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The Black Damsel In Dating Distress: A Response to OkCupid's Conclusions

102 points by araneae 17y ago

pw0ncakes 17y ago
Cless Alvein said it well: http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/black-and-white-part-1-of-aleph-0/ http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/black-and-white-pa...
aristoxenus 17y ago
As fascinating as I find the work Chris is doing and writing about over at the OkCupid blog, I've been pretty disappointed by his willingness to use all that data to "objectify" in demeaning ways (calling people ranked low in his attractiveness scales "hideous", the poor-black-women thing, etc). Thanks, Coates, for the welcome critique.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  If "hideous" applies to anyone, shouldn't it apply to people who get the lowest grades on dating sites? Or should he just assume that the truly hideous won't even bother?
  - aristoxenus 17y ago
    I think it takes a certain lack of humanity to use the word "hideous" to describe anybody's born appearance.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Is that because it's not nice, or it's not accurate?
      - aristoxenus 17y ago
        Because by being so strong and unkind, it amplifies the recognition of a material or perceptual accident of nature into a needless conceptual flattening of a person's entire presence in the world. Depending on the self-esteem of the person it may be referring to, it's impolite at best, and cruel at worst. What I think Chris forgets in his writeups is that actual individuals who may fall into those regions of his chart may at some point read it. Why be so abrasive about it?
        byrneseyeview 17y ago
        Ugliness is not a nice thing to have! Like stupidity, or unfriendliness. At the extremes, words for those traits are also generic insults: words like "hideous," "retard," and "asshole" all describe people. And they're often used as more generic pejoratives. These words are all relative. If you decide that "asshole" is simply too cruel a term, people end up using the next-cruelest term as the cruelest-possible one. So maybe if someone cuts you off in traffic, you say "Jerk!" But now "jerk" can't be used to categorize someone, since it's the worst word. You'll just be forced to keep making your language more and more bland. There's no logical point at which your argument stops applying: "He's very special, and doesn't play well with others. And he's a more authentically handsome person," will eventually be wordy way to say "He's a hideous, retarded asshole." There's no loss of meaning, but there's a profusion of syllables. Let's just say what we mean, and assume that people with unfortunate traits have gotten used to hearing about them by now.
      - chrischen 17y ago
        Because it's subjective, to a large degree, and to use it is to condemn. To condemn them with any certainty is to assert your righteousness.
oliveoil 17y ago
Please start throwing rocks at me, but I can also see a much simpler explanation behind the numbers than those constructed in the post. Just don't throw rocks at OkCupid, it's their job to analyze the numbers and match all those people in the best way they can. It's a nice bonus for everyone who is still on the dating scene (or in the dating website business) that OkCupid actually publishes what they find.
- Confusion 17y ago
  What is constructed in the post is not an alternative explanation of the numbers. It is an explanation of an effect that needs to be taken into account to explain the numbers. It may even dominate the explanation, but that's not asserted in the article. You have fallen into an "either-or" trap.
jrockway 17y ago
This isn't explicit anywhere, but OkCupid is all about subgroups. For many people, there is an equal number of guys and girls in each sub-group, so message response rates are consistent and people are generally happy. It seems like, for black girls, that there is not an equal subgroup; there aren't enough guys that find them interesting for all of them. So the girls desperately respond to every message, and the guys don't seem interested -- there is a large supply of girls they like, and a small supply of guys. Furthermore, this subgroup is easy to measure, because your gender and your race are in your profile. It is easy to count the number of messages that black girls write, because the database has an "is black" field in addition to a "number of messages written" field. But... I think there are other subgroups that don't do too well on OkCupid like the, "hi u ar so hawt" group of guys. There just aren't many women on the site that like that, but there are a ton of guys like that. So OkCupid ends up being pretty bad for these guys. They send messages (if you can call them that) like crazy, but they never get any responses. This is harder to quantify, though, because there is no "sends thoughtless messages to anything that seems female" field in the database. Buy it's exactly the same effect; one group is in high supply, and the thing that group wants is in low supply. So the group in high supply gets a lot of rejected messages. It's not about race, it's about supply and demand. (And oh yeah, this is all from the perspective of a straight guy. I imagine the dynamics in the gay/lesbian communities are a little different, since in theory, everyone in the pool is equally attracted to everyone else.)
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  I'm sure you don't mean to do so, but you shouldn't compare black women to "u r so hawt" guys. Very different categories, and very different dating problems. The moron can stop being a moron and learn how to write decent messages. In addition, his disadvantage is a shortcoming that sends a strong signal about his worthiness for a relationship. The black woman's disadvantage comes from her being black, which will never change and which is a signal of anything other than her skin having melanin. It's not just OkCupid. Black women face a systematic disadvantage in the dating scene, even now and even among educated people. I'm not saying that it's so severe as to make it impossible for a black woman to find a decent partner, but the disadvantage exists and it's a lot more common for an attractive black woman to have long single spells. I know a couple of beautiful, smart, incredible black women in their mid-20s who haven't even kissed a guy, much less been in a relationship. Asian men face a disadvantage of a different character that is arguably as bad. Anyone who can't see this is either living in delusion or sheltered.
