Christian Rudder Quotes

Computers, however, have nothing better to do; keeping track is their only job. They don't lose the scrapbook, or travel, or get drunk, or grow senile, or even blink. They just sit there and remember.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

prejudice unchallenged is prejudice perpetuated.

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

the least black band on Earth is Belle & Sebastian,

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

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.

inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks.

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,

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When you want to learn about how people write, their unpolished, unguarded words are the best place to start, and we have reams of them.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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

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.

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

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

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