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Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sam

Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies. Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey. They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or some other nonsense.

afpx 4y ago
Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment? I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  > Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment? I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science". If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem. same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.
  - kikokikokiko 4y ago
    "presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science"" Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.
    - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
      > Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results. Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published. Which was fun, but its not good science, its hardly science at all. There is a reason why blog posts and published results have different standards (and also why most sociological/psychological results are impossible to reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis of any science)
      - kikokikokiko 4y ago
        So, after sampling the interactions of 1.51 million people, and analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid? Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.
        Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        > Analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid? It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median. The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis. > Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive. If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis. > This delusion of denying facts I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.
newZWhoDis 4y ago
Why was OP flagged and mass reported? You had a sensible reply but now most can’t even see the discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on track
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  I would assume because it skirts quite close to some of the comment guideline rules for example: >Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes. I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at bringing in political correctness probably raised some flags. I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly discussed you just wanna report and move on with your day.
- freedomben 4y ago
  It's back now, so I think it shows the system working. Controversial posts like this one used to just die and disappear forever but now with "vouch" option some things deserving come back to life. Not perfect obviously, but on the right track IMHO.
  - newZWhoDis 4y ago
    When do you get vouch capability?
    - CapricornNoble 4y ago
      I think it's over 500 karma?
kikokikokiko 4y ago
Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that confirmed the thesis of black women being the least attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the day.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  Source or it wont be discussed. But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption. A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article. To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company. Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.
- narrator 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- compiler-guy 4y ago
  Strangely, There doesn't have to be just one with a lower score than the others. One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.
busterarm 4y ago
"incel" and "black pill" terminology didn't even exist in 2010.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  incel was coined in 1997. also the ideology was common well before it hit the mainstream, it just didnt have an official name. any guy in the forums in the early 2k can tell you this people were already there.
  - pksebben 4y ago
    can confirm. 4chan was full of the stuff way before it became remotely politicized.
- noasaservice 4y ago
  It wasn't by those names, sure. But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone And the citation date: 2010. Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy-incel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that: "On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent him from pressuring her to have sex."
  - claudiawerner 4y ago
    The 'Forever alone' meme was originally a jab at oneself for having few partners; it didn't imply anything about one's mindset or opinion on others, nor an opinion on society as a whole. It was also used mostly in an ironic sense. I'm saying that the meme has nothing to do with the 'incel' movement, unless you want to throw in every online expression of loneliness as incel stuff. Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.
houstonn 4y ago
Hypergamy is nonsense? I think you're confusing an opinion or desired reality with data and observed reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  Why link a page and not read it? In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/ So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes. Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.
  - throwaway289943 4y ago
  - kikokikokiko 4y ago
    Yeah, everybody knows that what guarantees a successful marriage is a man that earns half of his wife. Just close your eyes and think of allllll the couples, from friends to family, where this dynamic worked so amazingly well. Males find females, that are healthy and young, attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to have healthy offspring. Females find males, that are capable of getting enough resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of younger females and older males. It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum, and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet. It is what it is.
mpweiher 4y ago
They're not surveys, and that's exactly the point. Surveys reveal how people claim to behave, which may nor not be how they actually think they behave, which may or may not be how they actually behave. If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid. Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.
- pksebben 4y ago
  whether it's a survey or not is a straw man, and you know it. it's bad faith to argue along these lines given that the primary criticism leveled was regarding sampling. if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
  - npc12345 4y ago
  - mpweiher 4y ago
    > whether it's a survey or not is a straw man No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once. > on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample? On what grounds do you believe okcupid to not be a sufficiently representative sample? UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Do we have reasons to think the non representativeness would have been relevant to these conclusions?
- matsemann 4y ago
  What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups? What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform? There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.
yibg 4y ago
I don't think anyone ever claimed this represented the overall population. It's clearly the data set for OkCupid users, which may be a decent proxy for online dating users. Unless there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the data presented, I don't see the problem. Black women on OkCupid are not as desirable as white women. We may not like the results, but doesn't make it invalid. To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant data for that purpose.
- watwut 4y ago
  I have seen people making that claim repeatedly on HN.
lmm 4y ago
If the problem was that the results were inaccurate, there would be no need to suppress what the post originally said. Incomplete data is a fixable problem. No, the blog was a gaffe in the Kinsley sense: they accidentally said the truth.

afpx 4y ago

Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment? I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
> Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment? I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science". If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem. same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.
- kikokikokiko 4y ago
  "presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science"" Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    > Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results. Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything with p<00.5 that seemed fun was published. Which was fun, but its not good science, its hardly science at all. There is a reason why blog posts and published results have different standards (and also why most sociological/psychological results are impossible to reproduce having one of the largest reproduction crisis of any science)
    - kikokikokiko 4y ago
      So, after sampling the interactions of 1.51 million people, and analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid? Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.
      - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        > Analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid? It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median. The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis. > Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive. If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis. > This delusion of denying facts I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.

newZWhoDis 4y ago

Why was OP flagged and mass reported? You had a sensible reply but now most can’t even see the discussion. Dang really needs to get this place back on track

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
I would assume because it skirts quite close to some of the comment guideline rules for example: >Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes. I assume the use of orwellian, and the attempt at bringing in political correctness probably raised some flags. I had a sensible reply but tbh I have discussed those blog posts multiple times in this site, so it gets to a point where 10 years in they are still being wrongly discussed you just wanna report and move on with your day.
freedomben 4y ago
It's back now, so I think it shows the system working. Controversial posts like this one used to just die and disappear forever but now with "vouch" option some things deserving come back to life. Not perfect obviously, but on the right track IMHO.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  When do you get vouch capability?
  - CapricornNoble 4y ago
    I think it's over 500 karma?