petercooper 17y ago
That's because all the black men who don't want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary. Stormfront excluded, there aren't many "WhiteSingles" websites or "EliteIvory" dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. [..] Disagree. The reason there are no popular white-focused dating sites is because they would be hounded or sued out of business! It's "racist" for white people to congregate on a race-dependent basis, but acceptable for people of other races. I guess it's our payback for our ancestors being idiots in the distant past. That said, I think racial segregation is a "problem" (though it's not always "racist", per se). The existence of dating sites exclusively for certain races is the issue here. We need to go one way or the other. We ignore race and discourage its use as a demographic tool, or we celebrate it and allow people to silo as they see fit. Our society seems to have mostly chosen to ignore race and consider it a non-issue, so "Blacksinglesconnection" or "EliteNoire" (Are you shitting me? This really exists?) should be as distasteful to our society as a hypothetical "Whitesinglesconnection" would be.
- jbooth 17y ago
  When your race makes up 13% of the larger population, the economics for a niche dating site will work out. At 75%, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    Also, I can't speak from any racial perspective than that of a white man, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to date a woman who joined a whites-only dating site, and most of the women I've dated or been interested in dating haven't been white anyway.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Why is that? Would you refuse to date a Jewish woman who had signed up on Jdate? (Assume you met her outside of Jdate.)
danieldon 17y ago
Hopefully everyone here can recognize that Ta-Nehisi Coates' post simply presents a hypothesis and contains absolutely no supporting data.
- carbocation 17y ago
  He is relying on the same data for his assertions as everyone else has been. I see his analysis of that data as no less valid than that of OKCupid, etc.
  - danieldon 17y ago
    Maybe you read a different post, but the one linked here simply argues that "any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid," then lists a bunch of sites targeting black users and concludes that the OKCupid data is not representative of the public at large, despite the complete absence of supporting data. I don't see an analysis of data, just a hypothesis.
    - ekiru 17y ago
      Actually, it said "when black people who don't want to date non-black people date online, they go to one of the black-only dating sites rather than dating sites aimed at the general population." It did still simply provide a hypothesis, but it is at least a plausible hypothesis that might explain the data. One would need further data to determine its validity, of course.
      - danieldon 17y ago
        it is at least a plausible hypothesis It might seem plausible if you share the same preconceptions as Ta-Nehisi Coates. But where's the data? Plenty of things that sound plausible to some people turn out to be unsupported by data, particularly when they are issues that people are emotionally invested in and issues that, like this one, have heavy social and political components. Racial views in the US are absolutely filled with (and arguably dominated by) gross misconceptions that seem plausible to many people despite being untrue.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
It's more parsimonious to just assume that black women have fewer options. Black men between 20 and 34 (prime mate-choosing years) have an 11% incarceration rate. The unemployment rate and median income among (unincarcerated) black men is also low. So black women are more likely to need to look for people of a different racial background. That means that if everyone has a slight bias towards their own ethnic group, it's going to hit black women the hardest. (It would be a pretty strange mutation if you didn't have that bias.) Thus, they have to try the hardest, and have the least to show for it. Or they're on Ebony Elite.
- psyklic 17y ago
  Using broad statistics to say that black women have fewer options may not be the right approach. Black women who use the Internet and OKCupid are probably far less likely to have incarcerated, unemployed men in their social circles. If you look at dating sites in general, there aren't many users who live in dangerous or poor areas.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Ignoring those statistics doesn't help, either. Maybe a lot of people working on the Netflix prize said "But maybe IMDB and Netflix target a completely different audience." But those people didn't win.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  It would be a pretty strange mutation if you didn't have that bias Since this is potentially a sensitive subject, I'll preface my question with the assertion that I'm not offended, just curious. I have no such bias; why do you consider it a "strange mutation?"
  - sokoloff 17y ago
    I would imagine that the argument of GP is roughly: Suppose in a population at a certain time, 2 simple genetics based traits suddenly become available (visible/detectable) during mate selection. Trait A has the property that whether you have or don't have a particular expresion of it, you seek mates in the same condition. Trait B has the property that you randomly select mates without regard to their trait B status matching yours. Trait A would tend to persist or even be amplified throughout generations, while trait B would be dispersed and become less obvious over generations. Given the obviousness of race during mate selection, and the fact that the human race as a whole has not homogenized in that dimension, I would say that there is some non-trivial natural preference among humans to pick "like" when seeking mates. (There are of course obvious flaws in the above thinking, the most obvious I can think of being that societal mobility has only in the last few hundred years made it reasonably practical to date outside the local area in which you were born. I do however think that there's a genetic basis for "birds of a feather" in mate selection, and that that doesn't imply the root cause is an undesirable form of racism.)
yummyfajitas 17y ago
There is another explanation of OkCupid's conclusions which is not discussed in that blog. The author of the blog even censored a comment pointing this fact out. 39% of black women are obese, compared to 23% of white women. Men prefer to date non-obese women. http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456 http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456
