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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#61

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

userbinator wrote: post #56
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is depressing to people who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited. It's more of a free market than some care to admit. The gritty truth is: people are depreciating assets, and some lose their value (perceived or actual) faster than others. One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platfor…

who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited Why/how would people come to think that way? As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.

There is an equality narrative out there and nobody is willing to state the truth because it may paint one group as superficial and another less so.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#62

Post by raviolo »

Would creating, say, online marketplace to help people lose desired amount of money with certainty - for example, via some sort of specially crafted financial instrument - violate any applicable rules & regs? Idea for the next YC batch?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#63

Post by userbinator »

myself248 wrote: post #54
ceejayoz wrote: post #10

> One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual…

What's eye-opening is the author's point about _how_ many people go about ditching some income at the last minute -- by buying a particular type of financial product whose value is likely to go to zero. Which has the effect of transferring their wealth to someone else (the vendor of the financial product) who just sold something that was effectively worth nothing, for a great deal of money. It's the most bizarre sort…

It effectively creates "potholes" in the distribution --- anyone in that net-negative zone tries to move out of it.

The function looks like "y = x <= 48560 ? x : x - 7200" and means that, at the other end, someone who makes $55760 would end up with the same as someone who makes $48560.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#64

Post by gowld »

Sickening of these "unintended" consequences are that programs designed to help the poor end up being used by the rich and well-connected -- parents who "disown" their children" to make them look poor during college application, or who lie about or overemphasize their racial background to claim affirmative action rewards.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#65

Post by [deleted] »

thundergolfer wrote: post #22
ceejayoz wrote: post #10

> One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual…

Too many smart people in the US are working to invent things like the 'Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich'[1] rather than fixings these massive equity and fairness problems at the bottom end. 1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#66

Post by claudiawerner »

meristem wrote: post #59
lostmsu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? Biologically this must be tuned to the best age for having kids, and men's age hardly matters.

Quality of sperm decays with age. Just not in the same curve as egg reserves.

So if it were purely biological, we'd expect to see some sort of negative gradient for men's preferred ages, though not as exaggerated as the one for women's preferred ages?

I'm also unclear as to what the question was which prompted the answers from men and women, or what the motivations were. There is much more to a relationship than sex for procreation, and almost everyone seems to realize this fact. So the conclusion is that men simply find young women attractive (and the "reproductive age" evo-psych just-so story cannot justify it), or men no matter how old they are continue to want children, at the expense of a relationship with a fully developed adult.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#67

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mumblemumble wrote: post #34
selimthegrim wrote: post #30

How about the US killing like 10 “Al Qaeda No 2”s in a row for a while in Iraq

If you order your hit list right, you can kill a continuous streak of #2s, until there's only one person left.

With only a few 100k casualties in collateral damage.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#68

Post by gowld »

birdyrooster wrote: post #27
hammock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both men and women showed height above the national average. As a result I am more inclined to believe that there is selection bias in OKCupid audience (more white people, less minorities) than that there is such widespread deception going on.

Exactly. Not to mention short people may have opted out of dating because they lack a perceived fitness for dating.

Or tall people opt out of OKCupid because they can date offline.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#69

Post by Reedx »

lkbm wrote: post #12

OKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...

Noticed that they've removed data from that page. You can see a version from 2017 here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...

Always found their blog posts an interesting look at the underlying data and user behavior. But now they're scrubbing them?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#70

Post by [deleted] »

birdyrooster wrote: post #27
hammock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both men and women showed height above the national average. As a result I am more inclined to believe that there is selection bias in OKCupid audience (more white people, less minorities) than that there is such widespread deception going on.

Exactly. Not to mention short people may have opted out of dating because they lack a perceived fitness for dating.

[deleted]
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