Accompanied by a slideshow, he brought up a chart 1 of how straight women rate the men on OKCupid based on their age. Rudder’s talk at the Empiricist League borrowed from the book’s first chapter, covering the basics of whom we’re attracted to and why. The book arrives on Tuesday, bearing the kind of Gladwellian title - “Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking” - meant to tell readers that a Big Idea lies between the covers. In 2012 Rudder proposed a book based on his blog, and Crown outlasted nine other publishers with a seven-figure bid. By assembling users’ clicks and keystrokes into one place and spending hours inside Excel, Rudder had found a way to articulate our humanity. All of a sudden, Rudder, a one-time indie actor and rock star, had transformed himself into a dating laureate for the data age. Soon, Rudder’s insights and wry wit were attracting millions of views. The posts covered such topics as the best camera angle for a profile picture and how people lie on their profiles - the mysteries online daters wonder about. In 2009, Rudder started OKTrends, an in-house blog for OKCupid, as a way to attract new members to a site that was nearly out of money. Rudder, the 39-year-old president and co-founder of the online dating site OKCupid, had come to deliver a distilled version of what he’s been working on for the last five years. In the back corner of the room, Christian Rudder sat by himself at the bar, nursing Stephen King’s “It.”

It was the 11th meeting of the Empiricist League, a kind of ad-hoc, small-scale TED Talks for scientists and the New Yorkers who adore them. In mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love.

Dataclysm by christian rudder