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purplepierogi's review against another edition
2.0
wish I would have DNF’d this and could get back the hours of my life I spent on it, lol. sure, there was data — but the interpretations of that data seemed wildly, wildly speculative. correlation/causation, guys?? and probably by virtue of this book being from 2014, I feel like I’d heard the major points come up at dinner parties or rehashed on buzzfeed more than once. don’t waste your time.
bakalamba's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting analyses. The writing is a bit over the place, the author seems to want to make a grand conclusion but either the data don't support it or the point is unclear.
neodem's review against another edition
4.0
I very much enjoyed this book. Some of the conclusions Christian came up with were certainly eye opening!
sposnick's review against another edition
3.0
I read this book in very small chunks, which is unusual for me. It had lots of interesting and occasionally funny bits of research, but as it was written in 2014 and is fairly tech-based, a lot of it already feels dated, unfortunately. Not a bad read, though not incredibly gripping (otherwise I probably would've read it at my normal pace, haha). Would probably give it a 3.5, if I could.
gordin's review against another edition
4.0
Entertaining, funnily written and overall good, but rather short and the original and unique data from the author seems to be a bit underused.
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.