Dataclysm Quotes

“It’s that having haters somehow induces everyone else to want you more. People not liking you somehow brings you more attention entirely on its own.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Well, this is a rare context where boringness is something special: it implies that the individual men who did the scoring are likewise predictable, centered, and, above all, unbiased. And when you consider the supermodels, the porn, the cover girls, the Lara Croft– style fembots, the Bud Light ads, and, most devious of all, the Photoshop jobs that surely these men see every day, the fact that male opinion of female attractiveness is still where it’s supposed to be is, by my lights, a small miracle. It’s practically common sense that men should have unrealistic expectations of women’s looks, and yet here we see it’s just not true. In any event, they’re far more generous than the women, whose votes go like this: The red chart is centered barely a quarter of the way up the scale; only one guy in six is “above average” in an absolute sense. Sex appeal isn’t something commonly quantified like this, so let me put it in a more familiar context: translate this plot to IQ, and you have a world where the women think 58 percent of men are brain damaged.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Jenna Wortham from the Times describes this mentality well: “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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The era of data is here; we are now recorded. That, like all change, is frightening, but between the gunmetal gray of the government and the hot pink of product offers we just can’t refuse, there is an open and ungarish way. 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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“you ask an algorithm “What aren’t black women talking about” and it tells you “tanning,” you know you did something right.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Researchers at the University of Rochester recently pronounced “Men Are from Mars Earth, Women Are from Venus Earth,” concluding: 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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn’t a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. We’ve seen the same patterns repeated on three different sites, with different users and different experiences: men, women, free, subscription-only, casual, serious, “urban” demographics, and more “mainstream.” All told, the research set represents a large chunk of the young adults in this country, and the data uniformly shows non-blacks discount African American profiles. It’s not a problem caused by a small cluster of “ugly” black users or by a small group of unreformed racists throwing off an otherwise regular pattern.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“There’s not much you can do with the fact that, statistically, the least black band on Earth is Belle & Sebastian, or that the flash in a snapshot makes a person look seven years older, except to say huh, and maybe repeat it at a dinner party.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If you’ve ever signed up for a website and given a fake zip code or a fake birthday, you have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal—not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.1 The examples I’ve laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse—the Swiss sickness.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Phish might’ve already given it away, but inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the real moral here is: be yourself and be brave about it. Certainly trying to fit in, just for its own sake, is counterproductive.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“until thirty, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterward, she likes them slightly younger.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If we want to pick the point where a man’s sexual appeal has reached its limit, it’s there: forty.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“men and women perform a different sexual calculus. As Harper’s put it perfectly: “Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“The day is coming when pollsters can put down their pens, scientists will turn their lenses another way, and enterprising students can use their algorithms to calculate other things. The day is coming when the world will be so open, no one will need to guess.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“The world has now arrived at a place where we can do something with our own data—we don’t have to wait for a Milgram, let alone an Euler, to teach us about ourselves.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“When they built their headquarters, 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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“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.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“I know there are a lot of people making big claims about data, and I’m not here to say it will change the course of history—certainly not like internal combustion did, or steel—but it will, I believe, change what history is. With data, history can become deeper. It can become more. Unlike clay tablets, unlike papyrus, unlike paper, newsprint, celluloid, or photo stock, disk space is cheap and nearly inexhaustible. On a hard drive, there’s room for more than just the heroes.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If you have an iPhone, Apple could have your address book, your calendar, your photos, your texts, all the music you listen to, all the places you go—and even how many steps it took to get there, since phones have a little gyroscope in them. Don’t have an iPhone? Then replace “Apple” with Google or Samsung or Verizon. Wear a FuelBand? Nike knows how well you sleep. An Xbox One? Microsoft knows your heart rate.1 A credit card? Buy something at a retailer, and your PII (personally identifiable information) attaches the UPC to your Guest ID in the CRM (customer relations management) software, which then starts working on what you’ll want next.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“it’s not numbers that will deny us our humanity; it’s the calculated decision to stop being human.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Reddit is the fulfillment of that earliest ambition of the Internet—to bring far-flung people together to talk, debate, share, spread news, and laugh. To collapse space and create personal closeness. It’s one of the most popular sites on the web,3 and it rightly calls itself “The Front Page of the Internet”—a lot of the ridiculous viral stuff you see on the big aggregator sites originates there.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband …,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The next day, when America woke up to the confirmed reality of a black president, roughly 1 in 100 searches for “Obama” also included the epithet or “KKK” in the query string.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves