The bigger an effect, the fewer the number of observations necessary to see it.

Good data science is less complicated than people think. The best data science, in fact, is surprisingly intuitive.

This is the fourth power of Big Data: it makes randomized experiments, which can find truly causal effects, much, much easier to conduct—anytime, more or less anywhere, as long as you’re online. In the era of Big Data all the world’s a lab.

The microscope showed us there is more to a drop of pond water than we think we see. The telescope showed us there is more to the night sky than we think we see. And new, digital data now shows us there is more to human society than we think we see.

And Big Data does not eliminate the need for all the other ways humans have developed over the millennia to understand the world.

Seder is in the prediction business, not the explanation business.

Sometimes a new dataset reveals a behavior, desire, or concern that I would have never even considered. There are numerous sexual proclivities that fall into this category. For example, did you know that in India the number one search beginning “my husband wants . . .” is “my husband wants me to breastfeed him”?

The best way to get the right answer to a question is to combine all available data.

On Facebook, we show our cultivated selves, not our true selves.