Dataclysm

Christian Rudder is co-founder and President of OkCupid and author of the popular blog OkTrends. He graduated from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in math and later served as creative director for SparkNotes. He has appeared on Dateline NBC and NPR's "All Things Considered" and his work has been written about in the New York Times and the New Yorker , among other places. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

From the Hardcover edition.

An NPR Best Book of 2014
A Globe & Mail Best Book of 2014
A Brain Pickings Best Science Book of 2014
A Bloomberg Best Book of 2014
One of Hudson Booksellers' 5 Best Business Books of 2014
Goodreads Semifinalist for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize"Most data-hyping books are vapor and slogans. This one has the real stuff: actual data and actual analysis taking place on the page. That's something to be praised, loudly and at length. Praiseworthy, too, is Rudder's writing, which is consistently zingy and mercifully free of Silicon Valley business gabble." - Jordan Ellenberg, Washington Post"As a researcher, Mr. Rudder clearly possesses the statistical acumen to answer the questions he has posed so well. As a writer, he keeps the book moving while fully exploring each topic, revealing his graphs and charts with both explanatory and narrative skill. Though he forgoes statistical particulars like p-values and confidence intervals, he gives an approachable, persuasive account of his data sources and results. He offers explanations of what the data can and cannot tell us, why it is sufficient or insufficient to answer some question we may have and, if the latter is the case, what sufficient data would look like. He shows you, in short, how to think about data." -Wall Street Journal"Rudder is the co-founder of the dating site OKCupid and the data scientist behind its now-legendary trend analyses, but he is also - as it becomes immediately clear from his elegant writing and wildly cross-disciplinary references - a lover of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and all the other humanities that make us human and that, importantly in this case, enhance and ennoble the hard data with dimensional insight into the richness of the human experience...an extraordinarily unusual and dimensional lens on what Carl Sagan memorably called 'the aggregate of our joy and suffering.'"-Maria Popova, Brain Pickings "Fascinating, funny, and occasionally howl-inducing...[Rudder] is a quant with soul, and we're lucky to have him." -Elle "There's another side of Big Data you haven't seen-not the one that promised to use our digital world to our advantage to optimize, monetize, or systematize every last part our lives. It's the big data that rears its ugly head and tells us what we don't want to know. And that, as Christian Rudder demonstrates in his new book, Dataclysm , is perhaps an equally worthwhile pursuit. Before we heighten the human experience, we should understand it first." -TIME "At a time when consumers are increasingly wary of online tracking, Rudder makes a powerful argument in Dataclysm that the ability to tell so much about us from the trails we leave is as potentially useful as it is pernicious, and as educational as it may be unsettling. By explaining some of the insights he has gleaned from OkCupid and other social networks, he demystifies data-mining and sheds light on what, for better or for worse, it is now capable of." -Financial Times" Dataclysm is a well-written and funny look at what the numbers reveal about human behavior in the age of social media. It's both profound and a bit disturbing, because, sad to say, we're generally not the kind of people we like to think - or say - we are." -Salon "For all its data and its seemingly dating-specific focus, Dataclysm tells the story set forth by the book's subtitle, in an entertaining and accessible way. Informative, eye-opening, and (gasp) fun to read. Even if you're not a giant stat head." - Grantland "[Rudder] doesn't wring or clap his hands over the big-data phenomenon (see N.S.A., Google ads, that sneaky Fitbit) so much as plunge them into big data and attempt to pull strange creatures from the murky depths." - The New Yorker "A hopeful and exciting journey into the heart of data collection...[Rudder's] book delivers both insider access and a savvy critique of the very machinery he is employed by. Since he's