- natrius 17y ago
  If you take economic status into account, I'd bet that the difference is much smaller. I'd also bet that the distribution of economic status on OkCupid is more uniform among races than it is in society as a whole.
- jorgeortiz85 17y ago
  The OkCupid blog post claims they were careful to control for attractiveness: We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affec... So even though guys were rating these black women to be as "attractive" as the non-black women in the sample, the black women were getting fewer responses from guys.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I stand corrected. Apparently OkCupid does a good job with their numbers.
- _pius 17y ago
  Hard to believe that you're serious.
  - natrius 17y ago
    I don't see what's unserious about it. It's an incorrect explanation of the effect at work, but it was still a valuable comment.
orblivion 17y ago
What the hell does not finding black women attractive have to do with racism? This has nothing to do with what's "considered" beautiful, as if beauty is something to be considered logically. A lot of white people just don't find black people attractive. What, do you want white men to date black women they find unattractive out of fairness? That's just condescending, it doesn't do anybody's self esteem any good. The OK Cupid article displays righteous indignation for no good reason, and I'm disappointed that the articles critiquing it still seem to accept this basic premise.
- psyklic 17y ago
  There was a lot of debate on this surrounding the original OKCupid blog post. In summary, it is subconciously racism. I may not find people of a certain race attractive. However, let's say that I become good friends with some people of that race. Then, I will see that they are like me, and I will start to find some people of that race attractive too. (Of course there are exceptions, but this is how it generally works.) Things like this happen outside of race as well -- people who have gay friends are drastically more likely to support gay marriage. Why? Because they realize that gays are like them and that the stereotypes just aren't true.
  - orblivion 17y ago
    > I may not find people of a certain race attractive. However, let's say that I become good friends with some people of that race. Then, I will see that they are like me, and I will start to find some people of that race attractive too. Yeah, happened to me. Doesn't affect my opinion. Racism, subconscious or not, as a concept that's relevant to me anyway, implies judging people's character for reasons other than their merits. Judging attractiveness doesn't really have to do with judging character. Attractiveness is an automatic response, and a lot of it has to do with looks, which is one of the few places I would say race is quite relevant. (for an amusing example, I know an Asian girl who isn't into Asian guys) Attraction can be influenced by getting to know people, and I wouldn't discourage it, it makes for a less divided society and perhaps less disgruntled black women and all that. That's fine. But I shouldn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong, whatsoever, for choosing to stick with what my preferences are right now. It makes me mad that OK Cupid tries to make me feel guilty about it. And it scares me to think that this righteous tide is going to start making people decide to date people they don't really want to date. That sort of thing is personal and sacred, and should stay clear of any politics. EDIT: I should add this nuance. I can see the argument of wanting to encourage people to get to know each other. But supposing you do that, and you still don't find those women attractive? Then you're not "guilty" of not trying, and I think that this article makes the presumption of that guilt.
jondoh 17y ago
It's nice to see somebody making an effective argument against those high-and-mighty OkCupid data lords. I've read a number of their posts, and they are actually quite careless in making assertions as though they are experts. Anyone who works with data knows that subtle changes in how you define a metric can lead to drastically different findings. Ever heard the saying: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." In real science, you need to do everything possible to try to prove yourself wrong, and fail. They hardly seem to do anything so rigorous. They choose one metric, see what the outcome is - gasp, something sensational! Write a post about it.
- gruseom 17y ago
  They lost me when I noticed they were mucking around with chart axes to make effects look more significant than they are (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065203), surely the oldest trick in the book. Besides that, the posts can only count as pseudo-scientific in the absence of the data being available for review. But such criticisms do kind of miss the point, which is that this has been very effective marketing.
  - Confusion 17y ago
    What's wrong with 'mucking around' with chart axes? Scientists do that all the time, because effects are often hardly visible with 'normal' axes and you have something you wish to make clearly stand out. Skipping part of an axis and changing the scales is a normal, even required, thing to do.
    - mistermann 17y ago
      You should explicitly note this. I've actually really liked the posts from OK Cupid, they are very interesting, but this article really pokes a lot of holes in their theories, in that they presume they are dealing with a cross section of society due to their size, but from reading this, it seems entirely likely they are mistaken.
    - gruseom 17y ago
TheSOB88 17y ago
One of my friends, who is black, says he avoids black women due to the way they act. Perhaps this has something to do with it?
gizmomagico 17y ago
People please, stop being so goddamn politically correct and admit that most white men just don't consider black women all that appealing. I know I sure don't. Seriously, a black woman has to be Naomi Campbell to pique my interest, and even then she'd need to be.. less black. Halle Berry? -To use an annoying expression: "meh". That's just how it is. This is not racism, we're just wired this way. It's lame to wax poetic about what could theoretically be "wrong" when we all know the deal. White women are desired by men of all races, just like Asian women. Black women are mostly desired by black men.

