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OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

nytimes.com

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Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#81

Post by selimthegrim »

burgers wrote: post #30
beachstartup wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it doesn't subscribe to his fantasyland world where all people are equal in the sexual marketplace.

This has nothing to do with my "fantasyland" or wanting everyone to be equal. Its about making racial and other generalizations without publishing the full data with it. Racial and gender generalizations are dangerous things for a society. If you are going to go down the road of pointing out these things, you need to do it with extra caution and transparency.

Look man, we're not making this shit up to make you feel bad. I got absolutely nowhere on OKC when I still had "Indian" listed as ethnicity. (male born and raised in USA) For months at a time. Only when I left it blank did people start messaging me at all.

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#82

Post by [deleted] »

mpweiher wrote: post #28
Chinjut wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it have to do with?

Preference. See Wikipedia. "Racism consists of both prejudice and discrimination based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples" ... "In sociology and psychology, some definitions only include consciously malignant forms of discrimination.[4][5] While some consider any assumption that a person's behavior is tied to their racial categorization is inherently racist, regardless of whether the acti…

[deleted]

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#83

Post by colmvp »

deciplex wrote: post #65

This is really annoying (emphasis mine): >Mr. Rudder is particularly interested in the divide between the mates people claim they want and their actual online pursuits. Witness the actions of 35-year-old heterosexual men on OkCupid. These men typically search for women between the ages of 24 and 40, Mr. Rudder reports, yet in practice they rarely contact anyone over 29. > “I see this as a statement of what men imagin…

> A lot of other stuff on the OKCupid blog, e.g. claims of racism because black women receive fewer first messages than women of other races, fell into the same trap.

I don't see how that was faulty.

It's pretty clear that Black women are involved in interracial marriage at a significantly lower rate than women of other races, or even black men. Then if you look at response rate by race (a previous OKTrends post), black women generally have a lower response rate from men of all races compared to women of other races. Data supports the idea that black women are generally not favored.

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#84

Post by beachstartup »

selimthegrim wrote: post #81
burgers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with my "fantasyland" or wanting everyone to be equal. Its about making racial and other generalizations without publishing the full data with it. Racial and gender generalizations are dangerous things for a society. If you are going to go down the road of pointing out these things, you need to do it with extra caution and transparency.

Look man, we're not making this shit up to make you feel bad. I got absolutely nowhere on OKC when I still had "Indian" listed as ethnicity. (male born and raised in USA) For months at a time. Only when I left it blank did people start messaging me at all.

'burgers' has never had to think about it, and doing so offends him. 'dangerous' conclusions. LOL. it's seriously amazing how fucking oblivious people can be to the world that goes on around them, isn't it?

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#85

Post by DanBC »

selimthegrim wrote: post #81
burgers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with my "fantasyland" or wanting everyone to be equal. Its about making racial and other generalizations without publishing the full data with it. Racial and gender generalizations are dangerous things for a society. If you are going to go down the road of pointing out these things, you need to do it with extra caution and transparency.

Look man, we're not making this shit up to make you feel bad. I got absolutely nowhere on OKC when I still had "Indian" listed as ethnicity. (male born and raised in USA) For months at a time. Only when I left it blank did people start messaging me at all.

The point seems simple: don't claim to be doing research if you're not actually doing research. If you're just kludging user submitted data and a bunch of user clicks into Excel for your blog posts don't try to claim it has any more validity than "shit we made up".

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#86

Post by clark-kent »

cheez wrote: post #63
philip1209 wrote: post #23

I'm always confused by the phrase "African-American." OkCupid is international. Why does somebody with African ethnicity have to be classified as "African-American"?

I was talking to a co-worker about another co-worker, commending his work, and she said "Oh, the African American guy?" Oh man, I lost it. I laughed so hard and she just didn't get it. We're not American... Neither was he...

It makes me laugh when i fill out applications or surveys, that have no black race in the race section. I have to check my race as African-American but I'm really African-not-American.

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#87

Post by Natsu »

com2kid wrote: post #69
Natsu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm afraid I didn't see that Reddit discussion from 2 years ago, but quoting from it: > Basically the breakdown was that rather than 93%+ of the people you are shown being "dead profiles" the actual number is more like 10-20%. > But if you take these into consideration, our conclusion would say, "Match.com users get married at about the same rate or higher as people not using Match.com!" That's not really a rin…

> That's not really a ringing endorsement here, at best it shows that if we change our estimates a little we can reverse our conclusions. That to me says that they were never able to come to very reliable conclusions in the first place on this issue. And if you read the entire comment thread, you'll see that they removed the article precisely because they were unable to come to any real conclusions. The original blog…

> And if you read the entire comment thread, you'll see that they removed the article precisely because they were unable to come to any real conclusions.

The thing is, access to private data didn't change the fact that they were using a self-reported stat to begin with. Given that OKC's data was self-reported to a significant degree, it's hard to see why this wasn't taken into account.

And then they go on to cite how they already knew it could be 10x higher (or more) by citing OKC data. This leads to the (paraphrased) conclusion that they can't be total frauds because they're still in business.

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#88

Post by seanflyon »

xcubed wrote: post #62
chimeracoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at OkCupid, on OkTrends. You're not the first person to propose this question - there's a comment like this almost every time OkCupid makes the front page - and here's what I wrote the last time[0], which I think explains it well: There were a number of factors. A bit part is that, in 2010, there were 2.5 people working full-time[1] on doing research for OkTrends, which allowed us to research, write, a…

Christian had time to write a book, but did not have time to update the blog. I would suggest that in the interests of the OKCupid business, updating the blog would have been a better thing to do than write a book. The blog drew many users to OK Cupid. It's possible that writing a book was in Christian's interest. If Christian was no longer working at OK Cupid while he wrote the book, then I understand. In that case…

Perhaps Christian took his own time to do what was in his own best interest (and also beneficial to the company).

Re: OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction

#89

Post by paulhauggis »

colmvp wrote: post #66
jeorgun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual preference (it seems to me) isn't racist, but in aggregate it at the very least raises questions about where those widespread preferences come from.

> Individual preference (it seems to me) isn't racist, but in aggregate it at the very least raises questions about where those widespread preferences come from. Thank you. It's so easy to brush under the rug peoples racial preferences as if they are sacrosanct

I see. So if a gay female only looks for other females, are they sexist?
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