Dataclysm
Who We Are, When We Think No One’s Looking
This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of Dataclysm, by Christian Rudder.
Christian Rudder is the founder of OkCupid, a renowned online dating app.
In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook “likes” can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person’s sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requets; and why you have to have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of American’s most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter. He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey? And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.
I. What Brings Us Together
II. What Brings Us Apart
III. What Makes Us Who We Are
🟦 Introduction
Why Big Data? Because interviews are skewed. Firstly, humans are irrational , we do not really know ourselves. Secondly, samples are usually unrepresentative (ever heard about WEIRD research?). Contrarily, digital traces show what actually happens. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are not only businesses, they have become demographs!
However, Rudder warns the reader — it is certainly not easy to translate human behavior / love / friendship / opinions into quantifiable buckets. The data analyst should keep in mind the real stories behind the numbers.
Data analysis is like looking at Earth from space; you lose the detail, but you get to see something familiar in a totally new way.
1️⃣ What Brings Us Together
1. Wooderson’s Law
Although they choose a wide age range in the initial questionnaire (probably to be socially acceptable), men tend to talk to younger women and show a clear preference for 21 year-old women. There is a discrepancy between what they say they desire, and what they do.
Meanwhile, women’s preferences evolve with age; dating is like chasing a train you’ll never catch.
2. Death By A Thousand Mehs
Among a group of women who would be rated 7/10, the ones who have a higher variance (in other words, whose grade is composed of very low grades and very high grades), have more success. Indeed, the more haters you have, the more chances that somebody likes you very much, for the same reason someone else might hate you (say, for tattoos).
Rudder makes a reference to the Pratfall Effect: making occasional mistakes makes the good things stand out even more.
A little bit of shit brings the bees.
3. Writing On The Wall
“Technology changes the way we write online”, but not the way you think. Twitter’s restriction of characters leads to shortened expressions, but not necessarily diminished in meaning; people cut off unecessary words and write what’s more meaningful! Actually, the average character lentgh is longer the average from a dictionary.
The Internet led to the emergence of subgroups with specific vocabulary, such as marketing self-help communities, Twilight fans, crafting lingo… This means from the choice of words, it is possible to infer one’s personality, interests, group…
4. You Gotta Be The Glue
You can predict whether a couple will stay together from looking at their Facebook friends.
Social networks tell a lot about a couple’s closeness / likelihood to stay together. The best network type is when each member of the couple is the connector to other friend groups — the spouse is the only common person all other friend groups know. Otherwise, it would mean each are living their own lives and competing for each other’s time. Also, the more mutual friends, the stronger the ties and the relationship.
5. There’s No Success Like Failure
People know what they want, but not necessarily what they need.
People make choices from the information we provide because they can, not because they necessarily should. Especially on dating sites, we pay allot of attention to appearance. When Rudder and his team made an experiment with OkCupid, removing all pictures from the app for 24h, participants who went on a blind date reported the same level of satisfaction, no matter the rating of the other’s attractiveness!
2️⃣ What Brings Us Apart
6. The Confounding Factor
The confounding factor is something you haven’t accounted for, but that affects the results. Rudder mentions the fact that most research today is WEIRD (White Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic).
Race is a tabboo subject in research. Usually, racial analysis explore the connection between race and something:
Race ↔ Something (the justice system, SAT scores, education…)
But this means we are missing out the people:
Race ↔ People (hiring, teachers) ↔ Something (the justice system, SAT scores, education…)
Race is the confounding factor in dating. Indeed, in the app’s preliminary questionnaire, most people report they wouldn’t date someone expressing a negative bias towards a certain race, yet Black women are constantly rated lower. No matter how ‘progressive’ we say we are, we are all biased!
7. The Beauty Myth In Apotheosis
A women’s level of beauty has a huge impact on her overall success. Women are rated as if they were on OkCupid, even if the context is completely different (a job interview, for instance). Success is correlated to beauty for both genders, but the effect is stronger for women.
