"Dataclysm"

[fiefoe]

I've enjoyed Christian Rudder's earlier OKCupid blog posts, but the writing here is a lot more stately.

• 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,
• The idea is to move our understanding of ourselves away from narratives and toward numbers, or, rather, to think in such a way that numbers are the narrative.
• You grow to understand people much as a chemist might understand, and through understanding come to love, the swirling molecules of his tincture.
• It’s a delicate illusion, the Internet; imagine a carrot sliced so cleanly that the pieces stay there in place on the cutting board, still in the shape of a carrot.
• beauty could’ve been a you-have-it-or-you-don’t kind of thing. But the curve we started with says something else. Looking for understanding in data is often a matter of considering your results against these kinds of counterfactuals.
• But here’s the thing: rock star or no, big noises have been the sound of mankind so far... heroic framework is how people order the world... But this asymmetry is ending; the small noise, the crackle and hiss of the rest of us, is finally making it to tape. As the Internet... will, I believe, change what history is. With data, history can become deeper.
• That’s what being a parent is like. If the years bring me low, they raise my daughter,
• As usual, the good stuff lies in the distance between thought and action,
• where a man’s sexual appeal has reached its limit, it’s there: forty. The two perspectives (of the woman doing the rating and of the man being rated) are two halves of a whole...  A woman’s at her best when she’s in her very early twenties. Period.
• motivation is often intensified by feeling like you’re part of a special, embattled elect. Devotion is like vapor in a piston—pressure helps it catch...  a flaw is a powerful thing. 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.
• when it comes to romance, heart palpitations are the return, and that gets to the crux of it. It turns out that variance has almost as much to do with the sexual attention a woman gets as her overall attractiveness.
• The pleasant scent given off by many flowers, like orange blossoms and jasmine, contains a significant fraction (about 3 percent) of a protein called indole. It’s common in the large intestine, and on its own, it smells accordingly. But the flowers don’t smell as good without it. A little bit of shit brings the bees. {!!!}
• Nostalgia used to be called mal du Suisse—the Swiss sickness. Their mercenaries were all over Europe and were apparently notorious for wanting to go home.
• Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing.
• Although the thoughts expressed on Twitter may be foreshortened, there’s no evidence here that they’re diminished... Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai.
• There appears to be a natural limit to how much effort a person is willing to put into a message... it’s 3 characters typed for every 1 in the finished product.
• Theirs was an application of “the strength of weak ties,” a concept postulated in the 1970s with samples in the dozens, but since amplified on new, robust network data: it tells us that it’s the people you don’t know very well in your life who help ideas, especially new ones, spread.
• the curiosity, discovery, and (visual) stimulation of falling for someone is eventually replaced by the graph-theory equivalent of nesting.
• But very humble questions like Do you like scary movies? and Have you ever traveled alone to another country? have amazing predictive power.
• Online, you can always get what you want. But what you need, that’s a much harder thing to find.
• a similar wholesale pattern. The broad majority of non-black men apply that three-quarters reduction to black women.
• How you treat your friends is, by definition, the exception to how you treat the rest of humanity.
• On the positive side, women clearly prefer men of their own race—they’re more “race-loyal” than men—but they also express a clear, secondary, preference for white men.
• In the UK, the site’s black members get 98.9 percent of the messages white members do.
• Mankind is tribes within tribes. Or, putting it more beautifully, like the Korean proverb: “Over the mountains, mountains.” That’s the ruggedness of their peninsula and the endless difficulty of our fractured human terrain.
• beauty operates on a Richter scale. In terms of its effect, there is... Facebook, every percentile of attractiveness gives a man two new friends. It gives a woman three.
• Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, black candidates often received more support in polls than in actual elections.
• 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. But almost immediately afterward the volume of racially charged searches dropped sharply...  again showing the cycle of clench and catharsis that passes for race relations in the United States.