "notes" were relegated to the end of the book but were not totally disregarded.
A scientist can present his findings and knowledge to the general public being rigorous and respected by their academic peers without trying to please both. If you have clear who is the target or your book and put your focus on it, then things become easier as you find also easier what to sacrifice and what not.
There are a few flaws in the a-priori reasoning used. Perhaps things were not explained sufficiently, so I give Rudder the benefit of the doubt. Here some examples:
+ Although most people are not on online networks and sites, most of them are or will be, so the analysis of the data and its result have some sort of universality. And well, Facebook and Google are the kings and everybody is there, not to say the phone and Internet companies, which are also collecting your data. Yes, it is true. However, my mini-me-on-the-shoulder sort of question pops up. Were do we put the gazillion Chinese on Planet Earth who do not use FB or Google or Western sites? What about Middle East Cultures, like, say Yemen, or Saudi Arabia or Qatar or Afghanistan? Do include them by default in the findings and analysis in the book and decide that we are all one? You get the picture.
+ Sometimes I had the impression that Rudder could not distinguish, although I am sure he does, that the USA is not the world, and that the Western World is not the whole world. For example, are his analysis (which I really loved) about race in the USA pertinent, say, in Bolivia? in South Africa? in Botswana? Would the approach to the data on race could be collected the same? Rudder probably never intended to imply that, for sure, but the book comes across as if the contrary was true at times. I think part of the epilogue should have been devoted to stating what he is doing and what sort of limits his analysis has. This is, unless he is using data from around the world from China to Bhutan, Uganda to Dafour. Then, I will vanish and shut up. Of course there are some things that are universal because we are all humans, and we all have a human body, and want to relate: "no man is an island" However "the other" is there, in those places where life is most deeply affected by religion, your gender, or the part of the world you live in.
+ The author recognises that the important thing is not just what the data says about what humans do, but why they do it. Bingo! That got me excited. It was a quickie-sort-of excitement because beyond some truisms, nothing of substance is said as a reply.
+ What a person searches for often gives you the person himself. Really? Well, sometimes, not always. Yes, if there is a massive search on a given thing at the same time, like the epidemic thingie by Google. But say, that there is not such massive search, and I look up Google for skin rash photos. I might be giving my me having a skin rash, or me studying dermatology, or making an assessment for High School, or my baby has a rash and I want to find what exactly is, or I have a sort of sickly morbid fascination with photos of skin diseases.So, how analysts discriminate the intention behind my typing skin diseases from yours on the same sought up at the same time when there is non an epidemic?
Now, if I made the statements below, just a few of those that you will find in the book, would you be surprised or think that a humongous amount of data has to be analysed, charted and studied for your to learn this?
* Men usually prefer younger women, no matter their age.
* At the end of the day, looks aren't that important when you meet a person in real life, more the things you have in common.
* People say they are something but then they are another.
* People tend to hide or not to say things that are not politically correct regarding race, gender and what is not.
* Men-women connect better when they do not sea each other's photo.
* People vote for somebody and lie about at the exit of the polls booth, especially if the candidate is not popular.
* Asian Americans talk more about Korean pop or Korean films than white people, while the music that South American mention is salsa or bachata not as much as country music.
* With the Internet we all have a voice now and a larger audience.
* The better interconnected in the family a couple is, the more chances has of their relationship to succeed.
Yes, that is right. A series of truisms, common sense evaluations presented through flashy mathematically crafted charts, and complex data analysis. Isn't this a bit of a waste of the author's talent and time?
"The era of data is here; we are now recorded"
Is that so new? Just visit any old historical archive or the Tax office records of the pre-Internet era.I guess Sumerian Bookkeepers felt the same, at the top o the world, when dealing with so much data. We have been recording our data and our data has been used for ages, literally, just a bit differently. Yes, Rudder possibly did not intend to imply this either, but the flash is sometimes too bright to let us see properly.