102 points by araneae 17y ago

Cless Alvein said it well: http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/black-and-white-part-1-of-aleph-0/ http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/black-and-white-pa...

aristoxenus 17y ago

As fascinating as I find the work Chris is doing and writing about over at the OkCupid blog, I've been pretty disappointed by his willingness to use all that data to "objectify" in demeaning ways (calling people ranked low in his attractiveness scales "hideous", the poor-black-women thing, etc). Thanks, Coates, for the welcome critique.

byrneseyeview 17y ago
If "hideous" applies to anyone, shouldn't it apply to people who get the lowest grades on dating sites? Or should he just assume that the truly hideous won't even bother?
- aristoxenus 17y ago
  I think it takes a certain lack of humanity to use the word "hideous" to describe anybody's born appearance.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Is that because it's not nice, or it's not accurate?
    - aristoxenus 17y ago
      Because by being so strong and unkind, it amplifies the recognition of a material or perceptual accident of nature into a needless conceptual flattening of a person's entire presence in the world. Depending on the self-esteem of the person it may be referring to, it's impolite at best, and cruel at worst. What I think Chris forgets in his writeups is that actual individuals who may fall into those regions of his chart may at some point read it. Why be so abrasive about it?
      - byrneseyeview 17y ago
        Ugliness is not a nice thing to have! Like stupidity, or unfriendliness. At the extremes, words for those traits are also generic insults: words like "hideous," "retard," and "asshole" all describe people. And they're often used as more generic pejoratives. These words are all relative. If you decide that "asshole" is simply too cruel a term, people end up using the next-cruelest term as the cruelest-possible one. So maybe if someone cuts you off in traffic, you say "Jerk!" But now "jerk" can't be used to categorize someone, since it's the worst word. You'll just be forced to keep making your language more and more bland. There's no logical point at which your argument stops applying: "He's very special, and doesn't play well with others. And he's a more authentically handsome person," will eventually be wordy way to say "He's a hideous, retarded asshole." There's no loss of meaning, but there's a profusion of syllables. Let's just say what we mean, and assume that people with unfortunate traits have gotten used to hearing about them by now.
    - chrischen 17y ago
      Because it's subjective, to a large degree, and to use it is to condemn. To condemn them with any certainty is to assert your righteousness.

oliveoil 17y ago

Please start throwing rocks at me, but I can also see a much simpler explanation behind the numbers than those constructed in the post. Just don't throw rocks at OkCupid, it's their job to analyze the numbers and match all those people in the best way they can. It's a nice bonus for everyone who is still on the dating scene (or in the dating website business) that OkCupid actually publishes what they find.

