Yeah Sox!!
I'm taking this as scientific evidence that liking the Red Sox makes people more attractive.
The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#12Eh their analysis method is not too hot. From the comments section: "The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows: 1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population. 2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair. 3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1. 4. This is…
They're talking about the top fifty such phrases. It seems unlikely that there would be a demographic group that is proportionately less likely to use any arbitrary phrase. The only possibility is for a group's phrase usage to be statistically indistinguishable from the average.
Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check: read some of the phrases to someone, and ask that person which group they think the phrases came from. I bet people will guess with high enough accuracy to establish that it's nonrandom.
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#13It's interesting, I am asian, like soul food, but it's not something that would occur to me as putting on my profile. Similarly, I would write sashimi (if I ate it anymore) versus sushi, and I suspect that non-asians like sashimi just fine but wouldn't know to put it on... So the statistics point to self-cultural broadcasting, I think, more than preferences.
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#14Eh their analysis method is not too hot. From the comments section: "The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows: 1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population. 2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair. 3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1. 4. This is…
>Basically this is just noise, and a null-run (random group assignments) would produce just as valid results.
You didn't substantiate this claim.
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#15Eh their analysis method is not too hot. From the comments section: "The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows: 1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population. 2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair. 3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1. 4. This is…
They're talking about the top fifty such phrases. It seems unlikely that there would be a demographic group that is proportionately less likely to use any arbitrary phrase . The only possibility is for a group's phrase usage to be statistically indistinguishable from the average. Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check: read some of the phrases to someone, and ask that person which group they think the phrases cam…
I'm not saying the results were random. I'm saying they're not really allowing for a "confidence interval" in how many more times a certain group uses a phrase than average. For example if black men use "soul food" 30x greater than average that seems like a solid result. But if it's only 1.01x more than average that seems like noise.
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#16I thought it was interesting how the largest countries aren't the most nationalistic - no Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan, etc.. I also came away with an identity crisis - #1 good food (Soul) and seeing Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco and Talib Kwali in the top "stuff"... dammit I might be black.
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Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#17Eh their analysis method is not too hot. From the comments section: "The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows: 1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population. 2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair. 3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1. 4. This is…
If they only use a phrase 1.001x more than the population average, it's going to be much further down on the list than the top 50, unless they use nearly every phrase less than the average (which, barring some extremely pathological outlier cases, is impossible).
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#18Yeah Sox!! I'm taking this as scientific evidence that liking the Red Sox makes people more attractive.
Considering this is based on profiles from users at a dating site, wouldn't the inverse be more likely?
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#19On the proper use of this data:
Perhaps the easiest way to think of it is that the phrases are predictors for the race/sex, not the other way around. For example, you shouldn't expect every white male you meet to like Van Halen. However if someone says to you "I have a friend who's a big Van Halen fan", you're pretty safe in assuming that the friend is a white male.
Likewise, it might be that only 10% of blacks like soul food. But if almost no other demographics like it, it will still show up high on their list. So "is black" does not strongly imply "loves soul food", but "loves soul food" does strongly imply "is black".
In other words, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_theorem
Re: The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're talking about the top fifty such phrases. It seems unlikely that there would be a demographic group that is proportionately less likely to use any arbitrary phrase . The only possibility is for a group's phrase usage to be statistically indistinguishable from the average. Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check: read some of the phrases to someone, and ask that person which group they think the phrases cam…
I'm not saying the results were random. I'm saying they're not really allowing for a "confidence interval" in how many more times a certain group uses a phrase than average. For example if black men use "soul food" 30x greater than average that seems like a solid result. But if it's only 1.01x more than average that seems like noise.
Max Shron, OkCupid Data Scientist here.
In an older version of the post, we did have the actual numbers, but they didn't seem to add much. Black women use "soul food" 20 times (!) more frequently than the site-wide average; for black men, "soul food" is 11 times as frequent.
AFAIK, nothing we put up for this article is less than twice as frequent for that group as it is for the general (OkC) population.