Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha are you a THChubber? Yeah, there isn't... it sucks and I've been reduced to chatting on HN. What was your hub name?
Wow, I was a hubber too ('bird').
Jeez. It's a regular party on here. ashen says hi.
How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
"By algorithmically matching based on answers to questions, you must assume that those answers are meaningful. And meaningful means CONSISTENT. And people are NOT consistent." In practice, the user base for OkCupid will change. And old users will reanswer questions sometimes too. "Assuming you are even GETTING like thinkers, (which is tenuous at best) where is it written that like thinkers make great companions?" Tha…
Uploading photos isn't what supposedly sets okcupid apart, right? They aren't using physical attractiveness in their matching algorithms and that is the point I was trying to make. Your other point has been addressed above; people don't know what they want. Asking them what they want their "ideal match" to answer is as foolhardy as asking them to describe their "ideal mate" neuron by neuron.
Given a photo by itself, or a photo plus output from a matching algorithm, the photo plus output from a matching algorithm gives more information. My point is that judging physical attractiveness is (mostly!) a solved problem on dating sites, so your main competitive advantage is attacking the other problems.
People do not, in fact, know what they want. But they can make educated guesses.
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uploading photos isn't what supposedly sets okcupid apart, right? They aren't using physical attractiveness in their matching algorithms and that is the point I was trying to make. Your other point has been addressed above; people don't know what they want. Asking them what they want their "ideal match" to answer is as foolhardy as asking them to describe their "ideal mate" neuron by neuron.
Given a photo by itself, or a photo plus output from a matching algorithm, the photo plus output from a matching algorithm gives more information. My point is that judging physical attractiveness is (mostly!) a solved problem on dating sites, so your main competitive advantage is attacking the other problems. People do not, in fact, know what they want. But they can make educated guesses.
Judging physical attractiveness on dating sites isn't even a partially solved problem - I invite you to name the sites that you have found that are close, as a counterexample.
How does one go about making an EDUCATED guess with NO knowledge?
To put it plainly - statistical information assimilated from meaningless data is also meaningless. I don't know what my perfect mate looks like - and no one does. If you accept that premise, you are then forced to accept that any data gathered from some person A about what their perfect mate P is like is MEANINGLESS. So statistical algorithms from any such information yield meaningless data as well; ergo okcupid cannot do what it hopes to do. QED
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#64Earlier 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…
I think that you're assigning more meaning to the words "like" and "get along with" than the authors intend. Pretty much everywhere they use one of those phrases it should be qualified like "X _say they_ like Y". But that gets tedious, and I think the authors are also making the assumption that you were paying attention when they explained where these numbers come from.
Note that the end of the article is leading directly into the objections that people keep making along the lines of "this doesn't mean that these people really get along in real life", and the conflict between what people say they are looking for and the choices they actually make about who to contact and respond to.
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#65Favorite line of the article: "If religion is a minefield, then race is a field that’s just one giant mine"
The article was not quite as statistically sound as it could be, but at least they aren't trying to pass it off as statistical data.
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given a photo by itself, or a photo plus output from a matching algorithm, the photo plus output from a matching algorithm gives more information. My point is that judging physical attractiveness is (mostly!) a solved problem on dating sites, so your main competitive advantage is attacking the other problems. People do not, in fact, know what they want. But they can make educated guesses.
Judging physical attractiveness on dating sites isn't even a partially solved problem - I invite you to name the sites that you have found that are close, as a counterexample. How does one go about making an EDUCATED guess with NO knowledge? To put it plainly - statistical information assimilated from meaningless data is also meaningless. I don't know what my perfect mate looks like - and no one does. If you accept t…
> I don't know what my perfect mate looks like - and no one does.
While I agree that one's guess at a perfect partner might not be 100% accurate, are you sure you have no information on this at all? Here are some OkCupid questions. Would you be equally willing to date someone regardless of how they answered these questions?
-Is homosexuality a sin?
-How important is religion/God in your life?
-Are you happy with your life?
-Is interracial marriage a bad idea?
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#67One 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-cu…
JDate and similar sites aren't exactly religious. There are lots of secular Jews who would prefer to date or marry another Jew, for ethnic, cultural, or national reasons.
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging physical attractiveness on dating sites isn't even a partially solved problem - I invite you to name the sites that you have found that are close, as a counterexample. How does one go about making an EDUCATED guess with NO knowledge? To put it plainly - statistical information assimilated from meaningless data is also meaningless. I don't know what my perfect mate looks like - and no one does. If you accept t…
> I don't know what my perfect mate looks like - and no one does. While I agree that one's guess at a perfect partner might not be 100% accurate, are you sure you have no information on this at all? Here are some OkCupid questions. Would you be equally willing to date someone regardless of how they answered these questions? -Is homosexuality a sin? -How important is religion/God in your life? -Are you happy with your…
Interestingly, the universal answer set of these questions, from all of the women I've seriously dated, would be full! That is, every possible answer would be in the set.
And I am certain I am not unique. Indeed, half of the enjoyment in getting to know someone is in the mutual effort expended in trying to understand how the other person was formed: thoughts, feelings, desires, etc - and this enjoyment is independent of the actual thoughts, feelings, etc themselves.
As relationships grow, both parties discover the thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. that were perhaps, formed irrationally - and then adjust accordingly. This is called personal discovery - and is evidence enough that most people are too inconsistent and too nearsighted for an approach such as the one okcupid employs.
That said - I wish them the best of luck.
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#69[deleted]
Re: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating
#70So many statistics.
So little statistical significance testing.
This tells me much about this service.