Franklin Foer Quotes

Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it.

People are building apps that are doing super-crazy things, and there's a lot of talk about modeling and microtargeting. Facebook can predict when people are going to break up, and Target is able to predict if a woman is pregnant before she knows just based on the type of lotion she bought.

Facebook is teachable. If you hide items, you'll see fewer of those kinds of items in the future. Like more items, and you'll see more of those in the future.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Facebook is studying emotional reaction to things and bringing you fewer of things you don't engage with and more of what you do.

The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.

The whole concept of data science is that the software becomes the expert, and you, as the average user, are able to understand what's going on.

My laptop seems to know where I am, even if I don't. My cellphone asks me if I want directions to anywhere from the spot I am standing in. I buy a record online and Amazon.com sends me letters, telling me that people who bought what I bought also bought these other records.

Deep learning allows you to create predictive models at a level of quality and sophistication that was previously out of reach. And so deep learning also enhances the product function of data science because it can generate new product opportunities.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

Asking Siri where the nearest sushi bar is - that's not interesting. What's interesting is asking your phone where one of your friends have last had dinner in the neighborhood, or having it recommend a cool paella place in Barcelona because it knows you eat paella all the time at home.

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.

It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

I got really excited about the idea of data-driven startup just as I was starting Kaggle.

It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.

If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to.

Facebook is at the forefront. It's the company that can fundamentally change the way information is being exchanged and processed. It can be the basis for artificial intelligence to develop over time.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

I want Facebook to pick the best 20 items to show me every single time I refresh that screen.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.

We are moving into a world where companies will be able to offer us products and services based on our last two hours of activity. This is both exciting and frightening at the same time.