Confusion 17y ago
What is constructed in the post is not an alternative explanation of the numbers. It is an explanation of an effect that needs to be taken into account to explain the numbers. It may even dominate the explanation, but that's not asserted in the article. You have fallen into an "either-or" trap.

jrockway 17y ago

This isn't explicit anywhere, but OkCupid is all about subgroups. For many people, there is an equal number of guys and girls in each sub-group, so message response rates are consistent and people are generally happy. It seems like, for black girls, that there is not an equal subgroup; there aren't enough guys that find them interesting for all of them. So the girls desperately respond to every message, and the guys don't seem interested -- there is a large supply of girls they like, and a small supply of guys. Furthermore, this subgroup is easy to measure, because your gender and your race are in your profile. It is easy to count the number of messages that black girls write, because the database has an "is black" field in addition to a "number of messages written" field. But... I think there are other subgroups that don't do too well on OkCupid like the, "hi u ar so hawt" group of guys. There just aren't many women on the site that like that, but there are a ton of guys like that. So OkCupid ends up being pretty bad for these guys. They send messages (if you can call them that) like crazy, but they never get any responses. This is harder to quantify, though, because there is no "sends thoughtless messages to anything that seems female" field in the database. Buy it's exactly the same effect; one group is in high supply, and the thing that group wants is in low supply. So the group in high supply gets a lot of rejected messages. It's not about race, it's about supply and demand. (And oh yeah, this is all from the perspective of a straight guy. I imagine the dynamics in the gay/lesbian communities are a little different, since in theory, everyone in the pool is equally attracted to everyone else.)

pw0ncakes 17y ago
I'm sure you don't mean to do so, but you shouldn't compare black women to "u r so hawt" guys. Very different categories, and very different dating problems. The moron can stop being a moron and learn how to write decent messages. In addition, his disadvantage is a shortcoming that sends a strong signal about his worthiness for a relationship. The black woman's disadvantage comes from her being black, which will never change and which is a signal of anything other than her skin having melanin. It's not just OkCupid. Black women face a systematic disadvantage in the dating scene, even now and even among educated people. I'm not saying that it's so severe as to make it impossible for a black woman to find a decent partner, but the disadvantage exists and it's a lot more common for an attractive black woman to have long single spells. I know a couple of beautiful, smart, incredible black women in their mid-20s who haven't even kissed a guy, much less been in a relationship. Asian men face a disadvantage of a different character that is arguably as bad. Anyone who can't see this is either living in delusion or sheltered.

petercooper 17y ago

That's because all the black men who don't want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary. Stormfront excluded, there aren't many "WhiteSingles" websites or "EliteIvory" dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. [..] Disagree. The reason there are no popular white-focused dating sites is because they would be hounded or sued out of business! It's "racist" for white people to congregate on a race-dependent basis, but acceptable for people of other races. I guess it's our payback for our ancestors being idiots in the distant past. That said, I think racial segregation is a "problem" (though it's not always "racist", per se). The existence of dating sites exclusively for certain races is the issue here. We need to go one way or the other. We ignore race and discourage its use as a demographic tool, or we celebrate it and allow people to silo as they see fit. Our society seems to have mostly chosen to ignore race and consider it a non-issue, so "Blacksinglesconnection" or "EliteNoire" (Are you shitting me? This really exists?) should be as distasteful to our society as a hypothetical "Whitesinglesconnection" would be.

jbooth 17y ago
When your race makes up 13% of the larger population, the economics for a niche dating site will work out. At 75%, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  Also, I can't speak from any racial perspective than that of a white man, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to date a woman who joined a whites-only dating site, and most of the women I've dated or been interested in dating haven't been white anyway.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Why is that? Would you refuse to date a Jewish woman who had signed up on Jdate? (Assume you met her outside of Jdate.)

