## Metadata - Author: [[Christian Rudder]] - Full Title: Dataclysm - Category: #books ## Highlights - As Harper’s put it perfectly: “Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.” ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=198)) - Twitter is an especially interesting demographic case. It’s a glitzy tech success story, and the company is almost single-handedly gentrifying a large swath of San Francisco. But the service itself is fundamentally populist, both in the “openness” of its platform and in who chooses to use it. For example, there’s no significant difference in use by gender. People with only a high school education level tweet as much as college graduates. Latinos use the service as much as whites, and blacks use it twice as much. ([Location 243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=243)) - The data set we’ll work with encompasses thousands of times more people than a Gallup or Pew study; that goes without saying. What’s less obvious is that it’s actually much more inclusive than most academic behavioral research. It’s a known problem with existing behavioral science—though it’s seldom discussed publicly—that almost all of its foundational ideas were established on small batches of college kids. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=250)) - With data, history can become deeper. It can become more. Unlike clay tablets, unlike papyrus, unlike paper, newsprint, celluloid, or photo stock, disk space is cheap and nearly inexhaustible. On a hard drive, there’s room for more than just the heroes. Not being a hero myself, in fact, being someone who would most of all just like to spend time with his friends and family and live life in small ways, this means something to me. ([Location 306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=306)) - Up where the world is steep, like in the Andes, people use funicular railroads to get where they need to go—a pair of cable cars connected by a pulley far up the hill. The weight of the one car going down pulls the other up; the two vessels travel in counterbalance. I’ve learned that that’s what being a parent is like. If the years bring me low, they raise my daughter, and, please, so be it. ([Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=338)) - But some guy having a baby and getting wrinkles is not news. You can start with whatever the Oil of Olay marketing department is running up the pole this week—as I’m writing it’s the idea of “color correcting” your face with a creamy beige paste that is either mud from the foothills of Alsace or the very essence of bullshit—and ([Location 344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=344)) - Devotion is like vapor in a piston—pressure helps it catch. ([Location 501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=501)) - repelling some people draws others all the closer, ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=502)) - “Beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.” ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=504)) - 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. And the effect isn’t small—being highly polarizing will in fact get you about 70 percent more messages. That means variance allows you to effectively jump several “leagues” up in the dating pecking order—for example, a very low-rated woman (20th percentile) with high variance in her votes gets hit on about as much as a typical woman in the 70th percentile. ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=532)) - the idea that variance is a positive thing is fairly well established in other arenas. Social psychologists call it the “pratfall effect”—as long as you’re generally competent, making a small, occasional mistake makes people think you’re more competent. Flaws call out the good stuff all the more. ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=561)) - Our sense of smell, which is the most connected to the brain’s emotional center, prefers discord to unison. Scientists have shown this in labs, by mixing foul odors with pleasant ones, but nature, in the wisdom of evolutionary time, realized it long before. 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. Indole is also an ingredient in synthetic human perfumes. ([Location 564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=564)) - 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. They would get misty and sing shepherd ballads instead of fighting, and when you’re the king of France with Huguenots to burn, songs won’t do. The ballads were banned. ([Location 595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=595)) - While the OEC list is rather drab, lots of helpers and modifiers—workmanlike language to get you to some payoff noun or verb—on Twitter, there’s no room for functionaries; every word’s gotta be boss. ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=740)) - A team at Arizona State was able to reach beyond word count and length, and into the sentiment and style of the writing, and they found several surprising things: first, Twitter does not change how a person writes. Among the many examples they tracked, if a writer uses “u” for the second person in e-mails or text messages, she will also use it on Twitter. But, likewise, if she generally spells out “you,” she does so everywhere—on Twitter, in texts, in e-mail, and so on. The decision to refer to the first-person singular as “I” or “i” follows the same pattern. That is, a person’s style doesn’t change from medium to medium; there is no “dumbing down.” You write how you write, wherever you write. ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=755)) - Going back to the logs, I found it took the sender 73 minutes and 41 seconds to hammer out those 5,979 characters of hello—his final message was about as long as four pages in this book. He did not get a reply. Neither did the gentleman sender of B, who wins the Raymond Carver award for labor-intensive brevity. He took 387 keystrokes to get to “Hey.” ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=838)) - I’m a smoker too. I picked it up when backpacking in May. It used to be a drinking thing, but now I wake up and fuck, I want a cigarette. I sometimes wish that I worked in a Mad Men office. Have you seen the Le Corbusier exhibit at MoMA? It sounds pretty interesting. I just saw a Frank Gehry (sp?) display last week in Montreal, and how he used computer modelling to design a crazy house in Ohio. That’s the whole message—the sender was trying to pick up women who smoked and were into art. The unstudied “(sp?)” is my favorite flourish. Forty-two different women got this same message. ([Location 861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=861)) - Sitewide, the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time. I’ve told people about guys copying and pasting, and the response is usually some variation of “That’s so lame.” When I tell them that boilerplate is 75 percent as effective as something original, they’re skeptical—surely almost everyone sees through the formula. But this last message is an example of a replicated text that’s impossible to see through, and, in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken him otherwise, the sender got five replies from exactly the type of woman he was looking for. ([Location 866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=866)) - Forty years ago, Stanley Milgram was mailing out parcels (kits with instructions and postage-paid envelopes) to a hundred people in Omaha, working on his “six degrees of separation,” hoping maybe a few dozen adventuresome souls would participate. His quaint methods—ingenious though they were—would give him the famous theory, but not quite its proof. In 2011, the unprecedented and overwhelming scale of Facebook allowed us to see that he was indeed right: 99.6 percent of the 721 million accounts at the time were connected by six steps or fewer. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=945)) - it’s the people you don’t know very well in your life who help ideas, especially new ones, spread. ([Location 953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=953)) - one of Google’s best designers, the person who in fact built their visual design team, Douglas Bowman, eventually quit because the process had become too microscopic. For one button, the company couldn’t decide between two shades of blue, so they launched all forty-one shades in between to see which performed better. ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00J1IQUX8&location=1051))