When Numbers Become the Narrative: Lee Bob Black Interviews Christian Rudder, Author of Dataclysm
Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline, has a way with numbers. Since 2009 he has led OkCupid’s analytics team, examining terabytes of data to understand human nature and to help people hook up (OkCupid being one of the world’s most popular dating websites).
Here are some quotes from Dataclysm that inspired me to talk with Christian about his new book:
“[D]igital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing.”
“[W]e quantify to understand.”
“The idea is to move our understanding of ourselves away from narratives and toward numbers, or, rather, thinking in such a way that numbers are the narrative.”
“We focus on the dense clusters, the centers of mass, the data duplicated over and over by the repetition and commonality of our human experience. It’s science as pointillism. Those dots may be one fractional part of you, but the whole is us.”
Lee Bob Black: When I first read the title of your book, Dataclysm, I thought of data and apocalypse. Then I read that the title relates to the Greek word kataklysmos, the word cataclysm, and how nowadays there’s both a deluge of data and a hope that data will transform the world. Now that your book has come out, what else does the title mean to you?
Christian Rudder: The original spirit of hope in the title still pertains. But in the time since I completed the book, I’ve become worried by hardware like quad-copter drones, which can gather data without our consent. You decide whether or not to share yourself with Facebook. But certain technology takes the choice out of your hands — a drone photographs you out on the street or even in your home, and a facial-recognition API does the rest.
LBB: A marketing blurb describes Dataclysm as involving a “new form of statistical storytelling where numbers become narrative.” And in your book, your write, “The idea is to move our understanding away from narratives and toward numbers, or, rather, thinking in such a way that numbers are the narrative.” Could you explain this a little bit?
CR: I wanted to tell stories in aggregate, and I think numbers are a good way to do that. Words are necessary for any book, obviously, but I didn’t want to follow the anecdotal path to larger truths. I wanted to jump right to them, and I’ve found statistics to be a good way to get there.
LBB: You write in Dataclysm about how people on dating websites who are generally liked yet rarely disliked are often ignored. Yet to be disliked by some people is to be loved all the more by others. Acknowledging this, do you have a game plan for the criticism — positive and negative — that’ll come out when your book is published? Are you perhaps hoping that some critics and readers intensely hate it, knowing that this might spur others on to love it more?
CR: At least for the first run-through, I’m not going to read any reviews. The book’s done, and it’s certainly not perfect. I’m more aware of its flaws than any critic. That said, I’m sure opinions on the book, both good and bad, will find their way to my ears. Thank you for reminding me that having haters is good news, in a sense. At least they care.
LBB: I was fascinated to read that you’ve never been on an online date. Then I read that you’re married. I wonder, what might you say to your daughter, sometime in the future, about online dating?
CR: She’s only two, so whatever advice I would give now would be hopelessly outdated when she’s ready to think about dating, in 2040.
LBB: You write extensively about how data can shine a light on racism, sexism, hatred, mob mentality, and a slew of other problems. You write that “digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing.” With that in mind, are there any countries that are outside of western Europe and North America where you’d like to see big data transform people’s understandings of themselves, their governments, and so on?
CR: I think Facebook’s dataset offers tremendous pan-cultural potential. The site is big the world over, and their data team is already putting that reach to use. As I mention in the book, they’ve looked at a phenomenon called “coordinated migration” — where a group of people in one place move together to another. It’s the kind of mass relocation that we saw here in the U.S. in the early 1900s, and in Europe far earlier. But in places like in Southeast Asia, coordinated migration is still an important social force; you can see the young people in Thai villages moving en masse to Bangkok through Facebook. As Twitter and Facebook become even more universal than they already are, so will our understanding become more universal.
LBB: What inspires you?
CR: My friends and my family. My favorite books. Shelby Foote’s The Civil War.
LBB: With a wink to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, I’d like to know what part, if any, snap judgments, gut feelings, and/or intuition play in your work with data?
CR: Every author, every researcher decides what to spend his time and energy on. It’s an obvious thing to say, but don’t underestimate the role of personal preference in supposedly “neutral” science. My judgments and feelings edited Dataclysm before I ever committed a word to the page.
LBB: What was your process like writing Dataclysm?
CR: I didn’t have a process, per se, which is probably why I found myself writing 16 hours a day for the last six weeks before my delivery deadline.
LBB: As you wrote about in Dataclysm, big data is about finding big patterns in the small ones, finding commonality in our human experiences. It’s also about money and return on investment. What tips do you have for a company about what not do when starting on their first big data project?
CR: The first question to ask is, “Is big data really relevant?” Despite the hype, there aren’t many businesses that generate data in enough volume and with enough granularity to justify any analysis. Data projects are most appropriate for companies that use data in the natural course of their business, and that makes it an almost self-evident process. Frankly, you shouldn’t need tips. If you’re ever asking yourself “What should we analyze?” or “How should we analyze this?” then that’s a strong signal that you should stop with the data science and go back to the real business of your company, whatever it is.
LBB: On OkCupid’s blog, you analyzed big data long before it became all the rage. Your blog went dormant in 2011. Then you relaunched it to coincide with your book, Dataclysm, being published. What have you learned about big data since then and what are you planning to blog about now?
CR: I put up a new post in July, and I’ll keep blogging about OkCupid till I run out of stuff to write about. That post was about experiments — I was inspired by the dust-up over Facebook’s “Emotion Contagion” paper a few weeks before. Part of the challenge in writing the book was to engage with scholarship and current events, not just treat data as an island. I’d like to continue that with the blog.
LBB: How do you bring ideas to life?
CR: Effort and luck.
Some more insightful quotes from Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline:
“[T]he Internet can be a vibrant, brutal, loving, forgiving, deceitful, sensual, angry place. And of course, it is: it’s made of human beings.”
“[T]he Internet can be deranged place, but it’s that potential for the unexpected, even the insane, that so often redeems it.”
“Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth. A 32-year-old woman will sign up with a dating site, set her age-preference filters at 28–35, and begin to browse. That 35-year-old man will come along, set his filters to 24–40, and yet rarely contact anyone over 29. Neither finds what they are looking for. You could say they’re like two ships passing in the night, but that’s not quite right. The men do seem at sea, pulled to some receding horizon. But in my mind, I see the women still on solid ground, ashore, just watching them disappear.”
“[T]he color-coded ‘Threat Level’ that was such a part of the discussion in the years after 9/11 always felt to me like an elaborate advertisement for Halliburton. It’s hard to believe in information come to you on a “need to know basis” from an entity that doesn’t think you need to know anything. The concern becomes less about what they’re saying than why.”
Christian Rudder is cofounder of OkCupid and the author of the book Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline. He graduated from Harvard in 1998 with a degree in math and later served as creative director for SparkNotes. He has appeared on NBC’s Dateline 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 plays in the band Bishop Allen and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Note: This interview was conducted in 2014.
