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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#91

Post by WC3w6pXxgGd »

CydeWeys wrote: post #41
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...

Can confirm. I'm 5'9" but listed myself as 5'10" on dating sites. Adding that extra digit really seems to matter, and when I'm wearing shoes I am that tall anyway. Because of heels women often come off as much taller than they actually are. Rounding up to 6' definitely would've been stretching the truth too much though.

I'm also 5'9". After I listed 6'0" on my Tinder profile, I immediately got more matches AND those matches were much more responsive and willing to meet. Many wanted to come over immediately (without meeting up at a bar beforehand).

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#92

Post by lostmsu »

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.

Does the quality of sperm have any negative effect on the child or mother?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#93

Post by pfranz »

Reedx wrote: post #69
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?

If memory serves, it was shortly after they got acquired (in 2011 by Match.com owners?) they started scrubbing their blog. The most noticeable was old posts with criticisms of their new owners and the poor incentives around subscription dating websites.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#94

Post by leftyted »

lostmsu wrote: post #92
meristem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does the quality of sperm have any negative effect on the child or mother?

Older fathers are associated with all kinds of negative childbirth outcomes.

Just not as much as older mothers.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#95

Post by stevenbedrick »

DavidVoid wrote: post #25
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...

Slightly off-topic but this reminded me of what is perhaps their most depressing pair of graphs. Look at "A woman's age vs. the age of the men sho look best to her" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617... and then compare that with "A man's age vs. the age of the women who look best to him" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...

In his excellent book, “The Truthful Art”, Alberto Cairo presents a great analysis and discussion of those graphs. The short version is that the way they are designed masks a lot of details of the analysis such that they are fundamentally misleading...

https://books.google.com/books?id=8dKKCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT232&lpg=...

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#96

Post by boomboomsubban »

btilly wrote: post #74

The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay…

>But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than her current job

The salary was lower but would somehow remove her eligibility for food stamps?

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#97

Post by jhanschoo »

DavidVoid wrote: post #25
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...

Slightly off-topic but this reminded me of what is perhaps their most depressing pair of graphs. Look at "A woman's age vs. the age of the men sho look best to her" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617... and then compare that with "A man's age vs. the age of the women who look best to him" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...

IMO the dataset that those OKC analyses were on are highly skewed to the kind of people who would use OKC then. I wonder of OKC users are representative of the dating population, especially since of course dating dynamics on OKC are likely very different from other ways to date.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#98

Post by aianus »

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…

> (the vendor of the financial product) who just sold something that was effectively worth nothing

It's not necessarily worth nothing.

It has a very high chance of going to $0, but it could also have a very small chance of going to $1 million so that the other party in this trade is not necessarily raking in a lot of profit (or any) by making this trade many times over.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#99

Post by heavyset_go »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #96
btilly wrote: post #74

The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay…

>But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than her current job The salary was lower but would somehow remove her eligibility for food stamps?

The number of hours scheduled to work matter here.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#100

Post by tedunangst »

vageli wrote: post #87
tzs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and if you do qualify for a subsidy, you aren't out of the woods yet as far as year to year surprises go. There was a nasty one in my county for people getting subsidies. There were only two insurers available through the ACA exchange in my county in 2019. They were Kaiser and Premera. The cheapest plans from Kaiser were a pair of bronze level plans (one with an HSA, one without) for about $770/month. The cheapest…

The cynic in me wouldn't be surprised if these new plans were offered by subsidiaries of Kaiser or Premera. I certainly hope that isn't the case. (edit: deleted parent quotation)

Was it necessary to full quote the entire parent?
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