Christian Rudder Quotes & Sayings

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

There are times when a data set is so robust that if you set up your analysis right, you don't need to ask it questions--it just tells you everything anyway. — Christian Rudder

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

We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook 'experimented' with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work. — Christian Rudder

You take a picture of yourself in some exceptional situation - skydiving or whatever. People always post those photos because it works - you're saying something about yourself that begs a conversation and that's what the users are there for. — Christian Rudder

The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It's the Chris Farley of technologies. — Christian Rudder

A person's "like" pattern even makes a decent proxy for intelligence - this model could reliably predict someone's score on a standard (separately administered) IQ test, without the person answering a single direct question. — Christian Rudder

I know that shorter messages are better in terms of reply rate. The optimal length is something like 50 characters. Characters, not words. — Christian Rudder

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. 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. — Christian Rudder

the DOLLY Project (Digital OnLine Life and You) - it's a searchable repository of every geotagged tweet since December 2011, — Christian Rudder

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 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

Also, fuck body spray. — Christian Rudder

Going to a site with more users seems obviously better to me, but at the same time, having a bland, middle of the road profile with bland, middle of the road pictures seems like a bad strategy to me. — Christian Rudder

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

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

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

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

the least black band on Earth is Belle & Sebastian, — Christian Rudder

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. — Christian Rudder

Because the way love works in general, you don't need everybody to like you somewhat - you need one person to like you a lot. — Christian Rudder

Sometimes, in the face of an infinity of alternatives, a straightforward result is all the more remarkable for being so. — Christian Rudder

This is the echo of the approaching train in ears pressed to the rail. — Christian Rudder

Text is, in some ways, on the way out, unfortunately. There are dating sites now that are just pictures. — Christian Rudder

inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks. — Christian Rudder

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

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look: — Christian Rudder

prejudice unchallenged is prejudice perpetuated. — Christian Rudder

There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed. — Christian Rudder

If employers begin to use algorithms to infer how intelligent you are or whether you use drugs, then your only choice will be to game the system - or, — Christian Rudder

In any group of women who are all equally good-looking, the number of messages they get is highly correlated to the variance: from the pageant queens to the most homely women to the people right in between, the individuals who get the most affection will be the polarizing ones. — Christian Rudder

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

A great piece of advice for online dating is to stand out from the crowd. So greetings like "hello" and "hi" are very common. They do less well than things that are a little bit quirky or a little bit weird, like "howdy" or "holla." The rarer your salutation, the better it does, in general. — Christian Rudder

if "over the hill" means the beginning of a person's decline, a straight woman is over the hill as soon as she's old enough to drink. — Christian Rudder

Kind of paradoxically, men are very open minded or very even handed with their votes of women. — Christian Rudder

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

The Internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that's one thing that's always stood it in good stead with me: it's a writer's world. Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing. I honestly feel there's a certain epistolary, Austenian grandness to the whole enterprise. — Christian Rudder

Use correct grammar and punctuation. Do not use net speak, like WOT, W-O-T or U. Those messages get a lot lower reply rate. — Christian Rudder

Twitter actually may be improving its users' writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters - it — Christian Rudder

Technology is our new mythos. There's magic in some of it, undeniably. — Christian Rudder

Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. — Christian Rudder

to hire women based on their looks is to (statistically) guarantee poor performance. — Christian Rudder

If we want to pick the point where a man's sexual appeal has reached its limit, it's there: forty. — Christian Rudder

When you see people in middle management dickering with their Fitbits in the elevator, you know the Quantified Self movement is here to stay. The — Christian Rudder

Women are much more discriminating. I think both types of people are equally interested in having an attractive partner. But women essentially give the thumbs up to only half as many guys as guys giving the thumbs up to women. — Christian Rudder

Dudes have been making up stuff about themselves probably since there have been dudes. — Christian Rudder

Online, you can always get what you want. But what you need, that's a much harder thing to find. — Christian Rudder

very dull object. — Christian Rudder

If there's one thing I sincerely hope this book might get you to reconsider," Rudder writes in the introduction, "it's what you think about yourself. Because that's what this book is really about. OKCupid is just how I arrived at the story." Rudder wants to convince us that data is how we can arrive at our own stories. "As the Internet has democratized journalism, photography, pornography, charity, comedy, and so many other courses of personal endeavor, it will, I hope, eventually democratize our fundamental narrative." Gone are the days when our moment is defined only by researchers, effete columnists or whoever else gets to say what a millennial is. Now, Rudder argues, the story is ours to tell. — Christian Rudder

People tend to prefer their own race online in terms of the volume of messages. — Christian Rudder

The average message is now just over 100 characters - Twitter-sized, in fact. — Christian Rudder

when you read findings like the one above, and see that Jamal doesn't get the job, it's easy to shake your head at the few racist hiring managers who've tilted the odds against him. But the data we see in this chapter shows racism isn't a problem of outliers. It is pervasive. — Christian Rudder

people can feel the math behind things, especially, thankfully, moms. — Christian Rudder

Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse - the Swiss sickness. — Christian Rudder

If Big Data's two running stories have been surveillance and money, for the last three years I've been working on a third: the human story. — Christian Rudder

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. — Christian Rudder

Like an app straining for a song, data science is about finding patterns...to devise methods, structures, even shortcuts to find the signal amidst the noise. We're all looking for our own Parson's code. Something so simple and yet so powerful in a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, but luckily there are a lot of lifetimes out there. And for any problem that data science might face, this book ["Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves"] has been my way to say: I like our odds. — Christian Rudder

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

To be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. — Christian Rudder

Unlike other features on OkCupid, there is no visual component to match percentage. The number between two people only reflects what you might call their inner selves - everything about what they believe, need, and want, even what they think is funny, but nothing about what they look like. Judging by just this compatibility measure, the four largest racial groups on OkCupid - Asian, black, Latino, and white - all get along about the same.1 In fact, race has less effect on match percentage than religion, politics, or education. Among the details that users believe are important, the closest comparison to race is Zodiac sign, which has no effect at all. To a computer not acculturated to the categories, "Asian" and "black" and "white" could just as easily be "Aries" and "Virgo" and "Capricorn." But this racial neutrality is only in theory; things change once the users' own opinions, and not just the color-blind workings of an algorithm, come into play. — Christian Rudder