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The perennial older male age is because men are fertile longer than women so statistics would tend to this pattern over a large enough population. There's powe

The perennial older male age is because men are fertile longer than women so statistics would tend to this pattern over a large enough population. There's power asymmetry, people are monsters and sexual predation is rampant but there's also biological feasibility at play here. To demonstrate, let's say that we have an imaginary equalityville where for every age pairing and sex act, there is an exactly equal one with the ages swapped - as in mathematically perfect equality. In equalityville occasionally 45 year old men sleep with 35 year old woman. But every time, a 45 year old woman sleeps with a 35 year old man, coincidentally, at the exact same time, doing equal things, in another part of town. However, 45 year old woman give birth rarely. Let's say it's 1/99th the rate of the 35 year olds. So there's 1000 45 year old women with 35 year old men resulting in 10 births 1000 45 year old men with 35 year old women resulting in 990 births Now we're going to calculate the average age based on the babies. Women (990 * 35 + 10 * 45)/1000 = 35.1 Men (990 * 45 + 10 * 35)/1000 = 44.9 And thus we get our paradox because we're counting by live births. So long as there are age delta pairings past some set of constraints, the male average will drift upward. It'd be interesting to normalize for that. This is probably doable since actual fertility statistics are well studied.

searealist 4y ago
And yet https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk
- guerrilla 4y ago
  source?
  - Renevith 4y ago
    It's linked right below the image: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/christian-rudder-dataclysm-okcupid/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/christian-rudder-datacl...
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Those metrics are culturally specific and the dataset of okcupid is limited to people who go on okcupid and volunteer answers to such questions. It's a classic case of participation bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias (see "Alf Landon wins in a landslide" for the famous example). The takeaway here is that straight single middle aged men who chase after woman, are on ok cupid looking for them, and who fill out this survey, are on average, looking for younger women. Those results cannot be seen as representative of the general population based on the methodology used here. It gets worse. Similar to the Alf Landon flaw, this could simply be exposing the demographic makeup of the site. Perhaps men think there's a promise on okcupid of younger women so it self-selects for those proclivities. Perhaps women think there's a different promise so they come accordingly. You have to extricate that. Otherwise, it'd be like going to a gay dating site, running a survey and then come out with some earth-shattering ground-breaking claim of 100% of men saying they prefer intimacy with other men. I mean, duh, look who you're asking. That's not to say these results don't hold generally, they might. But this is not evidence supporting that.
  - searealist 4y ago
    Why do you mention middle aged men when that graph contained men of all ages.
hawk_ 4y ago
Where's the paradox? Live births drive evolution afterall. Wouldn't such a massive survival difference start to show up in mate age preferences getting "coded" into our genes?
nprateem 4y ago
Older men have had time to climb the social ladder and amass resources and status, a corollary for power. These equal higher odds of survival for offspring. Younger women are more fertile. There's nothing more to it than that. This dynamic has existed for so long it's part of our DNA now via sexual selection.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  That assumes nuclear families raising children under capitalism - that's a culturally specific western view of the past maybe 200 years. There's many other modalities over the entire globe and 250,000 years. The premise and the conclusion of your statement is unsupported unless you can demonstrate those assumptions consistently holding in most societies over a quarter million years.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    I'm talking about becoming the tribal chief or one of the other leaders. Nothing to do with nuclear families, quite the opposite.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      Now you're assuming there's a social hierarchy where someone can exercise sexual indiscretion as some kind of reward and where the social customs encourage such a behavior, which also must be demonstrated. Again, if we aren't talking about hard biology like menopause, puberty, fertility and stillbirth rates, things get dicey. Things can dip into eisegesis quickly.
      - nprateem 4y ago
        No, I'm assuming two modes: One were women were treated as sexual resources to be taken and controlled Another with more free will. In both cases, sexual selection would lead the offspring of those that aligned with the dominant male and his group, through free will or coercion, to have greater survival odds due to the dominant male's ability to control or capture resources, or fend off danger. If you're aware that a majority of stone-age societies practiced communism without hierarchies for several tens of thousands of years to offset this sexual selection, I'd be interested to hear about that period of history.

searealist 4y ago

And yet https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk https://imgur.com/Ijgzwsk

guerrilla 4y ago
source?
- Renevith 4y ago
  It's linked right below the image: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/christian-rudder-dataclysm-okcupid/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/christian-rudder-datacl...
kristopolous 4y ago
Those metrics are culturally specific and the dataset of okcupid is limited to people who go on okcupid and volunteer answers to such questions. It's a classic case of participation bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias (see "Alf Landon wins in a landslide" for the famous example). The takeaway here is that straight single middle aged men who chase after woman, are on ok cupid looking for them, and who fill out this survey, are on average, looking for younger women. Those results cannot be seen as representative of the general population based on the methodology used here. It gets worse. Similar to the Alf Landon flaw, this could simply be exposing the demographic makeup of the site. Perhaps men think there's a promise on okcupid of younger women so it self-selects for those proclivities. Perhaps women think there's a different promise so they come accordingly. You have to extricate that. Otherwise, it'd be like going to a gay dating site, running a survey and then come out with some earth-shattering ground-breaking claim of 100% of men saying they prefer intimacy with other men. I mean, duh, look who you're asking. That's not to say these results don't hold generally, they might. But this is not evidence supporting that.
- searealist 4y ago
  Why do you mention middle aged men when that graph contained men of all ages.

hawk_ 4y ago

Where's the paradox? Live births drive evolution afterall. Wouldn't such a massive survival difference start to show up in mate age preferences getting "coded" into our genes?

nprateem 4y ago

Older men have had time to climb the social ladder and amass resources and status, a corollary for power. These equal higher odds of survival for offspring. Younger women are more fertile. There's nothing more to it than that. This dynamic has existed for so long it's part of our DNA now via sexual selection.

kristopolous 4y ago
That assumes nuclear families raising children under capitalism - that's a culturally specific western view of the past maybe 200 years. There's many other modalities over the entire globe and 250,000 years. The premise and the conclusion of your statement is unsupported unless you can demonstrate those assumptions consistently holding in most societies over a quarter million years.
- nprateem 4y ago
  I'm talking about becoming the tribal chief or one of the other leaders. Nothing to do with nuclear families, quite the opposite.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Now you're assuming there's a social hierarchy where someone can exercise sexual indiscretion as some kind of reward and where the social customs encourage such a behavior, which also must be demonstrated. Again, if we aren't talking about hard biology like menopause, puberty, fertility and stillbirth rates, things get dicey. Things can dip into eisegesis quickly.
    - nprateem 4y ago
      No, I'm assuming two modes: One were women were treated as sexual resources to be taken and controlled Another with more free will. In both cases, sexual selection would lead the offspring of those that aligned with the dominant male and his group, through free will or coercion, to have greater survival odds due to the dominant male's ability to control or capture resources, or fend off danger. If you're aware that a majority of stone-age societies practiced communism without hierarchies for several tens of thousands of years to offset this sexual selection, I'd be interested to hear about that period of history.