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Heh, surprised that pointing out a dumb comment is gathering such a firestorm. Nothing against yummyfajitas but yes, this was a dumb comment: linking to some d

by _pius 17y ago

Heh, surprised that pointing out a dumb comment is gathering such a firestorm. Nothing against yummyfajitas but yes, this was a dumb comment: linking to some data doesn't change that one way or another. The great thing about hacker news is that people aren't worried about voicing ideas backed up with data - even if in wider society you'd probably get denounced for it. True. The problem is that if you're going to make an inflammatory argument, people are going to expect it to be well thought out. This particular one wasn't. Backing up one of your premises with data doesn't make the conclusions any more valid. To me, the comment was so obviously flawed and inflammatory at the same time that it looked like nothing more than a troll, implying that OKCupid is censoring the real reason for the apparent bias against black women on the site: they're just fat. Think about the argument for a second: it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense. If OKCupid had NOT filtered for that data would you consider the comment equally valueless? Clearly not equally valueless, but still pretty dumb, given the reason above, and equally inflammatory. This is a triumph of the scientific process IMO :) I agree.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
I freely admit, I should have gone back and reread OKCupid's original post. I didn't, and that's my mistake. But I'm really curious about something. You say that if OKCupid had not filtered their data for attractiveness, my comment would still be "pretty dumb". Could you explain why?
- _pius 17y ago
  You say that if OKCupid had not filtered their data for attractiveness, my comment would still be "pretty dumb". Could you explain why? Sure, here's the one reason I referred to: Think about the argument for a second: it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense. For instance, your explanation that black women are more obese than white women doesn't explain why black women do worse than latinas.
ErrantX 17y ago
> The problem is that if you're going to make an inflammatory argument It's not really inflammatory. The statistics say black women are generally more obese. It's just another suggestion for the difference in responses (which has been established as being wrong for the statistics OKCupid are using - it could still be generally accurate..) > implying that OKCupid is censoring the real reason for the apparent bias against black women on the site: they're just fat. Nah.. I can't see any suggestion that OKCupid was censoring information? I think he means the blog post this links too. Also: there is not implication that "they're just fat". Apparently statistically Black women are more obese than White women (I assume those are US stats); it's a reasonable suggestion that the OKCupid community mirrors wider society. > it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense. Well we are mostly comparing this to the response rates of white women (at least that's how I am reading all of this) so I see no problem in the conclusion. White women have the highest response rate so it makes logical sense to use them as the comparison point. If we want to consider other races, such as Hispanic, then, yes, we would need the data for them too (who knows; it could match or it could mismatch - therein is the beauty of statistics).

by _pius 17y ago

yummyfajitas 17y ago

I freely admit, I should have gone back and reread OKCupid's original post. I didn't, and that's my mistake. But I'm really curious about something. You say that if OKCupid had not filtered their data for attractiveness, my comment would still be "pretty dumb". Could you explain why?

_pius 17y ago
You say that if OKCupid had not filtered their data for attractiveness, my comment would still be "pretty dumb". Could you explain why? Sure, here's the one reason I referred to: Think about the argument for a second: it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense. For instance, your explanation that black women are more obese than white women doesn't explain why black women do worse than latinas.

ErrantX 17y ago

> The problem is that if you're going to make an inflammatory argument It's not really inflammatory. The statistics say black women are generally more obese. It's just another suggestion for the difference in responses (which has been established as being wrong for the statistics OKCupid are using - it could still be generally accurate..) > implying that OKCupid is censoring the real reason for the apparent bias against black women on the site: they're just fat. Nah.. I can't see any suggestion that OKCupid was censoring information? I think he means the blog post this links too. Also: there is not implication that "they're just fat". Apparently statistically Black women are more obese than White women (I assume those are US stats); it's a reasonable suggestion that the OKCupid community mirrors wider society. > it claimed that a pairwise comparison between black women and white women could explain black women's poor response rate as compared to all races. That doesn't make any sense. Well we are mostly comparing this to the response rates of white women (at least that's how I am reading all of this) so I see no problem in the conclusion. White women have the highest response rate so it makes logical sense to use them as the comparison point. If we want to consider other races, such as Hispanic, then, yes, we would need the data for them too (who knows; it could match or it could mismatch - therein is the beauty of statistics).