I would have not written such a long review if there wasn't something intrinsically good and thought-provoking in Rudder's book, so take it as it is. I still recommend the reading and I think it is really entertaining and interesting.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Extended blog entry
By Elad
This book discusses the author's observations from OKCupid, a dating site, with some reinforcements from other web sources, such as Twitter and Google.
The work on OKCupid is quite interesting: who wants to date who, males and females' preferences, etc. It was great in Rudder's blog, but I felt it didn't transfer well enough to a book. Rudder tries to enhance his data with sociological information and his views, but these are not altogether very convincing. He is most in his element discussing OKCupid.
It is also curious that the author hasn't published any of these data in academic journals. This makes it (in my view) a less valid observation.
Finally, there are a few minor mistakes in the book. For example, it is doubtful that there is research on civil unrest in Egyptian cities bordering Israel, because there are so few of the latter. Also, when Rudder discusses words, but shows phrases, it detracts from the message because it is inaccurate.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Teases out insights into how people honestly think about themselves and others
By Walt Bristow
Big data has a bad name. It is used to spy on us and to convince us to buy things we do not need (and, we discover after parting with our money, that we often do not want). Nevertheless, big data - and the insight it gives into who we are - fascinates us.
Christian Rudder is in a unique position to tell us a lot about ourselves. As a co-founder of OkCupid, he has access to the hearts and minds (and politics and food and drink) of millions of us. In Dataclysm, he slices, dices, and adds a bit of direction (and wit) to data that, he believes, reveals the inner soul of who we are.
Here is a smattering of what you'll uncover in Dataclysm.
Women (who men believe are `over-the-hill' after age 21) think that only one in six men is `above average' in attractiveness. Until age 30, women prefer slightly older guys. After 30, they prefer them slightly younger. At 40, well let's say that men lose their appeal after they turn 40. Conclusion? Women want men to age with them (at least until age 40). Men always want youth.
People who are considered attractive by everyone are less appealing that those who are seen as unattractive by some. That is, having some flaw or imperfection actually makes you more attractive and appealing to others.
Twitter may actually improve a user's writing because it forces you to wring meaning from fewer letters.
The messages on OkCupid that get the most responses are short (40-60 characters). To get to that brief message, most people edit, edit and edit some more. Then that same message is used over and over and over again. Rudder's conclusion? Boilerplate is 75% as effective as something original.
Remember the six degrees of separation? Rudder reports that analysis of Facebook accounts shows that 99.6% of people on Facebook are, in fact, within six degrees of anyone on the planet. The more you share with mutual friends, the stronger the relationship. Couples who have a strong relationship tend to be the connecting point among very different groups of people - your partner is one of the few people you can introduce into the far corners of your life.
People tend to overemphasize the big, splashy things: faith, politics, and certainly looks, but in determining compatibility with another, those beliefs do not matter nearly as much as everyone thinks. Sometimes they do not matter at all. Often it is caring about a topic that is more important than how you view the topic itself.
Race has less effect on how well you will get along with someone else than religion, politics or education. However, racism is still pervasive in whom you might prefer to interact with.
On Facebook, every percentile of attractiveness gives a man two new friends. It gives a woman three. Guess how that plays into employment interviews?
White people tend to differentiate themselves by their hair and eyes. Asians by their country of origin. Latinos by their music.
You get the idea - many strange but interesting relationships begin to pop out when you have mounds of data about many people who give up that data without the expectation that it is going to be used to figure out who we really are when no one is looking over our shoulder.
Rudder provides a stimulating glimpse into what can be teased out of piles of data. I have to assume he knows how to analyze the data and how to interpret what the data says to him. What he sees is sometimes distressing (as in his conclusions about racism). However, it is always fascinating.
As dating sites, Google, social media sites, (the NSA?) and others continue to vacuum up data on our personal lives, will the result be good? Or will it be used to hurt? Who will decide? Does it require laws? Or will people eventually turn away from companies that misuse the information we give them about ourselves?
A good read. Look for more tidbits as social scientists dig deeper and deeper into big data.
This and other reviews available at WalterBristow.com
Review based on a copy courtesy of the publisher.
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