danieldon 17y ago

Hopefully everyone here can recognize that Ta-Nehisi Coates' post simply presents a hypothesis and contains absolutely no supporting data.

carbocation 17y ago
He is relying on the same data for his assertions as everyone else has been. I see his analysis of that data as no less valid than that of OKCupid, etc.
- danieldon 17y ago
  Maybe you read a different post, but the one linked here simply argues that "any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid," then lists a bunch of sites targeting black users and concludes that the OKCupid data is not representative of the public at large, despite the complete absence of supporting data. I don't see an analysis of data, just a hypothesis.
  - ekiru 17y ago
    Actually, it said "when black people who don't want to date non-black people date online, they go to one of the black-only dating sites rather than dating sites aimed at the general population." It did still simply provide a hypothesis, but it is at least a plausible hypothesis that might explain the data. One would need further data to determine its validity, of course.
    - danieldon 17y ago
      it is at least a plausible hypothesis It might seem plausible if you share the same preconceptions as Ta-Nehisi Coates. But where's the data? Plenty of things that sound plausible to some people turn out to be unsupported by data, particularly when they are issues that people are emotionally invested in and issues that, like this one, have heavy social and political components. Racial views in the US are absolutely filled with (and arguably dominated by) gross misconceptions that seem plausible to many people despite being untrue.

byrneseyeview 17y ago

It's more parsimonious to just assume that black women have fewer options. Black men between 20 and 34 (prime mate-choosing years) have an 11% incarceration rate. The unemployment rate and median income among (unincarcerated) black men is also low. So black women are more likely to need to look for people of a different racial background. That means that if everyone has a slight bias towards their own ethnic group, it's going to hit black women the hardest. (It would be a pretty strange mutation if you didn't have that bias.) Thus, they have to try the hardest, and have the least to show for it. Or they're on Ebony Elite.

psyklic 17y ago
Using broad statistics to say that black women have fewer options may not be the right approach. Black women who use the Internet and OKCupid are probably far less likely to have incarcerated, unemployed men in their social circles. If you look at dating sites in general, there aren't many users who live in dangerous or poor areas.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  Ignoring those statistics doesn't help, either. Maybe a lot of people working on the Netflix prize said "But maybe IMDB and Netflix target a completely different audience." But those people didn't win.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
It would be a pretty strange mutation if you didn't have that bias Since this is potentially a sensitive subject, I'll preface my question with the assertion that I'm not offended, just curious. I have no such bias; why do you consider it a "strange mutation?"
- sokoloff 17y ago
  I would imagine that the argument of GP is roughly: Suppose in a population at a certain time, 2 simple genetics based traits suddenly become available (visible/detectable) during mate selection. Trait A has the property that whether you have or don't have a particular expresion of it, you seek mates in the same condition. Trait B has the property that you randomly select mates without regard to their trait B status matching yours. Trait A would tend to persist or even be amplified throughout generations, while trait B would be dispersed and become less obvious over generations. Given the obviousness of race during mate selection, and the fact that the human race as a whole has not homogenized in that dimension, I would say that there is some non-trivial natural preference among humans to pick "like" when seeking mates. (There are of course obvious flaws in the above thinking, the most obvious I can think of being that societal mobility has only in the last few hundred years made it reasonably practical to date outside the local area in which you were born. I do however think that there's a genetic basis for "birds of a feather" in mate selection, and that that doesn't imply the root cause is an undesirable form of racism.)

yummyfajitas 17y ago

There is another explanation of OkCupid's conclusions which is not discussed in that blog. The author of the blog even censored a comment pointing this fact out. 39% of black women are obese, compared to 23% of white women. Men prefer to date non-obese women. http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456 http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=6456

natrius 17y ago
If you take economic status into account, I'd bet that the difference is much smaller. I'd also bet that the distribution of economic status on OkCupid is more uniform among races than it is in society as a whole.
jorgeortiz85 17y ago
The OkCupid blog post claims they were careful to control for attractiveness: We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affec... So even though guys were rating these black women to be as "attractive" as the non-black women in the sample, the black women were getting fewer responses from guys.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I stand corrected. Apparently OkCupid does a good job with their numbers.
_pius 17y ago
Hard to believe that you're serious.
- natrius 17y ago
  I don't see what's unserious about it. It's an incorrect explanation of the effect at work, but it was still a valuable comment.

