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Comment by tony | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how that refutes my point. Also, while I stand by my post, I wouldn't call it an analysis. They're example scenarios to illustrate reporting bias.

So to your comment about meeting a spouse online, or at college, etc. I don't think we're getting accurate information on outcomes.

Hm, put it this way: If someone has a hope of meeting a spouse through a particular venue, invest in it, and it doesn't work out, can we count on them report the failure? So when an analysis actually does happen, we have everything ready to see?

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Is "someone" only "investing" in life with the expectation of a desired outcome - being married - otherwise it's all a failure and for naught? That'd be a sad analysis to read. I'd rather see them write a whole journal full of experiences they've had, people they've met and what they've learned about themselves. That's where the riches would be.

I made a mistake in the earlier post. I was talking about partners, but I let it get redefined as "spouse" without correcting it. I won't make that mistake again.

It's a separate conversation of how important love is to individuals, but don't you think it'd be generally something a person wouldn't admit failure at in survey?

Regarding a journal of experiences and what they learned, yep, that is valuable. It can do a lot to humanize the person. If you are interested in this type of autobiographical style, Locked Up Abroad is a good docu-series. One good episode is Cullen Thomas in South Korea. He also wrote a book called Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons where he has an interesting story and a lot of self-reflection.

How do we gather divorce statistics? Because divorce is an extreme case of what you mention, and a very common one.

But can we count on people to candidly self-report failure, even when it's optional? In either anecdotes or a research journal?

I don't believe so.

Aside: There's better exceptions to my original post, e.g. in US we release outcome statistics at schools.

- https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/catalog/student-outcomes.html (outcomes)

- https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/about/data-center/student/portf... (loans)

So we even get data in some cases. But experiences in many things like dating and job searching isn't mandatory for everyone to report. And sometimes the most impactful things don't fit into Pandas tables well :)

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