More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 19 - March 9, 2021
More than 1 out of every 3 Americans access Facebook every day.
If 87 percent of Americans use the Internet, 87 percent of them have used Google.
It’s called WEIRD research: white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And most published social research papers are WEIRD.1
As hard as it is to believe, even Facebook, touchstone and warhorse that it is, has only been big for about six years. It’s not even in middle school!
A woman’s at her best when she’s in her very early twenties. Period. And really my plot doesn’t show that strongly enough. The four highest-rated female ages are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three for every group of guys but one.
Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth. A thirty-two-year-old woman will sign up, set her age-preference filters at 28–35, and begin to browse. That thirty-five-year-old man will come along, set his filters to 24–40, and yet rarely contact anyone over twenty-nine. Neither finds what they are looking for. You could say they’re like two ships passing in the night, but that’s not quite right. The men do seem at sea, pulled to some receding horizon. But in my mind I see the women still on solid ground, ashore, just watching them disappear.
Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.
And the effect isn’t small—being highly polarizing will in fact get you about 70 percent more messages.
Social psychologists call it the “pratfall effect”—as long as you’re generally competent, making a small, occasional mistake makes people think you’re more competent.
The pleasant scent given off by many flowers, like orange blossoms and jasmine, contains a significant fraction (about 3 percent) of a protein called indole. It’s common in the large intestine, and on its own, it smells accordingly. But the flowers don’t smell as good without it. A little bit of shit brings the bees. Indole is also an ingredient in synthetic human perfumes.
So at the end of it, given that everyone on Earth has some kind of flaw, the real moral here is: be yourself and be brave about it. Certainly trying to fit in, just for its own sake, is counterproductive.
No matter what words we use or how we tap out the letters, we’re writing to one another more than ever.
There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.
The decision to refer to the first-person singular as “I” or “i” follows the same pattern. That is, a person’s style doesn’t change from medium to medium; there is no “dumbing down.” You write how you write, wherever you write.
Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai.
He took 387 keystrokes to get to “Hey.”
Sitewide, the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.
And as long as there is a person bored, excited, enraged, transported, in love, curious, or missing his home and afraid for his future, he’ll be writing about it.
Pixar famously put the only bathrooms in the building inside the central atrium to force interdepartmental small talk, knowing that innovation often comes from the serendipitous collision of ideas.
Early on, the best predictor of a relationship doesn’t depend on the couple’s social graph at all; for the first year or so of dating, the optimal method is how often they view each other’s profile. Only over time, as the page views go down and their mutual network fills out, does assimilation come to dominate the calculus. In other words, the curiosity, discovery, and (visual) stimulation of falling for someone is eventually replaced by the graph-theory equivalent of nesting.
In short, people appear to be heavily preselecting online for something that, once they sit down in person, doesn’t seem important to them.
He cites numerous examples of a young blind person being happy on a date until some “tell”—usually the feel of the hair but occasionally a whisper from a stranger—revealed that the other person was black. The date was then over.
Because of racial animus, John McCain in 2008 had better than home-state advantage throughout the entire country. If you’re looking for evidence of whiteness as a leg-up in American life, this is it. McCain was the nation’s favorite son for no other reason than he was pitted against a black man.
First, it gives us metrics—follower counts, retweet counts, favorites counts—to judge our status.
The second change is that the Internet has also made everyone a public figure.
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad
27.5 percent of Twitter’s 500 million tweets a day are retweets, people just passing along someone else’s thought.
It shows we fight hardest against those who can least fight back. And, above all, it runs to ground our age-old desire to raise ourselves up by putting other people down.
white people differentiate themselves mostly by their hair and eyes, Asians by their country of origin, Latinos by their music.
From empathy and sexuality to science inclination and extroversion, statistical analysis of 122 different characteristics involving 13,301 individuals shows that men and women, by and large, do not fall into different groups.
Funnily enough, in sex, as in wealth and language, we have an inequality problem. According to this data, the top 2 percent of gay men are having about 28 percent of the total gay sex.
I will point out that not long ago, only big companies, with big budgets, could get their message heard and beloved by strangers halfway around the globe. Now I can, and so can you, and so can everyone. The hardest part is getting anyone to listen.
Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire.2
“We, the users, the producers, the consumers—all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation—are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.”
the phrase “one in a million” is at the core of so many wonderful works of art. It means a person so special, so talented, so something that they’re practically unique, and that very rareness makes them significant. But in mathematics, and so with data, and so here in this book, the phrase means just the opposite: 1/1,000,000 is a rounding error.
Target, by analyzing a customer’s purchases, really did know she was pregnant before she’d told anyone. The hitch was that she was a teenager, and they’d started sending maternity ads to her father’s house.
On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn’t all that interesting unless you’re an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices.
It’s hard to believe in information coming to you on a “need to know basis” from an entity that doesn’t think you need to know anything. The concern becomes less about what they’re saying than why. In any event, I have no idea how many, if any, crimes the big glean at the NSA has prevented. We’re told it works, just not when, where, or how.
So most people won’t use the tools you give them, but maybe “most people” is the wrong goal here. For one thing, providing ways to delete, or even repossess, data is the right thing to do, no matter how few users take you up on it. For another, it’s possible that privacy has changed, and left the people writing about it behind.
Pentland’s approach is much more feasible: he calls it his “New Deal on Data.” Ironically enough, it harkens back to Old English Common Law for its principles. He believes that, as with any other thing you own, you should have the fundamental rights of possession, use, and disposal for your data. What that means is you should be able to remove your data from a website (or other repository) whenever you feel like it’s being misused.
would argue that people are already compensated for their data: they get to use services like Facebook and Google—connect with old friends, find what they’re looking for—for free. As I’ve said, I give these services little of myself; but I get less out of them too. People have to decide their own trade-off there.
To use data to know yet not manipulate, to explore but not to pry, to protect but not to smother, to see yet never expose, and, above all, to repay that priceless gift we bequeath to the world when we share our lives so that other lives might be better—and to fulfill for everyone that oldest of human hopes, from Gilgamesh to Ramses to today: that our names be remembered, not only in stone but as part of memory itself.
