Dataclysm: Who We Are
Founder of OK Cupid, Christian Rudder, reveals the myriad and mind-blowing possibilities of harnessing big data, and explores what our digital footprints can tell us about human relationships.In an hour, ten million pictures go up on Facebook. Each day, more people flirt on OkCupid than live in Chicago. We've all heard these types of numbers before; but in ‘Datacysm’, for the first time, we can actually feel their impact. We can see the actual information being created and what we can learn from it.Christian Rudder is one of the founders of OK Cupid, America’s biggest dating site, and so is in possession of one of the richest interpersonal datasets in the world. In this book, he takes data from OK Cupid, and also from other sites – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, last.fm, LinkedIn, Uber, Reddit, and so on – all the messaging, the flirting, the posting, the trolling, the liking, the hating, and makes something wonderful.While most popular nonfiction takes something small and uses it as a lens for big events, ‘Dataclysm’ does the opposite. It takes something big — the enormous dataset of everything that we're doing and saying and thinking — and teases from it many small things: how a joke changes in the telling, whether it really matters where you went to college, how people decide who’s beautiful and who isn’t. This book is a series of statistical vignettes, tiny windows, looking in on slices of life.One day soon there will be many people whose entire lives have been mediated through their digital devices. Then we’ll really be able to see what’s what. In the meantime, with the data he has collected, Christian Rudder has forged a new genre of statistical writing, where numbers become narrative.
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Dataclysm
Who We Are>*
Christian Rudder
>* When We Think No Oneâs Looking
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Christian Rudder 2014
Christian Rudder asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Psychology Today Magazine for permission to reprint an excerpt from âFinal Analysis: Missed Connectionsâ by Dorothy Gambrell (January/February 2013), copyright © 2013 by Sussex Publishers, LLC; reprinted by permission of Psychology Today Magazine. Image here: Film still from Dazed and Confused, copyright © 1993 by Polygram Filmed Entertainment; reprinted by permission of Universal Studios Licensing LLC. Table here: âZipfâs Law and Vocabularyâ by C. J. Sorell from The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by C. A. Chapelle (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); reprinted by permission of the author. Table here: Traits predicted by a Facebook userâs âlikesâ adapted from Figure 2, âPrediction accuracy of classification of dichotomous/dichotomized attributes expressed by the AUCâ in âPrivate Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behaviorâ by Michael Kosinskia, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel (Washington, DC: PNAS, 2013); reprinted by permission of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Source ISBN: 9780007494415
Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007494422
2016-04-12
CONTENTS
Part 1: What Brings Us Brings Us Together
5. Thereâs No Success Like Failure
7. The Beauty Myth in Apotheosis
8. Itâs Whatâs Inside That Counts
Part 3: What Makes Us Who We Are
You have by now heard a lot about Big Data: the vast potential, the ominous consequences, the paradigm-destroying new paradigm it portends for mankind and his ever-loving websites. The mind reels, as if struck by a very dull object. So I donât come here with more hype or reportage on the data phenomenon. I come with the thing itself: the data, phenomenon stripped away. I come with a large store of the actual information thatâs being collected, which luck, work, wheedling, and more luck have put me in the unique position to possess and analyze.
I was one of the founders of OkCupid, a dating website that, over a very un-bubbly long haul of ten years, has become one of the largest in the world. I started it with three friends. We were all mathematically minded, and the site succeeded in large part because we applied that mind-set to dating; we brought some analysis and rigor to what had historically been the domain of love âexpertsâ and grinning warlocks like Dr. Phil. How the site works isnât all that sophisticatedâit turns out the only math you need to model the process of two people getting to know each other is some sober arithmeticâbut for whatever reason, our approach resonated, and this year alone 10 million people will use the site to find someone.
As I know too well, websites (and founders of websites) love to throw out big numbers, and most thinking people have no doubt learned to ignore them; you hear millions of this and billions of that and know itâs basically âHooray for me,â said with trailing zeros. Unlike Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other sources whose data will figure prominently in this book, OkCupid is far from a household nameâif you and your friends have all been happily married for years, youâve probably never heard of us. So Iâve thought a lot about how to describe the reach of the site to someone whoâs never used it and who rightly doesnât care about the user-engagement metrics of some guyâs startup. Iâll put it in personal terms instead. Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid. Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids. There are children alive and pouting today, grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on
