“Lucy is a gifted communicator, makes occasional gut decisions against logic, and prefers big ideas over details.”
“露西有出色的沟通能力，偶尔会凭直觉、而非逻辑做出决定，她喜欢奇思妙想，而不爱关注细节。”
As a description of me, this is pretty good. I have spent my working life communicating, so I jolly well ought to be good at it by now. I have just made a decision in my private life which I know is not only illogical but financially catastrophic, yet I’m doggedly going with my gut. And as for details, unless they suit my argument, I have no fondness for them at all.
这段性格分析对我的描述挺恰当。在我的职业生涯中，我一直在不停地沟通，如今我当然应该很善于沟通。在我的个人生活方面，我刚刚做了一个决定，我知道这个决定不仅不合理，在财务上还将是灾难性的，但我固执地凭着直觉决定那么做。至于细节，除非它们符合我的观点，否则我一点也不喜欢它们。

Yet what is so disturbing about the above character analysis is that it does not come from someone who knows me; in fact, it doesn’t come from a person at all. It was thrown together in three seconds flat by an algorithm developed by some computer scientists who have worked out how to trawl the internet for all public information about a person and turn it into a potted portrait of a personality.
以上的性格分析真正让人不安的地方是，它并非来自某个认识我的人；事实上，这段分析根本不是人做出的，而是由一个算法在短短3秒钟里得出的。开发这个算法的计算机科学家们研究出了一种方法，能够搜集互联网上关于某个人的全部公共信息，然后利用这些信息归纳出这个人的性格特征。
Having let crystalknows.com analyse me, I then typed in my colleagues’ names and found they were summed up uncannily well too. A fellow columnist, whom I know to be impatient, bold and creative, was judged to be just that by Crystal. Some of its verdicts were a bit off the mark — yet in each case, the app tells you how confident it is about being right; the cases in which accuracy was poor were mostly those where there wasn’t much data to go on.
用crystalknows.com分析了我自己以后，我又输入了一些同事的名字，发现对他们的性格的总结也出奇地准确。一位写专栏的同事是个不怎么有耐心、大胆、有创意的人，Crystal对他的判断也正是如此。有些判断与实际有些出入，但在每个案例中，这款应用都让你觉得它很自信它的判断是对的；判断不够准确大多是因为没有足够的数据可供分析。
This is all good fun, but the main selling point of Crystal is not to provide uproarious entertainment. It is to help you communicate better. You simply link the app to Gmail and every time you start writing a message it tells you what sort of approach will go down best with the recipient.
这很有意思，但Crystal的主要卖点不是让人捧腹大笑，而是为了帮你更好地沟通。你只需要把这款应用连接到你的Gmail上，每次你开始写信的时候，它就会告诉你什么样的风格最适合你的收件人。
I have just emailed Drew D’Agostino, the founder of Crystal Projects. “Be brief,” warned a little green button at the bottom of my screen, telling me that Drew doesn’t like wordy. Had I been writing to someone else, it might have advised: be casual or be formal.
我刚刚给Crytal Projects的创始人德鲁•达戈斯蒂诺(Drew D’Agostino)写了一封邮件，屏幕下方的绿色小按钮警告我要“简短”，提示我德鲁不喜欢啰嗦。如果我给其他人写信，它给出的建议可能是让我写得随意或者正式一些。
According to Mr D’Agostino, Crystal is the biggest improvement to email since the spell check. But so far tetchy bloggers are not impressed. It’s been called the “stalking app” and “creepy” and “sinister”. Some people have protested that it doesn’t feel good to know perfect strangers are looking you up without your permission, and forming instant views of you.
据达戈斯蒂诺说，Crystal是继拼写检查功能之后对电子邮件的最大改进。但敏感易怒的博主们迄今并未被打动。人们把Crystal叫做“跟踪应用”，说它“可怕”、“邪恶”。一些人说，完全陌生的人不经你的允许查找你的信息，并立即得出有关你是个什么样的人的观点，这种想法让人感到不舒服。
Yet none of this strikes me as particularly creepy — all the data are already in the public domain. And I think I’d rather that decisions about me were made based on some sort of system rather than on hunch, prejudice and ignorance, as at present. Unlike most apps, Crystal solves a genuine problem. There are no common rules on email. Every time we write an email we are in the dark as to what is going to work best.
