Christian Rudder
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Christian Rudder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I definitely try to live more by intuition and just... Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think just getting back to this like perfect love algorithm or whatever, like I just, I genuinely think that's impossible to create a computer program that's going to predict with any real defensible set of certainty, like...
Who person A is, which of all the person Bs out there, who A is going to love, you know? I still don't think it's possible. And I think there's just a lot more to life. I mean, hopefully for, you know, maybe for not that much longer, but like than like a phone or whatever, you know, and the internet for sure. And so I just, I really try to...
Honestly, I am one of those tech people who try to stay away from all of that stuff. I like the ability of data to tell stories. I was actually just working with my child on an assignment about the Beatles evolution as songwriters. And we have Hard Day's Night from 64, Sgt. Pepper 67, Abbey Road 69. And you can actually go through and see in the data of the songs how...
how they've grown, how they grew as songwriters and just looking at the complexity of the instrumentation and the chord changes and you can actually quantify. It was like a little mini dataclism. It was fun to do. So I do enjoy that stuff.
But back to one of your points, like I think you can be overly certain about a lot of things if you're just looking at numbers because numbers aren't very subtle, right? They're just sort of facts that can be easily compared and you can decide which one is bigger or better or whatever it is.
But so little in life can actually be quantified down to a number, like outside of the world of sports, right? You know, you can try and you can pretend that like a 9.3 really captures how attractive someone is. But we all know that's not really true, right? Like two 9.3s, there's going to be a different opinion from every person that sees these two theoretically identical people, right?
So I just, yeah, I think that's, I also try to stay away from that, from data for that sense of the false sense of certainty about things. Okay.
You know, and I guess there was like that period, 2009, 2010, where data seemed revelatory. And this is pre-Cambridge Analytica and the whole kind of engineering of the first Trump candidacy and the big news and all of that stuff. And it was like, it sounds corny, it was like a hopeful period, I guess, for the internet. You know, there was like Airbnb. Yeah.
Uber, you mean I can just get a car and I don't have to like wait 20 minutes? You know what I mean? Like that whole vibe, especially in New York, it's just different. Yeah. So we had all this data. We thought it was really interesting about what people thought was attractive, about how different races would interact on our website or our app. And we kind of didn't have anything to lose either.
We were just like, all right, let's just do this. Facebook is a billion-dollar, whatever, trillion-dollar company maybe now. They obviously have a lot to lose, and they're heavily scrutinized. Yeah. In 2010, we were sort of under the radar. Online dating wasn't even remotely as cool as it is now. And obviously, it's not even that cool. So it was like mostly weird, even in 2010, you know.
And so we figured it would just be, it would be interesting. It was like the perfect like cocktail party conversation, you know. And yeah, I guess it was just like...
it was like a view into people that was just only coming into existence, you know, and the internet obviously had been around for a while, but like there weren't websites that did the kinds of things that we were doing until 2010 or whatever. And so, um, you couldn't have learned these things in 1999, uh, even though the internet existed then.
And like, we just thought it was cool and we could find out what people thought was hot and talk about it and maybe make fun of it a Yeah, I don't know. It's weird, though, to look back because it's totally the door completely closed. Yeah. Basically right after Dataclism came out. And that was one blind spot in the book where I was thinking about this on the way over here.
The entire tone of the book is like how interesting data is, how great it is, how it could lead to these different understandings of couples, of people, of systems, whatever. But, you know, come 2015, 2016, I was completely ignorant of the fact that data could be used It always had a marketing component for Facebook or whatever.
They use their data to sell ads to people, but I never thought it could be used to sell ideas or sell a worldview en masse to people as it was in 2014, 15, 16 by Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon and... It still to this day is going on. Yeah, now it's full on. Right, exactly.
And so it just never occurred to me that you could have these macro political changes, for example, through data and through these algorithms that could be manipulated in that way. So in some ways, maybe it's good that these companies are locking their stuff up because then nobody else can go... I don't know if I would want Facebook to publish all of their data because then people could go...
Oh, that's interesting. Manipulate more people. That's interesting.
Yeah, which you can then go spin or whatever.
It does. In a way. And it helps you be real with yourself too, right? Which is like always good.
No, it's on her foot. This is insane.
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