“Clark Benson is the CEO of ranker.com, a news and entertainment site that relies heavily on A/B testing to choose headlines and site design. “At the end of the day, you can’t assume anything,” Benson says. “Test literally everything.” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche. This” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“DIGITAL TRUTH DIGITAL LIES • Searches • Social media posts • Views • Social media likes • Clicks • Dating profiles • Swipes” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“Allowing us to zoom in on small subsets of people is the third power of Big Data.” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“Facebook is digital brag-to-my-friends-about-how-good-my-life-is serum. In Facebook world, the average adult seems to be happily married, vacationing in the Caribbean, and perusing the Atlantic. In the real world, a lot of people are angry, on supermarket checkout lines, peeking at the National Enquirer, ignoring the phone calls from their spouse, whom they haven’t slept with in years.” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share
“Sometimes new data reveals cultural differences I had never even contemplated. One example: the very different ways that men around the world respond to their wives being pregnant. In Mexico, the top searches about “my pregnant wife” include “frases de amor para mi esposa embarazada” (words of love to my pregnant wife) and “poemas para mi esposa embarazada” (poems for… — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share
“Netflix learned a similar lesson early on in its life cycle: don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do.” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“Milan Kundera, the Czech-born writer, has a pithy quote about this in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth… — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share
“... I was shock aplenty by what the internet reveals about human sexuality...” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“And it is certainly possible that lying played a role in the failure of the polls to predict Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Polls, on… — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“... I was shocked aplenty by what the internet reveals about human sexuality...” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“Newspaper readership, on average, tilts a bit left. (They have data on that.) And newspapers, on average, tilt a bit left to give their… — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
“Why is the presence of rich people such a powerful predictor of poor people’s life expectancy? One” — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Copy Share Image
