Dataclysm
by Christian Rudder · first published 2014
47% recommend50% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Data-driven look at online dating and human behavior drawn from OkCupid's user data, plus broader commentary on how tech companies use data; recommended for readers curious about social science and dating apps.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
An irreverent, provocative, and visually fascinating look at what our online lives reveal about who we really are--and how this deluge of data will transform the science of human behavior. Big Data is used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us things we don't need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder puts this flood of information to an entirely different use: understanding human nature. Drawing on terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OkCupid, and many other sites, Rudder examines the terrain of human experience. He charts the rise and fall of America's most reviled word through
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…care to admit. The gritty truth is: people are depreciating assets, and some lose their value (perceived or actual) faster than others. One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platform; I highly recommend it (this is where the above comment's [2] graphs are sourced from). You get other "interesting" observations, such that most people don't describe…
on “Suspicious Discontinuities” ↗…all. I'm happy to be out of the game, but online dating is bleak for 98% of men. Okcupid used to have great data on this before they sold out, a lot of it ended up in this book:https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin... The data in that book corroborates a lot of this. We're not that different from gorillas - sexual selection is tough and most of the discussion around it ranges from wrong…
on “Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home” ↗The co-founder also wrote a book about statistics behind dating sites, as well as a variety of other topics, called “Dataclysm”. I read it a couple years ago and I definitely recommend it if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...
on “Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says” ↗There's a pretty good book by one of the OKC founders that goes into a lot of this data. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin... There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating). The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman…
on “A 4-month online dating experiment using 10 fictional singletons (2012)” ↗…statistically the lower 50th percentile of men get like one or two matches a week, who are often below their standards of attractiveness. They surely aren’t dating “attractive women every night”. TL;DR go read Dataclysm by Christian Rudder as well as many other studies and criticisms of dating apps because you are delusional about how dating apps work
on “'It's quite soul-destroying': how we fell out of love with dating apps” ↗…genres (and mediums too). These are some of the books I've given an "A" over the last few years, roughly grouped by genre: Nonfiction: - A Short History of Nearly Everything - Fabric of the Cosmos - Dataclysm - The Righteous Mind - Merchants of Doubt - Dead Wake - Man's Search for Meaning - Evicted - The New Jim Crow - Night Sci-fi: - We - The Sirens of Titan - Hyperion - Stories of Your Life -…
on “Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?” ↗…of not living up to social standards of companionship. That’s where the data leads. See http://labs.time.com/story/see-the-ratio-of-single-men-to-wo... for a simple version, or read Date-o-nomics or Dataclysm for more discussion on the matter.
on “Five Years That Changed Dating” ↗There's this great line in Dataclysm (written by the guy who wrote the OkCupid blog) about how the NSA recruited from the best math students at Harvard. "The people spying on us are extremely, extremely smart."
on “Sysadmins see evidence that they have been hacked by GCHQ [video]” ↗I have no strong opinion on this subject, but this claim probably originates from a book written by a data analyst at OKCupid - Dataclysm by Christian Rudder. Its a good read fwiw.
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)” ↗Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder. An interesting peek into some of the data gathered by OkCupid, as well as an overall assessment of the power of data held by tech companies…
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?” ↗If you liked OkTrends, one of the founders of OkCupid, Christian Rudder, wrote an entire book full of fascinating social phenomena using data from social media and dating sites. It's called Dataclysm and it's great.
on “Suspicious Discontinuities” ↗…they might still be on the wayback archive, but I don't even remember what the url for the blog was at this point and I doubt it's still even public. Your best bet at this point is probably just to read Dataclysm, the book Rudder ended up writing about all of his findings.
on “How to boost your popularity on OkCupid using CSRF and a JSON type confusion” ↗Good news is that one of the OKCupid cofounders (the one who wrote those original data science blog posts) ended up writing a great book called Dataclysm[0] that expands on top of that earlier research + tons of completely unrelated and interesting research and analysis. It is really well written, the writer definitely has his way with words, and his analysis…
on “Power imbalances and sex” ↗Christian Rudder, the author of this article and many other great posts on the OKCupid blog, wrote a book with a lot of the same insights repackaged. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Christian-Rudder-audiobook/...
on “Never pay for online dating (2010)” ↗