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> A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators h

> A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The guy's name is Emil Kirkegaard and the paper and data is still available. I skimmed the paper and have no idea why he was labled a "white supremacist", or by whom. ("some commentators", really? Is this journalism?) [EDIT] paper: https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Kirkegaard_2016g.pdf https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Kirkegaard_2016g.pdf dataset: https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/4jj53i/here_is_a_mirror_for_the_okcupid_osf_emil/ https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/4jj53i/here_is_a_...

vijayr 9y ago
Is there any tool (chrome extension or whatever) that'll take an article and give thumbs up or down depending on crap like "some commentators", "anonymous sources", "allegedly" etc? So people can simply skip over such articles?
- aaronhoffman 9y ago
  I tried to create one once that would do this and follow the author around to other articles. Could not figure out the go to market strategy. Still have the domain betweenTheBylines .com
pdehaye2 9y ago
Hi, I am the person who is cited in the article and who helped Judith get access to her data. If you are interested in the OKCupid story, Judith also wrote about this in more details, also with my input. https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/2017/04/07/laboratoire-fake-science https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/2017/04/07/laboratoire-fake-...
- donquichotte 9y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Just a brief look on the titles of the Kirkegaard's other publications seems to confirm that he appears to have a deep interest in immigration, genetics, crime and IQ. One of his independent papers even mention cranial volume, which sounds vaguely familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Craniometry_and_physical_anthropology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Craniometry_...
- sprafa 9y ago
  hey man, do you guys have a template email I can send so I can get my own data out of Tinder?
- shady-lady 9y ago
  By any chance, is there an English version available?
notahacker 9y ago
Reading one of the only papers in his self-published "journal" that isn't concerned with showing that immigrants have lower IQs or more criminality than native white populations probably isn't the best way to establish whether he's a white supremacist or not, though it might be evidence for the claim that he's more contrarian crank than obsessive nationalist. One can of course draw rather more obvious negative inferences about the quality of his research from everything from the paper's laughable description of the sampling methodology to its entire premise that correlation between responses semi-arbitrarily assumed to represent intelligence demonstrates validity of that set of responses as a measure of cognitive ability.
- pls2halp 9y ago
  > Immigrants have lower IQs or more criminality. Assuming a reasonable portion of these are refugees(or from third world countries), wouldn’t that be a fair link to make? Malnutrition has a clearly established link to lower IQs, hence migrants having a lowe IQ(iirc, Nordic countries have the Flynn effect strongest, so this link might hold true even for immigrants from developed nations).
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    I'm loath to go down this rabbit hole, but wouldn't you also assume that migrants are the most tenacious and smartest, since they managed to survive huge changes, go somewhere new, and try to build something? It seems like migrants are self selecting for smarter people, although IQ tests are notoriously slanted by cultural expectations an societal norms and seem to be a poor method of measuring this.
    - dagenleg 9y ago
      I also don't like rabbit holes, but tenacity and smartness are really not the same thing.
      - sangnoir 9y ago
        It's a distinction without a difference in this case because both are positive attributes to have in immigrants (independently or jointly).
edem 9y ago
Is he related somehow with Soren Kirkegaard?
- l5870uoo9y 9y ago
  Don't think so, Kierkegaard is a somewhat common name in Denmark. Means graveyard or literally church yard.
nnfy 9y ago
The situation is unfortunate, and the guy doesn't seem like the brightest, but he is asking research questions that need to be asked. Unfortunately, people will take this as another example of how "racists are stupid," but they dont realize that the only people who are willing to touch what communities like HN have made taboo are those with nothing to lose, or those who have already been "outed" as the racists they'll be accused of being. Research into gender and racial differences does not need to be as sloppy as this Kierkegaard guy, and I can't deny that he unfortunately has an agenda, and that he's created a breeding ground for confirmation bias and cherry picking. Point is, though, taboo is antithetical to science. And when we dont treat it as such, and cordon off certain topics as "not socially acceptable questions," then we end up with shit like Kierkegaard.

vijayr 9y ago

Is there any tool (chrome extension or whatever) that'll take an article and give thumbs up or down depending on crap like "some commentators", "anonymous sources", "allegedly" etc? So people can simply skip over such articles?

aaronhoffman 9y ago
I tried to create one once that would do this and follow the author around to other articles. Could not figure out the go to market strategy. Still have the domain betweenTheBylines .com

pdehaye2 9y ago

Hi, I am the person who is cited in the article and who helped Judith get access to her data. If you are interested in the OKCupid story, Judith also wrote about this in more details, also with my input. https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/2017/04/07/laboratoire-fake-science https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/2017/04/07/laboratoire-fake-...

donquichotte 9y ago
Thanks for the clarification. Just a brief look on the titles of the Kirkegaard's other publications seems to confirm that he appears to have a deep interest in immigration, genetics, crime and IQ. One of his independent papers even mention cranial volume, which sounds vaguely familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Craniometry_and_physical_anthropology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism#Craniometry_...
sprafa 9y ago
hey man, do you guys have a template email I can send so I can get my own data out of Tinder?
shady-lady 9y ago
By any chance, is there an English version available?

notahacker 9y ago

Reading one of the only papers in his self-published "journal" that isn't concerned with showing that immigrants have lower IQs or more criminality than native white populations probably isn't the best way to establish whether he's a white supremacist or not, though it might be evidence for the claim that he's more contrarian crank than obsessive nationalist. One can of course draw rather more obvious negative inferences about the quality of his research from everything from the paper's laughable description of the sampling methodology to its entire premise that correlation between responses semi-arbitrarily assumed to represent intelligence demonstrates validity of that set of responses as a measure of cognitive ability.

pls2halp 9y ago
> Immigrants have lower IQs or more criminality. Assuming a reasonable portion of these are refugees(or from third world countries), wouldn’t that be a fair link to make? Malnutrition has a clearly established link to lower IQs, hence migrants having a lowe IQ(iirc, Nordic countries have the Flynn effect strongest, so this link might hold true even for immigrants from developed nations).
- pnutjam 9y ago
  I'm loath to go down this rabbit hole, but wouldn't you also assume that migrants are the most tenacious and smartest, since they managed to survive huge changes, go somewhere new, and try to build something? It seems like migrants are self selecting for smarter people, although IQ tests are notoriously slanted by cultural expectations an societal norms and seem to be a poor method of measuring this.
  - dagenleg 9y ago
    I also don't like rabbit holes, but tenacity and smartness are really not the same thing.
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      It's a distinction without a difference in this case because both are positive attributes to have in immigrants (independently or jointly).

edem 9y ago

Is he related somehow with Soren Kirkegaard?

l5870uoo9y 9y ago
Don't think so, Kierkegaard is a somewhat common name in Denmark. Means graveyard or literally church yard.

nnfy 9y ago

The situation is unfortunate, and the guy doesn't seem like the brightest, but he is asking research questions that need to be asked. Unfortunately, people will take this as another example of how "racists are stupid," but they dont realize that the only people who are willing to touch what communities like HN have made taboo are those with nothing to lose, or those who have already been "outed" as the racists they'll be accused of being. Research into gender and racial differences does not need to be as sloppy as this Kierkegaard guy, and I can't deny that he unfortunately has an agenda, and that he's created a breeding ground for confirmation bias and cherry picking. Point is, though, taboo is antithetical to science. And when we dont treat it as such, and cordon off certain topics as "not socially acceptable questions," then we end up with shit like Kierkegaard.