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> There was a very detailed article that used data collected in Tinder. Survery* OkCupid* and 2011*. > It showed something like 80% of women fought for 20% of

> There was a very detailed article that used data collected in Tinder. Survery* OkCupid* and 2011*. > It showed something like 80% of women fought for 20% of top men and other way around. It showed that women rated 80% of men below average. Which is pretty understandable, in okcupid and in 2011. That is an insane sample bias, when women look at men in ACTUAL research they tend to rate in a bell curve, and are actually kinder to age than men that tend to rate older women super low. > This basically meant that large number of men are being left out cold in dating scene. The data from the same survey showed a lot of those women ended up in relationships outside that 20%. Women rate look as the 4th most important thing in a man. It seems like you probably need to check first hand sources instead of parroting whatever youtuber you heard this from cause you extrapolated conclusions from data you never checked and got all the conclusions wrong.

KronisLV 4y ago
> That is an insane sample bias, when women look at men in ACTUAL research they tend to rate in a bell curve, and are actually kinder to age than men that tend to rate older women super low. I think that the survey was pretty controversial and has since been quoted to death in all sorts of contexts. It would be nice to see this actual research which paints a different picture, so that folks here might actually discuss the findings. I might have nothing to offer there, but people who work with statistics and whatnot would probably offer a good point or two. > Women rate look as the 4th most important thing in a man. I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers. For example, if asked about what I'd prefer in a country, I might claim that I value human rights and liberty really highly, but then turn around and vote for politicians that would promise to lower the taxes instead. I would actually be picking a different set of characteristics/priorities than I had indicated previously - regardless of whether I actually believed my own answers and didn't know, or simply wanted to appear virtuous. (just a made up example, I'm not sure how one would even measure what people actually value outside of asking them, maybe try to classify people based on various indicators)
- daniel_iversen 4y ago
  Isn’t that the whole “system 1” and “system 2” thinking? One being your logical brain and one being your practical brain. Hence why some supermarkets are testing shelving layouts in VR because if you survey people they’ll tell you one thing but in practice they’d actually do something different :)
- jseban 4y ago
  > I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers. Yeah and it's very typical with this question especially. You can't ask a woman what she values in a partner, because she will say whatever makes her look like a good person. That's why so many girls list intelligence as an important thing in a man, and still the most intelligent guys get the least girls. You need to look at how women actually choose their partners, not ask them how they would hypothetically choose. Look at the men that always have hot girlfriends and what they have in common, that's how you can make an empirical conclusion.
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    This is actually how you feed your confirmation bias, please be careful as a lot of the language you are using makes me worry about you. There are many explanations for the phenomenon of dating, but your comment reads like a textbook example of someone looking to confirm beliefs. Why couldn’t attractiveness simply be a cross product of money and physical activity level? In that case, hot people end up together due to economics and interests.
bdsa 4y ago
No, I think they're talking about this study: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Or "study" depending on your standards)
scarmig 4y ago
The OkC study (and the Tinder study mentioned in a sibling comment) are pretty much worthless either way, and people should stop citing them. The only really meaningful way to look at these things are measures of the actual relevant outcomes (likes, matches, conversations, dates), which is hard without access to actual dating app data. An engineer at Hinge did exactly this for a post on the blog, calculating a Gini coefficient for (IIRC) match rates: https://hinge.co/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer/ https://hinge.co/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-m... Naturally, it was taken down, but it did show that heterosexual matches were distributed in a much more lopsided way among men than among women. Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric.
- cstrahan 4y ago
  > Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric. Not that I agree with the quote, but... why would any of these assertions be true? I suppose that depends on what "get" means in the quote. I think it's immediately evident that, say, 20% of men aren't married to 80% of women, for example -- so if that's what "get" means, then that doesn't add up. But I see nothing inherently wrong with the notion that 20% of men could be taking 80% of women off the market. Not because these men are dating approximately 4 women each at the same time, but because they could be rapidly playing the field. If these men are engaging in short flings with women, it would seem reasonable that the women might not want to settle on anything less than the 80 percentile of men, knowing that they can briefly hold out until another top 20%er comes along. That effectively takes them off the dating market for the other men. Again, the stats could disagree with such a hypothesis, but I don't think there's any inherent logical contradiction in the hypothesis itself. If we're talking about hooking up with people met at the bar, I can maybe see the quote making sense. But if we're talking about meaningful relationships, I actually find it hard to believe that a man is having a hard time finding a partner because "20% of men are stealing all of my opportunities." Though that could be easy for me to say if I'm just that damned attractive, but I don't suspect that's the case :).
at_a_remove 4y ago
I used to work at a dating service pre-Web. I was in the thick of the data, so to speak, and noticed a lot of trends which haven't really changed. 1) Men ask women out a lot; women only rarely ask men, and when they do, they tend to all be the same guys. They really converged. 2) Women rated the importance of their preferences higher than men do, at almost every aspect. 3) When someone says, "Oh, women would never actually judge men based on ..." assume the opposite. Income and height were always in the top five. 4) Despite pushing people to match on commonalities of interest and psych stuff, it was the "chemistry" factor that dictated who got asked out, who accepted, and so on. 5) It was in no way egalitarian and always tended toward "grim and depressing truth about people." All of this has only been accelerated in online dating. Tempted to see if those old floppies survived and if I could retrieve anything in dBase III or whatever it was. I'd still have to find a document stating what those referred to. Sample size wasn't too bad, a few thousand ... The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss.
- scarmig 4y ago
  > The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss. That is probably the most frustrating thing about all this discourse. When people see the structure of dating (online and otherwise) presented, they ascribe negative traits to the populations whose behavior is described and assume that everyone else would make the same judgment. Because of that, they assume negative motives and take it on themselves to debunk or censor that data.

