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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

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.

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.