8. It’s What Inside That Counts
Google is a goldmine of insights on human behavior. It is free of social desirability bias; it gives you insights about what people really think, and represents a repository for human’s collective identity. The size of Google’s data means it is not anecdotal, but large, scaled and reliable.
Rudder explores Google’s autofill — a feature that gives propositions as you type in the search bar. It gives insights on opinions and stereotypes (‘why do women… wear makeup’).
It’s the site acting not as Big Brother but as Older Brother, handing you mental cigarettes.
9. Days of Rage
Theory of online dishinibition effect: normal person + anonimity + audience = total fuckward
A digital crowd can have a mob mentality — it is about raising ourselves by bringing others down. The Internet empowers, as anyone can become an instant celebrity (or leecher).
Rumors are inherently human; we like them.
3️⃣ What Makes Us Who We Are
10. Tall For An Asian
Rudder explored how each gender / ethnicity describes themselves. By analyzing words, he gets an ‘insider view’ of a culture that wouldn’t have been possible with Google. He explores how each group differenciates: appearance for white people, music for Latinos, country for Asians.
Interestingly, some words are negatively associated — you will never see under-achievements such as ‘single Dad’ from an Asian. Latinos never use gentrified, very white wordings such as ‘Wall Street Journal’.
11. Ever Fallen In Love?
People may be effectively ‘outing’ themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
Some researchers have proven it is possible to determine, with staggering accuracy, whether a person is gay from their Facebook information (their friend network).
Although the numbers are varying, some research show 5% of the population is gay. This is reflected by Google searches in the US— no matter how conservative the State, the 5% number is consistent. Naturally, the higher the acceptance of same-sex relationships within the State, the more openly gay people there are, and the more openly people are ‘browsing gay stuff’. For more conservative States, Google searches look more like ‘Is my husband gay’.
12. Know Your Place
Refering to Anderson’s thoughts that a nation is imagined because you would never meet everyone, yet in our mind lives the image of our communion, Rudder wonders if the same could be applicable to online communities (such as Reddits).
Historical and geographical maps are just one type; we can also map behavior and create new kinds of frontiers.
- political opinion. Bigger cities and other cities influenced by the bigger cities agree it should be legal to burn the US flag. The opinion is more negative in the rest of rural areas.
- sex and love interest. In more conservative areas, such as Dakota, it seems that more people have purely sexual interests when using a dating app. Which does not mean they are more ‘liberated’! A factor explaining this behavior is that due to physical barriers (small population density, isolated area), they have to resort to digital life when they can’t find someone physically.
When people can’t find something in person, they find a way to build a digital community.
13. Our Brand Could Be Your Life
With the Internet, a whole new territory has opened: self-branding. It gives us the opporutnity to be heard around the globe, and to tweet ourselves into (or out of) a job.
Commonly cited rules, such as the 1% rule, also apply to social networks! On Twitter, 1% of accounts monopolize the majority of followers.
Reducing people to numbers is sad but inescapable.
We are often chasing empty metrics while self-branding; we constantly seek for attention, validation, interaction. But a single metric cannot define someone — Rudder raises the absurdity of Klout scores by drawing a parallel with IQ and test scores: your IQ does not define your intelligence, and one single failed math test does not make Einstein less of a genius.
14. Breadcrumbs
By casually using social media, you are giving away information that allows to infer:
- your IQ
- your personality type
- whether your parents divorced before you were 21
- your sexual orientation
When this information is used by companies, at best, it leads to better targeting, less marketign spendings, lower costs and the possibility to use useful services like Facebook or Google thanks to ads.
Governments usually use metadata (who you call, rather than what you say).
An example of usage of this metadata information. A digital image comes with the longitude, latitude, time and date, exposure… With only this information, Rudder can deduct that the better-looking the profile picture in OkCupid, the more chance it is of being outdated.
Rudder discusses possible solutions, including regulations, which risk to become outdated by the time the ink dries, or privacy options, which people will probably not use…
