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Comment by kikokikokiko | Hacker News Reader

So, after sampling the interactions of 1.51 million people, and analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid?

Please, tell me how this is absurd, when it's basically what you see in real life. Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average? This delusion of denying facts when it does not conform to your own sense of what is "fair" is just childish.

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because they're all people who signed up for okcupid, who were actively using okcupid to date at the time.

the amount of pressure this puts on the sampling is hard to understate. not only are you looking at a highly truncated set of interpersonal dynamics (what you can tell about someone based on a dating profile is far less than what you can tell by meeting real people in meat space), you're specifically selecting for people who have been as of yet unsuccessful IRL. you're also selecting for people who wish to take a fairly serious shortcut around personal interaction.

given these factors, it would be both crazy and stupid to believe you can generalize about human nature anything you get from a dating app.

as for "what you see in real life", might I suggest that you, yourself, are also constrained to a perspective that doesn't necessarily match other people's perspectives, and that maybe, just maybe, you are also seeing a biased sample of the world which is both the result and cause of difficulties with interpersonal interactions?

An analogy would be to conclude, after going to a Mensa meeting, that most smart people are socially inept :)

> Analysing the amount of messages an average tall woman receives compared to an average short woman, the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid?

It isn't invalid, but its also not science. If you have 1000 short girls and 3 girls over 6'4 well you got an issue of normalising values. Where variance of results are more affected near the edge cases than the median.

The problem is not the results, its that on a vaccum they are contextless, and that is what makes the silly fun data anlysis.

> Or that men that make more money are more attractive to women, on average?

Yeah because if they wanted to date someone broke they could find them outside. Online dating is a fraction of their total dating behaviour, therefore conclusions are not conclusive.

If you want actual studies about it, women prefer a stable job over wealth. Aka a dude with 100k normal salary has a better chance than an unemplyed dude with 1 million dollars. This is something that cannot be found through OkCupid cause networth isn't even a question or filter on their analysis.

> This delusion of denying facts

I am not denying facts, i have just done science past running a database through matlab.

> the conclusion that "taller women, on average, are less attractive to the average male than short women" is invalid

I'd say it's premature given that a lot of women don't want to date men shorter than them, so I can see men messaging them less just because they'd assume they were wasting their time.

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