Big Data allows us to finally see what people really want and really do, not what they say they want and say they do. Providing honest data is the second power of Big Data.

It is an unfortunate truth about the world that you will have a much easier time getting new insights about racism, child abuse, or abortion than you will getting a new, profitable insight into how a business is performing. That’s because massive resources are already devoted to looking for even the slightest edge in measuring business performance.

“Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”

Even the most numerate scientists have woefully defective intuitions about how many subjects one really needs in a study before one can abstract away from the random quirks and bumps and generalize to all Americans, to say nothing of Homo sapiens.

The reason for the relationship doesn’t matter. But the relationship itself does.

These experiments demonstrate the potential of Big Data to replace guesses, conventional wisdom, and shoddy correlations with what actually works—causally.

Indeed, poor people living near rich people exercise more, smoke less, and are less likely to suffer from obesity.

I saw it in a large dataset of dreams people record on an app.

There is no grand conspiracy. There is just capitalism.