然而我并不觉得以上所说的这些特别可怕——这些信息本来就是公开的——而且我认为，与其像现在这样，人们基于直觉、偏见和无知做出关于我的决定，我宁愿这些决定是基于某种系统做出的。和大多数应用不同，Crystal解决了一个真正的难题。写电子邮件没有统一的规则。我们每次写电子邮件的时候，都不知道哪种书写风格效果最好。
You could say that a post-Crystal world, in which all messages arriving in my inbox were written in the same prescribed style, would be a dull one. Yet it couldn’t be as dull as the current arrangement whereby I read dozens of emails every day that begin with windy small talk like “I hope this email finds you well”. If people knew how much I hated that, they would desist. That would save time for them and save me from irritation. Win, win.
你也许会说，在一个“后Crystal”的世界里，我的收件箱里每一封邮件都使用软件所建议的统一文风，这听起来很无趣。但怎么也不会像现在这么无趣吧。现在我每天都要阅读几十封用空洞的寒暄开头的邮件，比如“当你看到这封信的时候，希望你一切都好”。如果人们知道我多么讨厌这种套话，他们就不会这么写了。这不仅能节省他们的时间，我也不用恼火了。双赢局面。
A more philosophical complaint is that, if all the judging of character were done by machines, we would lose our own — more nuanced — ways of assessing people. And because we are suggestible, we don’t question the apps’ results, even when they are based on not much information. Confirmation bias, and all that.
还有一种更偏哲学层面的抱怨，如果对性格的判断全都是由机器完成的，我们就不再会用我们自己的更细致入微的方法去评判人了。因为我们很容易轻信，我们将不会质疑这款应用得出的结果，即使这些结果是在信息不多的情况下得出的。这也就是证实倾向(Confirmation bias)之类的问题。
There may be something in this, but my main objection to Crystal is more basic. It doesn’t work well enough.
这么说或许有些道理，但我反对Crystal的主要理由更加简单。它的效果还不够好。
I should be the easiest person in the world for Crystal to analyse given that I have published a personal column every week for 21 years. Even though the app has more or less got my character right, its suggestions on how to approach me are worse than useless. “Use emoticons,” it begins. Is this a joke? I have never knowingly used an emoticon in my life, and instantly knock a couple of points off the IQ of anyone who deploys them. Even more outrageously, it says that I don’t mind if people are late. Again: could not be more wrong. I am obsessively punctual.
对于Crystal来说，我应该是世界上最容易分析的人了，因为我21年来每周都发表一篇个人专栏。就算这款应用对我性格的判断或多或少是对的，它在如何给我写邮件方面给出的建议却有害无益。建议一开始就说“使用表情符号”。这不是开玩笑吧？我这辈子从来没有有意地使用过一个表情符号，看到任何使用表情符号的人，我都会立即在心里给他们的智商评价扣掉几分。更让人无法容忍的是，建议中说我在约会中不介意对方迟到。这也大错特错。我是个极其守时的人。
Emoticonphobia and obsessive timekeeping are not things that an algorithm needs to deduce about me. They are phobias that I have written about explicitly and often. Thus my problem with Crystal is not that it is stalking me, but that it doesn’t stalk nearly enthusiastically enough.
我对表情符号的反感和对守时的执着不需要一个算法来推断。我经常公开地在文章里写到这些特质。所以我不满Crystal不是因为它跟踪我，而是因为它对我的跟踪还不够“狂热”。
In my brief email to Drew, I asked about accuracy. “Hi Lucy. Thanks for reaching out,” he emailed back, thus committing two email bloopers before he had even got going. He then reassured me that accuracy is getting better, and soon users will be able to correct mistakes and supply preferences themselves.
在我写给德鲁的简短的邮件中，我问到了准确性的问题。“你好露西。感谢来信，”他回邮件说。在还没进入正文之前，他就已经犯了两个错误。接着他让我放心，说准确性会越来越好，很快用户就能自行修正建议中的错误，补充自己的喜好。
In the meantime here is my character report on Crystal: great idea; must try harder.
以下是我对Crystal出具的性格分析报告：想法不错；但还得加把劲。