The Black Damsel In Dating Distress: A Response to OkCupid's Conclusions

Settle down. I got the mean incomes from the table on pages 29-34, which a CTRL-F would've shown you. I chose the mean incomes because we were discussing how far off you'd be if you guessed a random person's income. Mean incomes would be the most accurate in that case. Median incomes are a perfectly fine metric as well.

The "set of classes" means nothing. If you're trying to predict someone's behavior, distinguishing someone who makes $59,999 from someone who makes $60,000 makes no sense. If it helps, pretend I said "socioeconomic status" every time I said "class". They're interchangeable to me, though the latter indeed implies discrete groups.

With that said, if you think living on $55,530 is anything like living on $34,218, you're just wrong. How can multiplying one's income by 1.6 not have a massive effect on their life?

That's ignoring the decreasing marginal utility of a dollar as incomes rise. The poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,025. Black households have a "surplus" income of $12,193. White households have a surplus income of $33,505. The average white family will find itself in a situation where theft is attractive far less often than the average black family.

"Not substantial"? Consider my mind boggled.

[Edit: spelling mistakes]

Based on your response, you do not even understand the terms I've been using.

'Set of classes,' means everything per this discussion - as the discussion has been premised on the statement you made (that skin color is an indicator of class).

So when you say things like...:

"If you're trying to predict someone's behavior, distinguishing someone who makes $59,999 from someone who makes $60,000 makes no sense."

..You suggest that you either do not understand my argument, or, you do not understand what has been meant by the word "class" in this discussion.

So I'll say it again; Classes are defined by an interval on the set of natural numbers. This isn't a discussion about guessing incomes with any greater precision than those provided to us by said classes.

The data provided to us by the census bureau document is the average. Note that the "households" in the census include BOTH family and non-family households.

So, when you say things like...:

"The poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,025. Black households have a "surplus" income of $12,193. White households have a surplus income of $33,505."

...You hint that you didn't quite understand that the average provided was calculated including single-households as well as non-single households with kids. So your whole reply is a bit of a straw-man...

...But it isn't even really a good one. We are talking about race as a predictor so let us control for income and work backwards. Imagine two families, one black, the other white, both living with an income of $34,218, both with four children. Is it then your contention that the Black family is still more likely to produce a thief?

If so, I do consider your mind boggled.

[Edit: 'its' changed to 'opposite' for clarity, 'there' to 'their']

1. "I have said several times that I'm not talking about discrete classes, yet you insist on arguing that point."

Regardless of whether or not you meant to be "talking about discrete classes," you were. Socio-economic classes ARE discrete classes. So if you are talking about some other type of class, it is a mistake of comprehension on your behalf.

2. "I do not think that race can predict whether someone is lower, middle or upper class."

An explicit contradiction. I'll quote you directly:

"In America, skin color is a good predictor of class."

So which is it? Is race a good "predictor" of class or is it not?

3. "I do think that race can predict income."

This is the same thing as predicting class. Income is both necessary and sufficient for determining class, so if you could predict income by race, you could predict class by race. But you cannot do this (remember that guessing 'middle class' over and over is not allowed as it isn't information providing.).

4. "...you haven't even tried to disprove my assertion that households earning $55,530 and $34,218 will likely have different behaviors."

Ummm...that's because the opposite is taken for granted in the model of class. The middle class interval is traditionally considered to be from 30K to 75K - the class intervals are chosen precisely because the buying power in each strata is considered to be effectively equivalent. Again, if you don't understand this, then you do not understand the nature of classes - it just is what it is.

5. " If my assertion is true, then race is a valuable predictor of behavior."

No. Even if your assertion is true, all it shows is that income is a predictor of class. Well, duh - classes are defined by incomes. Behavior has no relation to any of these variables - that is, bad behaviors are distributed in equal proportions across the class strata. Income may predict risk-levels associated with bad-behaviors, but not necessarily their frequency.

6. "No, I don't think black families and white families with the same incomes will have significant differences in criminality."

Exactly. So then, there is no predictive ability that race has for any arbitrary class strata. It immediately follows then, that race has no predictive ability in terms of class. QED.

What is constructed in the post is not an alternative explanation of the numbers. It is an explanation of an effect that needs to be taken into account to explain the numbers. It may even dominate the explanation, but that's not asserted in the article. You have fallen into an "either-or" trap.

Which explains why it is so hard to get an Asian woman to reply to you, they must be inundated with messages, presuming of course that men don't prefer obese women.