Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

"Why does it appear that the vast majority of women prefer the same small group of men?"

The chart doesn't show that. The chart shows that in surveys, women and men answer a survey with different average baselines for what "average" means. That's interesting, but it fundamentally tells you about how men and women answer surveys, not how they are attracted to the opposite gender.

What tells you their actual attraction is revealed preference: Who they date, and who they message. And the same OKCupid data source shows that women do message the same men they rate as "below average", whereas men actually overwhelmingly message the most attractive women. So right off the bat, this isn't a promising start: The author has interpreted the result backwards.

> translate this plot to IQ, and you have a world where the women thing 58 percent of men are brain damaged

No, it doesn't. It translates into a world where the women obviously do not act like they think this, and thus via revealed preferences, clearly do not think this. (But where the men do...)

> I began by wondering if a simple statistical model

Garbage in, garbage out. If you're reading the chart upside down, you're simple statistic model won't apply very well to real life.

Edit: According to the same data source OP is using "2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women" where women messages to men follow a much flatter response curve, with a peak right around the median. See https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0... In my view, that conclusively undermines OP's premise.

This is what happens when your discipline values methodology above real insight.

If I were doing this analysis, I'd note that the first chart is probably consistent with male scores being drawn from one beta distribution (mapped to the interval (1,5)) and female scores being drawn from another.

But I'd stop there, and observe that any number of phenomena could generate results like that: the beta distribution is extremely common. To build a better explanatory model, I'd start digging into why people are voting the way they do. This means quite a lot of messy data analysis, and working at the level of individual user records. If you don't have that data there's not much more that can be said.

Instead, this guy makes some assumptions without any evidence, and takes the fact that his (complex) model can generate a common distribution as validation for his ideas.

Frankly, what bothers me about the article isn't that it's naive and a bit sexist. It's that untrained people can find this sort of analysis persuasive. Because hey, agent-based modelling is complex and impressive, right?

> it's naive and a bit sexist

It's not a bit sexist, and it's not naive. This is MRA/redpill propaganda. Bad methodology isn't accidental when it gets you the "women are alpha-riding sluts" result you hoped for.

Oh my, the mental gymnastics you're doing. Males and females are asked to rate eachother, males clearly rate females in a normal-distribution way, females highly skew it in favor of the more attractive males.

What is your conclusion about the graph, besides "interesting"? What is fundamentally different about how men and women answer surveys?

> males clearly rate females in a normal-distribution way, females highly skew it in favor of the more attractive males.

Yes. But males messaging females skew highly in favour of the more attractive females, while females messages males do so in a normal-distributed way.

So when OP asks "Why does it appear that the vast majority of women prefer the same small group of men?" the answer is simple: It's actually the other way around. 2/3 of men (a "vast majority") are messaging 1/3 of women (a "small group"). Women do not exhibit this behaviour. Those are the facts we are presented with.

Anything else is, as you put it, "mental gymnastics".

Not sure if it makes a difference but it's 2/3 of messages, not 2/3 of men.

Let me enlighten you: females message less attractive males because females love validation and attention and lose nothing if they do so, not because they don't actually know who they really like.

We live in a serial-monogamous society -- if the average individual wants a relationship he/she'll eventually have to settle for an average partner, regardless of who they fancy the most.

I have noticed this (as have many others).

Women are far more off in self-reporting their levels of attraction, arousal and the reasons for it.

Everything from studies done on bisexuality (women reported not being turned on by certain combinations but their genitals disagreed) to the OKCupid study cited above.

Men seem to be much better predictors and analyzers of what they are attracted to.

"What do women want" is a popular question ever since women were liberated.

I wish there were more studies done into this.

Rewording your comment (and not commenting on its veracity), it sounds like you're saying that women can differentiate between what their consciousness and what their reproductive glands want better than men. That's a pretty common stereotype about men...

I am saying that men have less of this difference in the first place.

> differentiate between what their consciousness and what their reproductive glands want

It is one and the same

> Women are far more off in self-reporting their levels of attraction, arousal and the reasons for it.

Women are conditioned by popular culture to resist sex at every turn, either to play "hard to get," to not be too "easy" for men to take advantage of, to not be perceived as slutty, to outright being taught by media that sex is something women dole out as a reward to the men in their lives, not something they are supposed to enjoy, let alone instigate.

It's not at all surprising to me that they'd be reserved about what revs their engines, where men are very straight forward because that's what we're taught that we're supposed to be.

Yet they seem not to be so reserved about highly rating higher status men, just they're reserved about lower status men. Are you saying somehow society makes women rate less attractive men even lower and more attractive men higher?

As in "Meh... this guy is a 7/10, but wait... ummmm society something something ... there, I'll rate him a 5/10 even though I think he's a 7/10"?

I think that's just good old Reporting bias. They're giving the answer they think they should be giving, not the truth.

I'm just curious how do you know that "Women are far more off in self-reporting their levels of attraction, arousal and the reasons for it" ?

You're cherry picking the data to match your conclusions. To be fair, so is the article. And your "revealed preference" justification for cherry-picking sounds compelling. But I still disagree.

When I was a teenager, I observed interactions around me and came to the same conclusion that most women prefer the top few men and most men prefer any woman average or better.

So I have confirmation bias similar to the author (on this point. I don't necessarily agree with the author on other points)

But let me suggest why the different data point to different conclusions. When I was younger, I tried (very poorly) to flirt with the most beautiful women but was thrilled when any girl in the top 50% showed interest in me. I wasn't that picky, but it's more fun to get rejected by the prettiest girl than to be rejected by the average girl and rejection was pretty much the guaranteed outcome either way.

"Revealed preference" in who I'd date was, in my opinion, a lot more meaningful than "revealed preference" in who I'd approach.

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