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How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

blog.okcupid.com

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Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#21

Post by natrius »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
natrius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not flamebait at all. The data is all about people's responses to generic questions about what they're looking for in a date. They don't say "I don't want to date Muslims" and have that reflected in match scores. The match score is based on things like "I hate people who squeeze the toothpaste from the middle." It's quite interesting.

To put data based on 'race & religion' out in the open to me is already a thing that is not excusable (besides the lousy definition of such things as race and religion, both of which are floating, not discrete). There is a massive pre-selection problem here (people that frequent dating sites, rather than people in general) and the link to 'hacking' is a very tenuous one. I've seen Michael Jackson referred to as a hac…

You're right. It's infotainment. So? Are you incapable of taking anything at face value? They aren't making claims about how the world works; they're making claims about how people interact on their site. If that's not interesting to you, flag it and move on.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#22

Post by hughprime »

hughprime wrote: post #14
ilyak wrote: post #8

Really-really interesting. I'm curious why asian females scored worst of all when asian males scored descent.

The differences on the race graph are so small as to be insignificant.

Come to think of it, the differences on the race graph are amazingly small, given how strongly race is correlated with certain religions -- (e.g. middle-eastern people are much more likely to be Muslim, and almost all Hindus are Indian.)

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#23

Post by jacquesm »

natrius wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put data based on 'race & religion' out in the open to me is already a thing that is not excusable (besides the lousy definition of such things as race and religion, both of which are floating, not discrete). There is a massive pre-selection problem here (people that frequent dating sites, rather than people in general) and the link to 'hacking' is a very tenuous one. I've seen Michael Jackson referred to as a hac…

You're right. It's infotainment. So? Are you incapable of taking anything at face value? They aren't making claims about how the world works; they're making claims about how people interact on their site . If that's not interesting to you, flag it and move on.

The flaw here is that how people interact on their site has very little bearing on how those same people will interact in real life.

The plural of data isn't evidence, even for large amounts of data.

Sure you can do interesting statistical analysis, but the real action is after two people have found each other, and that's where the huge flaw is in all this analysis, the statements are about interactions in real life, the data is gathered online.

Any kind of statement about people being more or less likable would have to be taken out of the context of the website and into real life, without that statements as listed above are unsupportable.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#24

Post by sharpn »

vaksel wrote: post #17
sharpn wrote: post #7

I liked this on a few different levels: -Hacking data to reveal the answers to important difficult questions. -Exploring contentious issues in a neutral & intelligent way. -Great example of how to attract potential customers by providing valuable information that also gently demonstrates competence related to your service & differentiates your offering from competitors. I enjoyed reading this, I learnt something, and…

okcupid is pretty much considered the hip version of plenty of fish.

I don't know what that means, but I did think this was a brilliant marketing post from a company, and an interesting read.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#26

Post by gambling8nt »

shalmanese wrote: post #6

One possible explanation for the low Hindu-Hindu match is that there are many websites dedicated to specifically Hindu dating which means that the Hindus using OkCupid are those who are specifically not looking for a Hindu date. For other religions, such sites aren't nearly as prevalent.

I was going to post a comment directly disagreeing with this, and citing the large number of Jewish dating sites, but these are really only used by people on the more religious end of the spectrum, so it is possible that the effect is more prevalent in the Hindu-Hindu match calculations than in Jew-Jew match calculations. I would posit, however, that this effect, along with the self-selection bias of using a multi-cultural dating website, is almost certainly the cause for the tendency for higher matches towards non-relgious people.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#28

Post by pyre »

hughprime wrote: post #14
ilyak wrote: post #8

Really-really interesting. I'm curious why asian females scored worst of all when asian males scored descent.

The differences on the race graph are so small as to be insignificant.

Keep in mind that the 'Match %' is based on OKCupid.com's algorithms that number crunch against quiz answers that the users answer. This has nothing to do with 'success rate' of users on the site hooking up with other users.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#29

Post by chime »

hughprime wrote: post #16
ecuzzillo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if Hindu men like ice cream, and I don't want Hindu men, I might not like men who like ice cream either because a) it's what Hindu men do, or b) I don't like people who like ice cream to begin with, and I don't like Hindu men for that reason. So it's not totally unrelated.

But is there anything you can replace "ice cream" with to make it a workable example? What _real_ questions are you likely to see this kind of Hindu-Hindu antimatching behaviour on?

Arranged-marriage.

Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating

#30

Post by pyre »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
gloob wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree that it's not a hack - that doesn't, in my mind, preclude it from being hacking. They're two different things. For me, anyway, playing with giant data sets does not fall into the first group, but does fall into the second. That said, "is it hacking or not" isn't really a terribly interesting meta-discussion to have, imho, so I'll try and go in a different direction. Please, if that isn't flamebait I really…

If you're going to make this kind of generalizing statement about large groups of people I simply think that you have the responsibility to do it properly, so with control groups and so on, or not at all, otherwise the results are totally meaningless. The way it is presented right now is as if simply the size of OkCupid and their data gathering methods give them the license to make this kind of claim. It's 'interesti…

> It's 'interesting' but not 'rigorous'.

Of course it's not rigorous. To some degree people interacting with OKCupid's site are a self-selecting bunch. You really need to take this at face value. This is just a blog post showing some number crunching on their site. There are no sensationalist headings like "Muslim Males the Most Hated Group of People." Keep in mind that this is also not a scientific journal, not peer-reviewed research... nor is it claiming to be.

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