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Comment by danieldon | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you read a different post, but the one linked here simply argues that "any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid," then lists a bunch of sites targeting black users and concludes that the OKCupid data is not representative of the public at large, despite the complete absence of supporting data. I don't see an analysis of data, just a hypothesis.

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Coates is pointing out that there are good reasons to suspect strong sample bias. OkCupid didn't address this -- they just assumed an unbiased sample. I find Coates' argument far more compelling than OkCupid's blind assumption.

Blacks do look seriously underrepresented based on the response rates to the two questions. (Suggesting that blacks account for around 4% of OkCupid's users.) That's hardly proof of anything, but it does offer some credence to Coates' argument.

In the real world, it's often very hard to find compelling data, so we sometimes have to rely on compelling argument.

    Coates is pointing out that there are good reasons
    to suspect strong sample bias.

If that was all he did then there wouldn't be a problem, but it wasn't. He also made unsubstantiated, anecdotal claims, and he presented the whole thing as fact.

    OkCupid didn't address this -- they just assumed an unbiased sample.

The OKCupid post very explicitly addressed how their user demographics differ from the norm.

Actually, it said "when black people who don't want to date non-black people date online, they go to one of the black-only dating sites rather than dating sites aimed at the general population." It did still simply provide a hypothesis, but it is at least a plausible hypothesis that might explain the data. One would need further data to determine its validity, of course.

    it is at least a plausible hypothesis

It might seem plausible if you share the same preconceptions as Ta-Nehisi Coates. But where's the data? Plenty of things that sound plausible to some people turn out to be unsupported by data, particularly when they are issues that people are emotionally invested in and issues that, like this one, have heavy social and political components.

Racial views in the US are absolutely filled with (and arguably dominated by) gross misconceptions that seem plausible to many people despite being untrue.

You are correct, he didn't do a poll to find out what percentage of black people would only go to OKCupid after failing at those others he mentions. So basically this discussion is pointless until this poll is done.

You hit the nail on the head - he made an argument from emotion. The OkCupid post was an evidence based approach.

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