I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.
I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science".
If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem.
same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.
Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.
and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results.
Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published. Which was fun, but its not good science, its hardly science at all.
There is a reason why blog posts and published results have different standards (and also why most sociological/psychological results are impossible to reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis of any science)
How do you think science operates in actual practice? OkCupid at least has a sample large enough that you can commit all sorts of statistical sins and still produce halfway decent conclusions, unlike your run-off-the-mill n=10 study.
Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.
It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median.
The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis.
> Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average?
Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive.
If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis.
> This delusion of denying facts
I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.
the amount of pressure this puts on the sampling is hard to understate. not only are you looking at a highly truncated set of interpersonal dynamics (what you can tell about someone based on a dating profile is far less than what you can tell by meeting real people in meat space), you're specifically selecting for people who have been as of yet unsuccessful IRL. you're also selecting for people who wish to take a fairly serious shortcut around personal interaction.
given these factors, it would be both crazy and stupid to believe you can generalize about human nature anything you get from a dating app.
as for "what you see in real life", might I suggest that you, yourself, are also constrained to a perspective that doesn't necessarily match other people's perspectives, and that maybe, just maybe, you are also seeing a biased sample of the world which is both the result and cause of difficulties with interpersonal interactions?
I'd say it's premature given that a lot of women don't want to date men shorter than them, so I can see men messaging them less just because they'd assume they were wasting their time.
I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased?
Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you make the leap that people looking for dates via a matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable of people looking for dates?
So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.
Is that all? That doesn't make it "incredibly" biased.
I mean, looking at your example of "black women being the least desirable on OkCupid", it's easy enough to check if it applies only to 20 year olds who are willing to answer lots of questions or if that correlation actually exists outside of that group[1].
Your way, of simply dismissing it instead of regarding it as a data point that can be further investigated is the opposite of science.
[1] OkCupid certainly had the data, and on one of the blogs I recall seeing their distribution of ages, and it was not dominated by the 20-30 age group, even if they were a majority. It would have been easy for OkCupid to redo that desirability analysis for particular age groups.
The classic illustration is the Literary Digest poll of the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny but well sampled set of respondents and correctly estimated the Roosevelt victory. The magazine's problem was partly sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average American, amongst other things) and partly non-response bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty good, but probably disproportionately from the most politically engaged of their readership, who hated Roosevelt).
I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a distraction - the sampling is all.
(This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics' space, and which genuinely needs that much training data. It's also not true if you're studying the site members themselves, for whom the site members are a perfect (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume their experience will extend to the rest of the world).
You had a sensible reply but now most can’t even see the discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on track
for example:
>Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.
I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at bringing in political correctness probably raised some flags.
I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly discussed you just wanna report and move on with your day.
But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption.
A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article.
To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.
No amount of empirical data matters because it is a first principal which the whole rest of the political ideology relies upon. If someone does not accept this as a first principal and is willing to examine empirical data that contradicts it and draw the conclusion that all people are not equal, then they are no longer a liberal.
It’s not acknowledging differences that are the problem. It is things like the assignment of value judgements and other stuff that people erroneously attribute to those differences.
One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/preferences/#Tra has an overview, note especially the paragraph about pair-wise comparisons.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BehavioralEconomics.html
But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone
And the citation date: 2010.
Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that:
"On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent him from pressuring her to have sex."
Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.
In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/
So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes.
Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.
Males find females, that are healthy and young, attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to have healthy offspring.
Females find males, that are capable of getting enough resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of younger females and older males.
It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum, and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet.
It is what it is.
"In a 2016 paper that explored the income difference between couples in 1980 and 2012, researcher Yue Qian noted that the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves still persists in the modern era."
Emphasis mine.
2. Reduced ≠ eliminated
And of course, it says that "some research supports that theory," of that reduction. (again, emphasis mine). When you take a theory that has some support and then extrapolate from that theory to an end-state and claim that end state as certainty, you are leaving the realm of evidence and drifting off into pure fantasy.
> women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real.
Actually it is real, as all the evidence shows. Including genetic evidence, which has concluded that historically, only around half of males reproduce, whereas almost all women do (apparently 40% vs. 80%).
If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid.
Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.
if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once.
> on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
On what grounds do you believe okcupid to not be a sufficiently representative sample?
UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.
What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform?
There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.
Then why on earth would you put down "bi" in the profile?
What kind of a stupid question is this?
If you only want interest from a particular gender, why advertise that you want interest from all genders?
To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant data for that purpose.
Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey.
They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or some other nonsense.