Dataclysm Quotes

“Several sources maintain that the Romans enshrined a goddess named “Rumor”—a winged demon with a hundred eyes and a hundred mouths who spoke only the most hurtful side of the truth.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“(little-known fact: there are no bugs in heaven, just sweet features),”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“So much of what makes the Internet useful for communication - asynchrony, anonymity, escapism, a lack of central authority - also makes it frightening.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“I'm not going to pretend that a few minutes with Wikipedia can stand in for an understanding of a culture.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard - variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“Although the thoughts expressed on Twitter may be foreshortened, there's no evidence here that they're diminished.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“You can find readings of the Ballou letter on Youtube, and many of the comments are along the lines of "They just don't make them like that anymore." That's true. But what they, or rather we, are making offers a richness and a beauty of a different kind: a poetry not of lyrical phrases but of understanding. We are at the cusp of momentous change in the study of human communication and what it tries to foster: community and personal connection.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

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

“Male HR reps weigh the female applicants’ beauty as they would in a romantic setting”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“On Facebook, 58 percent of fake profiles are “female bisexuals” versus”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them. What we get in return for the government’s intrusion is less straightforward.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“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: Who We Are

“Her dating pool is like a can with two holes—it drains on the double.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Technology is our new mythos. There’s magic in some of it, undeniably.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If anyone can become an overnight celebrity, anyone can become an overnight leper.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“The social capital you build by sharing information is now explicit; in fact, it’s in little numbers that increment before your very eyes.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“to hire women based on their looks is to (statistically) guarantee poor performance.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“It is hardly fresh intellectual ground that beauty matters, and that it matters more for women. For example, a foundational paper of social psychology is called “What Is Beautiful Is Good.” It was the first in a now long line of research to establish that good-looking people are seen as more intelligent, more competent, and more trustworthy than the rest of us. More attractive people get better jobs. They are also acquitted more often in court, and, failing that, they get lighter sentences.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“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

“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

“Bass Ale’s triangle logo was the first registered trademark in the English-speaking world, and today that sturdy oldness is a big part of the brand’s appeal.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If Facebook ever gets tired of that minimalist f and wants a new logo, I suggest, on a blue background: two white people arguing about what another white person said about Africa.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Sometimes, in the face of an infinity of alternatives, a straightforward result is all the more remarkable for being so.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the least black band on Earth is Belle & Sebastian,”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

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

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

“My second decision, to leave out statistical esoterica, was made with much less regret. I don’t mention confidence intervals, sample sizes, p values, and similar devices in Dataclysm because the book is above all a popularization of data and data science. Mathematical wonkiness wasn’t what I wanted to get across.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“One thing that gets lost in all the aggregation throughout this book: on an individual level, the personal affects of these broad social forces are often very subtle... when you go person by person, any individual's experience is too small and too varied to conclusively say anything racial has happened. It could be your skin or it could be just you. On the other side of it, it's laughable to think of one red-faced guy searching for n****r jokes because Barak Obama got elected, but it's a lot less funny when you can see that he's one of thousands and thousands making the same search. And it's less funny still when you see the large affects these private attitudes can still have, even in public life. Thus the story of just one of us versus the story of us all. That's why data like this is necessary; it ends arguments that anecdotes could never win. It provides facts that need facing.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“The average message is now just over 100 characters—Twitter-sized, in fact.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves