Christian Rudder is a co-founder and former president of the dating site OkCupid, where he authored the popular OkTrends blog. 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.
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
been in the data mines and has risen above them, Rudder becomes a
singular and trustworthy guide.
—The Globe and Mail
"Compulsively readable — including for those with no particular
affinity for numbers in and of themselves — and surprisingly
personal. Starting with aggregates, Rudder posits, we can zoom in
on the details of how we live, love, fight, work, play, and age;
from numbers, we can derive narrative. There are few characters in
the book, and few anecdotes — but the human story resounds
throughout."
—Refinery29
"Rudder’s lively, clear prose…makes heady concepts understandable
and transforms the book’s many charts into revealing truths…Rudder
teaches us a bit about how wonderfully peculiar humans are, and how
we go about hiding it."
—Flavorwire
"Dataclysm is all about what we can learn about human minds
and hearts by analyzing the massive ongoing experiment that is the
internet."
—Forbes
"The book reads as if it's written (well) by a curious child whose
parents beg him or her to stop asking "what-if" questions. Rudder
examines the data of the website he helped create with unwavering
curiosity. Every turn presents new questions to be answered, and he
happily heads down the rabbit hole to resolve them."
—U.S. News
"A wonderful march through infographics created using data derived
from the web…a fun, visual book—and a necessary one at that."
—The Independent (UK), 2014's Best Books on the Internet and
Technology
"This is the best book that I've read on data in years, perhaps
ever. If you want to understand how data is affecting the present
and what it portends for the future, buy it now."
—Huffington Post
"Rudder draws from big data sets – Google searches, Twitter
updates, illicitly obtained Facebook data passed shiftily between
researchers like bags of weed – to draw out subtle patterns in
politics, sexuality, identity and behaviour that are only revealed
with distance and aggregation…Dataclysm will entertain those
who want to know how machines see us. It also serves as a call to
action, showing us how server farms running everything from home
shopping to homeland security turn us into easily digested data
products. Rudder's message is clear: in this particular sausage
factory, we are the pigs.”
—New Scientist
"Dataclysm offers both the satisfaction of confirming stereotypes
and the fun of defying them…Such candor is disarming, as is Mr.
Rudder’s puckish sense of humor."
–Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Studying human behavior is a little like exploring a jungle: it's
messy, hard, and easy to lose your way. But Christian Rudder is a
consummate guide, revealing essential truths about who we are. Big
Data has never been so fun."
—Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational
"Dataclysm is a book full of juicy secrets—secrets about who we
love, what we crave, why we like, and how we change each other’s
minds and lives, often without even knowing it. Christian Rudder
makes this mathematical narrative of our culture fun to read and
even more fun to discuss: You will find yourself sharing these
intriguing data-driven revelations with everyone you know."
—Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken
"In the first few pages of Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses massive
amounts of actual behavioral data to prove what I always believed
in my heart: Belle and Sebastian is the whitest band ever. It only
gets better from there."
—Aziz Ansari
"It’s unheard of for a book about Big Data to read like a guilty
pleasure, but Dataclysm does. It’s a fascinating, almost
voyeuristic look at who we really are and what we really want."
—Steven Strogatz, Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics,
Cornell University, author of The Joy of x
"Smart, revealing, and sometimes sobering, Dataclysm affirms what
we probably suspected in our darker moments: When it comes to
romance, what we say we want isn't what will actually make us
happy. Christian Rudder has tapped the tremendous wealth of data
that the Internet offers to tease out thoughts on topics like
beauty and race that most of us wouldn’t cop to publicly. It's a
riveting read, and Rudder is an affable and humane guide."
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
"Christian Rudder has written a funny and profound book about
important issues. Race, love, sex—you name it. Are we the sum of
the data we produce? Read this book immediately and see if you can
answer the question."
—Errol Morris
"Big Data can be like a 3D movie without 3D glasses—you know
there's a lot going on but you're mainly just disoriented. We
should feel fortunate to have an interpreter as skilled (and funny)
as Christian Rudder. Dataclysm is filled with insights that boil
down Big Data into byte-sized revelations."
—Michael Norton, Harvard Business School, coauthor of Happy
Money
"With a zest for both the profound and the wacky, Rudder
demonstrates how the information we provide individually tells a
vast deal about who we are collectively. A visually engaging read
and a fascinating topic make this a great choice not just for
followers of Nate Silver and fans of infographics, but for just
about anyone who, by participating in online activity, has
contributed to the data set."
—Library Journal
"Demographers, entrepreneurs, students of history and sociology,
and ordinary citizens alike will find plenty of provocations and,
yes, much data in Rudder's well-argued, revealing pages."
—Kirkus Reviews
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