kikokikokiko 4y ago

Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that confirmed the thesis of black women being the least attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the day.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
Source or it wont be discussed. But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption. A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article. To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.
- lmm 4y ago
  > To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company. Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.
narrator 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
compiler-guy 4y ago
Strangely, There doesn't have to be just one with a lower score than the others. One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.

busterarm 4y ago

"incel" and "black pill" terminology didn't even exist in 2010.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
incel was coined in 1997. also the ideology was common well before it hit the mainstream, it just didnt have an official name. any guy in the forums in the early 2k can tell you this people were already there.
- pksebben 4y ago
  can confirm. 4chan was full of the stuff way before it became remotely politicized.
noasaservice 4y ago
It wasn't by those names, sure. But the "Forever alone" meme definitely was. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/forever-alone And the citation date: 2010. Or better yet, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy-incel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/involuntary-celibacy... cites that: "On August 12th, 2005, the American television network G4TV released a satirical commercial for the online role-playing game World of Warcraft in which a woman introduces the game to her boyfriend in order to prevent him from pressuring her to have sex."
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  The 'Forever alone' meme was originally a jab at oneself for having few partners; it didn't imply anything about one's mindset or opinion on others, nor an opinion on society as a whole. It was also used mostly in an ironic sense. I'm saying that the meme has nothing to do with the 'incel' movement, unless you want to throw in every online expression of loneliness as incel stuff. Some namesakes remain, for example Reddit's r/ForeverAloneDating where people who haven't had much experience (if any) can make posts to solicit potential e-dates. Although the balance is skewed toward men, there are a good number of women posting there too, and it has nothing to do with incel/blackpill crap.

houstonn 4y ago

Hypergamy is nonsense? I think you're confusing an opinion or desired reality with data and observed reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
Why link a page and not read it? In the "Mating preferences" blurb they discuss hypergamy as being reduced as gender equality reduces and even worse links to a study called "The end of hypergamy" where they discuss men stop dating down once women achieve educational parity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421994/ So yeah, if you come from a poor, unequal country women wanna marry and old rich university educated man. If you don't, they dont. So hypergamy is not natural or unavoidable its a sad reality of some societes. Most people on dating apps swipe right on people with higher rating than them, the talking point about women being hypergamous and only liking the top profiles is not reproducible outside of dating apps, because it isn't real. Its a reflection of their userbase. If there are 1000 men sending 100 messages a day to 10 women, they all get rated highly, so they mostly see highly rated men profiles. And having attention from mediocre candidates outside of the app, they mostly interact with the most attractive counterparts online. This doubly skews the candidate pool women would interact with online in 2010, thus the findings are not proof of hypergamy, but okcupid being a sampled and incomplete group of people.
- throwaway289943 4y ago
- kikokikokiko 4y ago
  Yeah, everybody knows that what guarantees a successful marriage is a man that earns half of his wife. Just close your eyes and think of allllll the couples, from friends to family, where this dynamic worked so amazingly well. Males find females, that are healthy and young, attractive - since they are the most likely candidates to have healthy offspring. Females find males, that are capable of getting enough resources to sustain the offspring, attractive. And in the case of males, there is no age barrier per se that impedes reproduction, so it's expected to see couples of younger females and older males. It's true for humans, it's true for chimps, it's true for dogs. Reality does not change just because you want it to. And it doesn't matter if we're talking about India in the 19th century or California in 2022. Women, ON AVERAGE, will find a rich guy more attractive than a bum, and men, ON AVERAGE, would find a 21 year old waitress hotter than a 55 year old Hollywood starlet. It is what it is.

mpweiher 4y ago

They're not surveys, and that's exactly the point. Surveys reveal how people claim to behave, which may nor not be how they actually think they behave, which may or may not be how they actually behave. If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid. Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.

pksebben 4y ago
whether it's a survey or not is a straw man, and you know it. it's bad faith to argue along these lines given that the primary criticism leveled was regarding sampling. if you want to back up your point, speak to that. how does this show anything about the ~99% of people who have never used okcupid? on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample?
- npc12345 4y ago
- mpweiher 4y ago
  > whether it's a survey or not is a straw man No it's not. The post I replied to mentions "survey" four times, once per sentence. It mentions "sample" once. > on what grounds do you believe okcupid to be a representative sample? On what grounds do you believe okcupid to not be a sufficiently representative sample? UPDATE: it was 4 times, not 3, so once per sentence.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Do we have reasons to think the non representativeness would have been relevant to these conclusions?
matsemann 4y ago
What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups? What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform? There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small part of people's behavior and sexuality.

yibg 4y ago

I don't think anyone ever claimed this represented the overall population. It's clearly the data set for OkCupid users, which may be a decent proxy for online dating users. Unless there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the data presented, I don't see the problem. Black women on OkCupid are not as desirable as white women. We may not like the results, but doesn't make it invalid. To use your analogy, if 95% of people going through burger king drive through prefers Coke vs Pepsi, that's relevant data for that purpose.

watwut 4y ago
I have seen people making that claim repeatedly on HN.

lmm 4y ago

If the problem was that the results were inaccurate, there would be no need to suppress what the post originally said. Incomplete data is a fixable problem. No, the blog was a gaffe in the Kinsley sense: they accidentally said the truth.