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This is really annoying (emphasis mine): >Mr. Rudder is particularly interested in the divide between the mates people claim they want and their actual online

This is really annoying (emphasis mine): >Mr. Rudder is particularly interested in the divide between the mates people claim they want and their actual online pursuits. Witness the actions of 35-year-old heterosexual men on OkCupid. These men typically search for women between the ages of 24 and 40, Mr. Rudder reports, yet in practice they rarely contact anyone over 29. >“I see this as a statement of what men imagine they’re supposed to desire,” he writes in the book, “versus what they actually do.” For a guy talking up all the awesome science he thinks he can do, this is rather unscientific. I'm sure he realizes there are other explanations for this trend (older women are more likely to be divorced or have kids, for example), but by promoting his own narrative he muddies the waters. For what it's worth I don't think his interpretation of the data is correct in this case. A lot of other stuff on the OKCupid blog, e.g. claims of racism because black women receive fewer first messages than women of other races, fell into the same trap. The blog was very interesting to read, to be sure, but I couldn't take it seriously because there was so much pseudoscience and just-so stories, even if it was backed up with mountains of data and nifty charts.

colmvp 12y ago
> A lot of other stuff on the OKCupid blog, e.g. claims of racism because black women receive fewer first messages than women of other races, fell into the same trap. I don't see how that was faulty. It's pretty clear that Black women are involved in interracial marriage at a significantly lower rate than women of other races, or even black men. Then if you look at response rate by race (a previous OKTrends post), black women generally have a lower response rate from men of all races compared to women of other races. Data supports the idea that black women are generally not favored.

colmvp 12y ago

> A lot of other stuff on the OKCupid blog, e.g. claims of racism because black women receive fewer first messages than women of other races, fell into the same trap. I don't see how that was faulty. It's pretty clear that Black women are involved in interracial marriage at a significantly lower rate than women of other races, or even black men. Then if you look at response rate by race (a previous OKTrends post), black women generally have a lower response rate from men of all races compared to women of other races. Data supports the idea that black women are generally not favored.