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The earliest versions included a playful admonishment that people “wouldn’t want to write your PhD dissertation” with the data, which immediately motivated me to write my dissertation with it.
Silver found that the single factor that best correlated with Donald Trump’s support in the Republican primaries was that measure I had discovered four years earlier. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for “nigger.”
Not so, say the authors. In fact, the liberal bias is well calibrated to what newspaper readers want. Newspaper readership, on average, tilts a bit left. (They have data on that.) And newspapers, on average, tilt a bit left to give their readers the viewpoints they demand. There is no grand conspiracy. There is just capitalism.
The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes.”
Members of a hate site perusing the oh-so-liberal nytimes.com? How could this possibly be? If a substantial number of Stormfront members get their news from nytimes.com, it means our conventional wisdom about white nationalists is wrong. It also means our conventional wisdom about how the internet works is wrong.
Even the viral popularity of the anti–News Feed group was evidence of the power of News Feed. The group was able to grow so rapidly precisely because so many people had heard that their friends had joined—and they learned this through their News Feed.
His goal is to recruit enough people, covering enough conditions, so that people can find their health doppelganger. Heywood hopes that you can find people of your age and gender, with your history, reporting symptoms similar to yours—and see what has worked for them. That would be a very different kind of medicine, indeed.
These bad breaks are what make life unfair. But, if it is any consolation, the bad breaks do make life a little easier for economists to study.
The economists found that prisoners assigned to harsher conditions were more likely to commit additional crimes once they left. The tough prison conditions, rather than deterring them from crime, hardened them and made them more violent once they returned to the outside world.
If future salary is the measure, similar students accepted to similarly prestigious schools who choose to attend different schools end up in about the same place.
Since we don’t know when nature will choose to run her experiments, we can’t set up a small survey to measure the results.
He had to resign his presidency at Harvard after suggesting the possibility that part of the reason for the shortage of women in the sciences might be that men have more variation in their IQs.
But it points to a potential problem with people using data to make decisions. Numbers can be seductive. We can grow fixated with them, and in so doing we can lose sight of more important considerations. Zoë Chance lost sight, more or less, of the rest of her life.
This might seem the height of generosity: a free steak dinner. But really it’s self-serving. The casino is just trying to get customers to quit before they lose so much that they’ll leave for an extended period of time. In other words, management is using sophisticated data analysis to try to extract as much money from customers, over the long term, as it can.
Thus, I conclude this book in the only appropriate way: by following the data, what people actually do, not what they say. I am going to get a beer with some friends and stop working on this damn conclusion. Too few of you, Big Data tells me, are still reading.