orblivion 17y ago

What the hell does not finding black women attractive have to do with racism? This has nothing to do with what's "considered" beautiful, as if beauty is something to be considered logically. A lot of white people just don't find black people attractive. What, do you want white men to date black women they find unattractive out of fairness? That's just condescending, it doesn't do anybody's self esteem any good. The OK Cupid article displays righteous indignation for no good reason, and I'm disappointed that the articles critiquing it still seem to accept this basic premise.

psyklic 17y ago
There was a lot of debate on this surrounding the original OKCupid blog post. In summary, it is subconciously racism. I may not find people of a certain race attractive. However, let's say that I become good friends with some people of that race. Then, I will see that they are like me, and I will start to find some people of that race attractive too. (Of course there are exceptions, but this is how it generally works.) Things like this happen outside of race as well -- people who have gay friends are drastically more likely to support gay marriage. Why? Because they realize that gays are like them and that the stereotypes just aren't true.
- orblivion 17y ago
  > I may not find people of a certain race attractive. However, let's say that I become good friends with some people of that race. Then, I will see that they are like me, and I will start to find some people of that race attractive too. Yeah, happened to me. Doesn't affect my opinion. Racism, subconscious or not, as a concept that's relevant to me anyway, implies judging people's character for reasons other than their merits. Judging attractiveness doesn't really have to do with judging character. Attractiveness is an automatic response, and a lot of it has to do with looks, which is one of the few places I would say race is quite relevant. (for an amusing example, I know an Asian girl who isn't into Asian guys) Attraction can be influenced by getting to know people, and I wouldn't discourage it, it makes for a less divided society and perhaps less disgruntled black women and all that. That's fine. But I shouldn't feel like I'm doing anything wrong, whatsoever, for choosing to stick with what my preferences are right now. It makes me mad that OK Cupid tries to make me feel guilty about it. And it scares me to think that this righteous tide is going to start making people decide to date people they don't really want to date. That sort of thing is personal and sacred, and should stay clear of any politics. EDIT: I should add this nuance. I can see the argument of wanting to encourage people to get to know each other. But supposing you do that, and you still don't find those women attractive? Then you're not "guilty" of not trying, and I think that this article makes the presumption of that guilt.

jondoh 17y ago

It's nice to see somebody making an effective argument against those high-and-mighty OkCupid data lords. I've read a number of their posts, and they are actually quite careless in making assertions as though they are experts. Anyone who works with data knows that subtle changes in how you define a metric can lead to drastically different findings. Ever heard the saying: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." In real science, you need to do everything possible to try to prove yourself wrong, and fail. They hardly seem to do anything so rigorous. They choose one metric, see what the outcome is - gasp, something sensational! Write a post about it.

gruseom 17y ago
They lost me when I noticed they were mucking around with chart axes to make effects look more significant than they are (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065203), surely the oldest trick in the book. Besides that, the posts can only count as pseudo-scientific in the absence of the data being available for review. But such criticisms do kind of miss the point, which is that this has been very effective marketing.
- Confusion 17y ago
  What's wrong with 'mucking around' with chart axes? Scientists do that all the time, because effects are often hardly visible with 'normal' axes and you have something you wish to make clearly stand out. Skipping part of an axis and changing the scales is a normal, even required, thing to do.
  - mistermann 17y ago
    You should explicitly note this. I've actually really liked the posts from OK Cupid, they are very interesting, but this article really pokes a lot of holes in their theories, in that they presume they are dealing with a cross section of society due to their size, but from reading this, it seems entirely likely they are mistaken.
  - gruseom 17y ago

TheSOB88 17y ago

One of my friends, who is black, says he avoids black women due to the way they act. Perhaps this has something to do with it?

gizmomagico 17y ago

People please, stop being so goddamn politically correct and admit that most white men just don't consider black women all that appealing. I know I sure don't. Seriously, a black woman has to be Naomi Campbell to pique my interest, and even then she'd need to be.. less black. Halle Berry? -To use an annoying expression: "meh". That's just how it is. This is not racism, we're just wired this way. It's lame to wax poetic about what could theoretically be "wrong" when we all know the deal. White women are desired by men of all races, just like Asian women. Black women are mostly desired by black men.