KronisLV 4y ago

> That is an insane sample bias, when women look at men in ACTUAL research they tend to rate in a bell curve, and are actually kinder to age than men that tend to rate older women super low. I think that the survey was pretty controversial and has since been quoted to death in all sorts of contexts. It would be nice to see this actual research which paints a different picture, so that folks here might actually discuss the findings. I might have nothing to offer there, but people who work with statistics and whatnot would probably offer a good point or two. > Women rate look as the 4th most important thing in a man. I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers. For example, if asked about what I'd prefer in a country, I might claim that I value human rights and liberty really highly, but then turn around and vote for politicians that would promise to lower the taxes instead. I would actually be picking a different set of characteristics/priorities than I had indicated previously - regardless of whether I actually believed my own answers and didn't know, or simply wanted to appear virtuous. (just a made up example, I'm not sure how one would even measure what people actually value outside of asking them, maybe try to classify people based on various indicators)

daniel_iversen 4y ago
Isn’t that the whole “system 1” and “system 2” thinking? One being your logical brain and one being your practical brain. Hence why some supermarkets are testing shelving layouts in VR because if you survey people they’ll tell you one thing but in practice they’d actually do something different :)
jseban 4y ago
> I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers. Yeah and it's very typical with this question especially. You can't ask a woman what she values in a partner, because she will say whatever makes her look like a good person. That's why so many girls list intelligence as an important thing in a man, and still the most intelligent guys get the least girls. You need to look at how women actually choose their partners, not ask them how they would hypothetically choose. Look at the men that always have hot girlfriends and what they have in common, that's how you can make an empirical conclusion.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  This is actually how you feed your confirmation bias, please be careful as a lot of the language you are using makes me worry about you. There are many explanations for the phenomenon of dating, but your comment reads like a textbook example of someone looking to confirm beliefs. Why couldn’t attractiveness simply be a cross product of money and physical activity level? In that case, hot people end up together due to economics and interests.

bdsa 4y ago

No, I think they're talking about this study: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Or "study" depending on your standards)

scarmig 4y ago

The OkC study (and the Tinder study mentioned in a sibling comment) are pretty much worthless either way, and people should stop citing them. The only really meaningful way to look at these things are measures of the actual relevant outcomes (likes, matches, conversations, dates), which is hard without access to actual dating app data. An engineer at Hinge did exactly this for a post on the blog, calculating a Gini coefficient for (IIRC) match rates: https://hinge.co/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer/ https://hinge.co/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-m... Naturally, it was taken down, but it did show that heterosexual matches were distributed in a much more lopsided way among men than among women. Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric.

cstrahan 4y ago
> Though that can't be taken as a justification of "20% of the men get 80% of the women", which is either (obviously) false as stated, also true of the distribution of X among women, or incoherent as a meaningful metric. Not that I agree with the quote, but... why would any of these assertions be true? I suppose that depends on what "get" means in the quote. I think it's immediately evident that, say, 20% of men aren't married to 80% of women, for example -- so if that's what "get" means, then that doesn't add up. But I see nothing inherently wrong with the notion that 20% of men could be taking 80% of women off the market. Not because these men are dating approximately 4 women each at the same time, but because they could be rapidly playing the field. If these men are engaging in short flings with women, it would seem reasonable that the women might not want to settle on anything less than the 80 percentile of men, knowing that they can briefly hold out until another top 20%er comes along. That effectively takes them off the dating market for the other men. Again, the stats could disagree with such a hypothesis, but I don't think there's any inherent logical contradiction in the hypothesis itself. If we're talking about hooking up with people met at the bar, I can maybe see the quote making sense. But if we're talking about meaningful relationships, I actually find it hard to believe that a man is having a hard time finding a partner because "20% of men are stealing all of my opportunities." Though that could be easy for me to say if I'm just that damned attractive, but I don't suspect that's the case :).

at_a_remove 4y ago

I used to work at a dating service pre-Web. I was in the thick of the data, so to speak, and noticed a lot of trends which haven't really changed. 1) Men ask women out a lot; women only rarely ask men, and when they do, they tend to all be the same guys. They really converged. 2) Women rated the importance of their preferences higher than men do, at almost every aspect. 3) When someone says, "Oh, women would never actually judge men based on ..." assume the opposite. Income and height were always in the top five. 4) Despite pushing people to match on commonalities of interest and psych stuff, it was the "chemistry" factor that dictated who got asked out, who accepted, and so on. 5) It was in no way egalitarian and always tended toward "grim and depressing truth about people." All of this has only been accelerated in online dating. Tempted to see if those old floppies survived and if I could retrieve anything in dBase III or whatever it was. I'd still have to find a document stating what those referred to. Sample size wasn't too bad, a few thousand ... The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss.

scarmig 4y ago
> The thing is, I could do all that work, and the people who don't want to believe that people are like that? wouldn't believe it anyway. They'd just look for confounding variables and reasons to dismiss. That is probably the most frustrating thing about all this discourse. When people see the structure of dating (online and otherwise) presented, they ascribe negative traits to the populations whose behavior is described and assume that everyone else would make the same judgment. Because of that, they assume negative motives and take it on themselves to debunk or censor that data.