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adnielsen's review against another edition
4.0
Dataclasm is an interesting read primarily based on statistical analysis of OK Cupid and Twitter data. There were a few throw away sections and other sections haven’t aged super well. The interesting chapters were very interesting. It turns out that Belle and Sebastian is very unlikely to be mentioned in black women’s dating profiles which is an interesting quirk. The author also explores how social media companies are fairly accurately predict their users’ sexual preference. Overall, half of the book is fascinating and the other half can be skimmed over.
stag1e's review against another edition
4.0
My main gripe with this book is that I think that it is way, way too much oriented towards americans. I really don't know much of the events that the author is talking about and I think that certain conclusions in the book wouldn't be true if one would conduct the same analysis in, for example, a European country or in a Asian country. Other than that, I think it is a great book that shines a bright light of our inherent humanly biases, how far we still have to go to get rid of racism, and so on. The author concludes with some prose about dragnet surveillance, Snowden, and about what we can get out of data science. The future really looks bright and I hope that we will get a lot of good value of out of it. I would recommend this book to anyone that has a social media account and for budding data scientists to wet their appetite.
sjgrodsky's review against another edition
3.0
No review. I will only quote from page 177:
"...after performing some ...analysis...Silver estimated that gay marriage will be legal in forty-four states by 2020."
Legal in 50 states by 2015.
So much for the predictive accuracy of big data and fancy number crunching.
"...after performing some ...analysis...Silver estimated that gay marriage will be legal in forty-four states by 2020."
Legal in 50 states by 2015.
So much for the predictive accuracy of big data and fancy number crunching.
el_reads17's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars
Dataclysm has a lot of interesting things to say about the way we behave on the internet and the applications of the data that it generates. The possibilities of big data seem scary and exciting at the same time. This book presents them in a very accessible way to the average reader. I was skeptical of some the conclusions that the author presented but there's a lot of good conversation starters here. However, I don't think much of it will stick with me in the long run.
I probably didn't make the best choice by listening to this on audiobook where numbers in charts were read out for minutes haha
Overall, a short, enjoyable, and timely read if you want to delve into popular science books.
Dataclysm has a lot of interesting things to say about the way we behave on the internet and the applications of the data that it generates. The possibilities of big data seem scary and exciting at the same time. This book presents them in a very accessible way to the average reader. I was skeptical of some the conclusions that the author presented but there's a lot of good conversation starters here. However, I don't think much of it will stick with me in the long run.
I probably didn't make the best choice by listening to this on audiobook where numbers in charts were read out for minutes haha
Overall, a short, enjoyable, and timely read if you want to delve into popular science books.
drillvoice's review against another edition
3.0
an alright time. a bunch of mildly interesting tidbits with fluff around it.
kaichai's review against another edition
2.0
He’s a data privacy apologist. Basically the end boils down to “I won’t use social media, but the average user won’t hide anything “ 😕🙄 The average user has no idea of the magnitude of the privacy infringement
lspargo's review against another edition
4.0
This book is about what the author has learned about people in general by looking at large amounts of data from several websites. I found it very interesting not just for the results, but also because I'm learning about data science right now and enjoyed thinking about his methods.
hc21's review against another edition
5.0
This is what I wanted Aziz Ansari's book to be: data driven and interesting even to people who have been on the online dating market. Even for those conclusions that seem obvious, the book does a nice job putting the finer edges on them.
thisisleila's review against another edition
2.0
What do white people like? Will you get more dates if you spell "what" as "wut" (answer: no)? If you love the idea of finding trends and using light social science to poke through data derived from online dating sites, go read http://blog.okcupid.com/, probably my second favorite blog of all time.
Don't real Dataclysm, the book the blog became. Actually, "Dont read the book the book the blog became" is pretty good general advice. Like most, this takes the awesome content and fills it out into an acceptable book length it with thousands of words of dull rambling and barely any additions to the good stuff.
Plus, Christian Rudder loves taking data and running with it, jumping to all sorts of really, really, REALLY frustratingly stupid conclusions.
Don't real Dataclysm, the book the blog became. Actually, "Dont read the book the book the blog became" is pretty good general advice. Like most, this takes the awesome content and fills it out into an acceptable book length it with thousands of words of dull rambling and barely any additions to the good stuff.
Plus, Christian Rudder loves taking data and running with it, jumping to all sorts of really, really, REALLY frustratingly stupid conclusions.