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Comment by Crabber | Hacker News Reader

Stop basing your entire worldview on what 20 women said on twitter.com in 2014

This kind of stuff is pretty widespread. One of the major dating sites published a stat showing woman ranked 80% of men as below average attractiveness while men ranked 50% of woman as bellow average. They had to pull the post because it was explosive. I assume no tech company will ever post stats on the data they have showing some kind of meaningful social observation again.

That was OKCupid, why they actually published it is beyond me.

Why wouldn't they?

They published a lot of very interesting anonymized stats back then.

Would you rather not know?

I think from their perspective, publishing it was a mistake. A lot of companies publish anonymized user stats but usually they don't say or mean a whole lot. I'm pretty sure OkCupid didn't intend to get in the middle of a hot political topic and prove that the incel movement might have a point.

I imagine a lot of tech companies are holding on to some extremely volatile truths about society that they do not want becoming public.

I think it was in times when OkCupid had a soul bacause original founder was still with them (or at least his spirit). And his goal was for people to better understand each other and themselves not just suck up cash from the hornies.

I completely agree with you that's completely insane decision from the point of view of soulless corp that just wants to suck people dry.

What a remarkably insensitive and dismissive take on someone providing primary sources to bolster their case.

Parent has a point. You can find any manner of horrible on twitter, especially if you reach back far enough. Twitter is not a "primary source" in the wikipedia sense.

You're right: the quotes do a shit job of illustrating thangalin's point, because you can find anyone supporting anything on Twitter. Regardless, "Stop basing your entire worldview on what 20 women said on twitter.com in 2014" is still an unnecessarily rude way to make that point.

Parent doesn’t have a point because they’re rejecting the reality of height discrimination and the language that perpetuates it. Pretending like this isn’t a thing isn’t constructive, and reinforces the original point that this wouldn’t be tolerated with respect to race.

>Pretending like this isn’t a thing isn’t constructive, and reinforces the original point that this wouldn’t be tolerated with respect to race.

You could just as easily go and find 20 tweets from 2014 of women saying they refuse to date black men. If you build your worldview by cherry picking the opinions of 20 twitter users out of 300 million and treating them as gospel then you can create any bleak reality you want.

If I assert that many people like Justin Bieber and show you many tweets saying as much, do you infer that it was the tweets that made me form this opinion?

Cherry-picked "primary sources" are as worthless as no source at all. What some randos on Twitter say is not at all representative of the world at large.

And no one claimed this was representative of the world at large, although I must be cheeky and note there’s currently more evidence in favor than against since you haven’t provided anything to the contrary.

It looks like it's all 20 black women from 2014 as well. I'm not sure what to assume about the intention or circumstances behind the account owner choosing those samples, but it certainly doesn't accurately reflect majority opinion in 2022.

For some, this is merely the paper evidence of shit I'm being told to my face every day.

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