[0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
The technical insights were far more informative in terms of dating trends.
> Apparently, an online dater’s imagination is the best performing mutual fund of the last 10 years.
Look at "A woman's age vs. the age of the men sho look best to her" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...
and then compare that with "A man's age vs. the age of the women who look best to him" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...
One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platform; I highly recommend it (this is where the above comment's [2] graphs are sourced from). You get other "interesting" observations, such that most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are [3].
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offl...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379741
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfort... (In Online Dating, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist)
Why/how would people come to think that way? As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.
[1] https://www.insider.com/leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriends-reddit...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/azjti7/leo...
That story is an advertisement for Leonardo, not a fundamental truth about human sex lives.
Disagree. Wikipedia quote "in the old indigenous religions, women married between 12 and 15 years of age". The most generous read of this (and the one I'm inclined to agree with) is that men genuinely factor emotional maturity and morality and so on into their sexual selection and preferences, where the least generous read is that men hide their ephebophilia when answering surveys.
What definition of merit are you using that it's not?
> most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are
Calling people racist for preferring to date a particular race is just silly, you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender.
A: If it's aesthetic, sure (though one might ponder to what extent euro-centric beauty standards are indicative of inherent attractiveness vs a desire to fit into the current dominant culture: fair skin is now very popular world-wide, skin lightening is a big thing in Asia, the most popular plastic surgery tends to try to replicate european features, etc)
B: if it's because you think someone else's genes are inferior to yours... that might be the actual definition of racism. In his final book Where Do We Go From Here, MLK calls this out:
> Often white liberals are unaware of their latent prejudices. A while ago I ran into a white woman who was anxious to discuss the race problem with me. She said: “I am very liberal. I have no prejudices toward Negroes. I believe Negroes should have the right to vote, the right to a good job, the right to a decent home and the right to have access to public accommodations. Of course, I must confess that I would not want my daughter to marry a Negro.” This lady could not see that her failure to accept intermarriage negated her claim to genuine liberalism. She failed to see that implicit in her rejection was the feeling that her daughter had some pure, superior nature that should not be contaminated by the impure, inferior nature of the Negro. It is the Teutonic Origins theory warmed over. The question of intermarriage is never raised in a society cured of the disease of racism.
No true Scotsman. Also, maybe she didn't want her daughter to suffer the cost of how society treated mixed race couples at the time. That's society's racism on display, not hers. I think we should all just be a little more charitable.
In defense of humankinds' innate fairness, though, I feel I should point out that all the reasoning about genetics and demographics and 'those people' in the world will not overrule someone's intrinsic assessment of a potential partner's attractiveness. The young lads and lasses will go out and shack up with whoever tickles their fancy. The older generation will tut-tut and justify their disapproval, but who ever listens to them?
Just give it a few years. I know that Slate (a mainstream publication) a few years ago published an article which mentioned in an aside that it is bigotry for a heterosexual man to refuse to date a male who identifies as a woman. I will be completely unsurprised if in a decade or two the same argument is applied to gender preference, period.
And with your line of reasoning can an intersex person (such as someone with XXY chromosomes) never be considered a man nor a woman?
Your understanding of reality is flawed. XY chromosomes provide the instructions for the human organism to construct a male body -- they do nothing to prevent the altering of it later on.
Also, is this not 'hacker' news? Chromosomes are just the source code -- eventually we we will hack the souce or the binary all we want.
How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a woman? This is physically impossible and is akin to changing a banana into a fly.
> if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman
And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Well, the spectrum of bone sizes / muscle mass do have crossovers between the sexes. Obviously you're not going to turn a 6'5'' 300lb man into a believable woman but if that same man starts to transition at 16? Who knows. And there are plenty of people who are well within the size parameters of the opposing sex even in adulthood.
> And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Disagree with what? I said for all practical purposes. Sure, you could in theory make a biological and physical distinction -- it just won't be relevant to 99% of people if the difference is not available to them. Does a multi-platform software user care if he's running the ARM or x86 binary? They are two vastly different beasts but if the compilers work the user has no distinction.
> They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it.
You are missing the big picture. What we view as physically possible now will change, as it always has throughout history. Space travel used to be 'physically impossible', heck so did circumnavigating the world. We will eventually reverse engineer our brain structure -- downloading our consciousness might be feasible one day. Do you think people will care about XY chromosomes when they can swap bodies? Or in a world that heavily uses VR?
So now there's a notion of "believable" and "unbelievable" changing of men into women? That kind of completely brings down this entire house of cards now doesn't it?
Think of it from another way. If there's an earthquake and a man pretending to be a woman dies in the rubble, and they discover his remains 50 years from now, do you honestly think that they'll classify him as female? His skeletal structure is masculine, and no amount of pretending or hormones or surgery is going to change it.
How so?
> Think of it from another way. If there's an earthquake and a man pretending to be a woman dies in the rubble, and they discover his remains 50 years from now, do you honestly think that they'll classify him as female? His skeletal structure is masculine, and no amount of pretending or hormones or surgery is going to change it.
You're too hung up on the 'essence' of someone. It's not relevant in any practical way. If someone told you your spouse had a different set of chromosomes would you suddenly stop loving them?
You seem to be completely ignoring the generally agreed-upon scientific consensus that gender and sex are not equivalent; sex is biology, and gender is mostly performance. A transwoman is a woman (gender) even though they're biologically male (sex).
There can be studies into why some people have this condition, perhaps it could be due to environmental or upbringing reasons, but the solution is not to expect others to dissociate from reality and pretend that that person is the sex he "wants to identify with". It's no different from asking others to treat that person like a dog if he feels like it.
I'm also unclear as to what the question was which prompted the answers from men and women, or what the motivations were. There is much more to a relationship than sex for procreation, and almost everyone seems to realize this fact. So the conclusion is that men simply find young women attractive (and the "reproductive age" evo-psych just-so story cannot justify it), or men no matter how old they are continue to want children, at the expense of a relationship with a fully developed adult.
Just not as much as older mothers.
And rate of infant mortality vs mother's age: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_i...
Both have a minimum in the early 30s, a decade off from these numbers. Granted, there's likely some confounding due to poverty rates vs age of pregnancy, but the data simply does not support the conclusion that 20 is the best, healthiest age for a woman to bear a child. There's still some development and biological maturation going on into the 20s.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8dKKCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT232&lpg=...
If few older people sign up to OKCupid, that would be a sample bias and the average height would be noticeable higher.
Edit: “Adjusting for age, adults ages 18-74 years with an annual income of $15,000 and over were observed to be 1.2 inches taller than those with an annual income under $4,000”, amongst other serious biases (whiteness, education) that affect average height the would be expected to be in OKCupid sample. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_224.pdf
Over 60's are about 1" shorter. Hispanics are a lot shorter.
I am pointing out that the sampling biases are important when looking for cause and effect when comparing against a population average.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...
Always found their blog posts an interesting look at the underlying data and user behavior. But now they're scrubbing them?
Rounding up to 6' definitely would've been stretching the truth too much though.
Nevertheless, I always use real height (5’3”) in dating profiles, thankfully my current wife didn’t care (we met on OkCupid). Given that me and her only put exactly 1 or 2 profile pictures and zero description and we still able to meet, should be considered anomaly.