Book Meme - Day 2

What nonfiction title has made you more interested in a topic? What can you do to explore this topic further?

I've always been interested in psychology and sociology - anything to do with how humans work. It's at the base of why I read so much. The problem I have with those fields is the lack of rigor. Or rather, the lack of sample size. It's hard to set up a good and interesting experiment on people. It's nearly impossible to do this and get a reasonable sample size and conform to ethics. I considered pursuing neuroscience, but I could never get through the introductory biology classes necessary for it. (Well, I probably could have if I'd really pushed myself, but physics was just so much easier.)

But an amazing thing has been happening recently. Well, amazing from the point of view of these two sciences, somewhat less amazing if your main concern is privacy. That amazing thing is social media and the vast amounts of data that can be harvested from it. We still can't perform meaningful experiments on people, but we can probe into this data and ask lots of interesting questions and actually start answering some of them.

The book that opened my eyes to this was Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, who worked at OKCupid and had access to a treasure trove of online dating profiles and interactions. Using this he was able to start looking at trends in how we date, in the differences between what we say we want and what we actually want, and in general start to understand humans a little better.

This is the field of science that I'm currently the most excited about: the intersection of big data and psychology. Now it's not like I'm going to go back for a degree in either (or both) of these fields. But more books are starting to be published on the topic, and I'm eager to lay my hands on them and learn more about humanity. I've got a similar book, Everybody Lies, currently sitting on my shelf at home.

At this point I'm mostly just hoping that this field takes off and provides me with lots of interesting things to read. If there's a silver lining to companies selling our data for profit, this is it. And I honestly thing it's a pretty big one.