11 ms·

Slightly off-topic but this reminded me of what is perhaps their most depressing pair of graphs. Look at "A woman's age vs. the age of the men sho look best to

• manicdee 7y ago
  Given that magazines and movies are full of young women pretending to be old (skin care products especially) is this any surprise?
• lostmsu 7y ago
  Why is it depressing? Biologically this must be tuned to the best age for having kids, and men's age hardly matters.
  • toomuchtodo 7y ago
    This is depressing to people who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited. It's more of a free market than some care to admit. The gritty truth is: people are depreciating assets, and some lose their value (perceived or actual) faster than others. One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platform; I highly recommend it (this is where the above comment's [2] graphs are sourced from). You get other "interesting" observations, such that most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are [3]. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offline-Selves/dp/0385347391 https://smile.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offl... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379741 [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfortable-data-behind-online-dating/ https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfort... (In Online Dating, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist)
    • userbinator 7y ago
      who expect the dating and sexual marketplace to be some sort of meritocracy, or equality to be exhibited Why/how would people come to think that way? As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.
      • toomuchtodo 7y ago
        I will leave detailed explanations to domain experts. An example I'd hold up would be when Leonardo DiCaprio catches flak, loudly and publicly, for consistently dating women only in their early to mid 20s [1] [2] [3]. Is it biological? Yes. Is it legal? Absolutely. Do people still vocally decry it? Very much so. [1] https://www.insider.com/leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriends-reddit-chart-2019-3 https://www.insider.com/leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriends-reddit... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/azjti7/leonardo_dicaprio_refuses_to_date_a_woman_over_25/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/azjti7/leo... [3] https://youtu.be/LCNdTLHZAeo?t=308 https://youtu.be/LCNdTLHZAeo?t=308
        • friendlybus 7y ago
          When does he catch flak? Leo is one guy, you could list a whole bunch of ceos and famous people's private lives as counter-examples. Bill gates has been married to Melinda forever. That story is an advertisement for Leonardo, not a fundamental truth about human sex lives.
      • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        There is an equality narrative out there and nobody is willing to state the truth because it may paint one group as superficial and another less so.
      • peteretep 7y ago
        > As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing. Disagree. Wikipedia quote "in the old indigenous religions, women married between 12 and 15 years of age". The most generous read of this (and the one I'm inclined to agree with) is that men genuinely factor emotional maturity and morality and so on into their sexual selection and preferences, where the least generous read is that men hide their ephebophilia when answering surveys.
  • meristem 7y ago
    Quality of sperm decays with age. Just not in the same curve as egg reserves.
    • claudiawerner 7y ago
      So if it were purely biological, we'd expect to see some sort of negative gradient for men's preferred ages, though not as exaggerated as the one for women's preferred ages? I'm also unclear as to what the question was which prompted the answers from men and women, or what the motivations were. There is much more to a relationship than sex for procreation, and almost everyone seems to realize this fact. So the conclusion is that men simply find young women attractive (and the "reproductive age" evo-psych just-so story cannot justify it), or men no matter how old they are continue to want children, at the expense of a relationship with a fully developed adult.
    • lostmsu 7y ago
      Does the quality of sperm have any negative effect on the child or mother?
      • leftyted 7y ago
        Older fathers are associated with all kinds of negative childbirth outcomes. Just not as much as older mothers.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
    • taneq 7y ago
      And resources (especially of single men) increase more than linearly with age, to make up for it.
    • dreen 7y ago
      This wouldnt matter in a natural environment, but our biology hasnt caught up with us not living in such environments anymore.
  • quietbritishjim 7y ago
    Something can be completely expected and explainable while still being depressing. I don't see how that's surprising.
  • Robotbeat 7y ago
    You would think so, but this is not accurate. Graphs for proportional rate of preterm birth vs mother's age: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191002.g002&size=large https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10... And rate of infant mortality vs mother's age: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_infantmortality.png https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_i... Both have a minimum in the early 30s, a decade off from these numbers. Granted, there's likely some confounding due to poverty rates vs age of pregnancy, but the data simply does not support the conclusion that 20 is the best, healthiest age for a woman to bear a child. There's still some development and biological maturation going on into the 20s.
    • perl4ever 7y ago
      Men are biased because of the discrepancy in risk between men and women. Men prefer younger women because male reproductive capacity is not at stake if something goes wrong. I think the empirical situation you're noting should be inferrable from theoretical consideration of evolutionary psychology and knowing that peoples' assumptions tend to be based on male prejudices.
• __s 7y ago
  "look best" is open ended. Why should my "looks best" evaluation alter as I age? Just because I think a young woman looks good doesn't mean I want to marry her
• okusername 7y ago
  Do you have a link to the study? I'd love to check the study design
• stevenbedrick 7y ago
  In his excellent book, “The Truthful Art”, Alberto Cairo presents a great analysis and discussion of those graphs. The short version is that the way they are designed masks a lot of details of the analysis such that they are fundamentally misleading... https://books.google.com/books?id=8dKKCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT232&lpg=PT232&dq=alberto+cairo+%22okcupid%22+graph&source=bl&ots=8S2sOO-MNP&sig=ACfU3U2TYmwaYyovKfSLS_XWr4-pt6-h4g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiao5-30-HnAhUtIDQIHRQhB0YQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ https://books.google.com/books?id=8dKKCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT232&lpg=...
• jhanschoo 7y ago
  IMO the dataset that those OKC analyses were on are highly skewed to the kind of people who would use OKC then. I wonder of OKC users are representative of the dating population, especially since of course dating dynamics on OKC are likely very different from other ways to date.
• MarkMc 7y ago
  Somewhat similar is the effect of income on a man's popularity: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*N0OGjZ9WDff4gOrf.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*N0OGjZ9WDff4gOrf.png