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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

One possible explanation for the low Hindu-Hindu match is that there are many websites dedicated to specifically Hindu dating which means that the Hindus using OkCupid are those who are specifically not looking for a Hindu date.

For other religions, such sites aren't nearly as prevalent.

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Not really.

The matches are based on answers users give to questions (both site designed and user designed).

When the blogger says they don't match, it means:

  - Person A: I like X

  - Person B: I don't like people who like X

Where X could mean ice cream, god or tooth-brushing. It has nothing to do with people selecting the race or religion of the people they think they want to date.

Yeah, but if Hindu men like ice cream, and I don't want Hindu men, I might not like men who like ice cream either because a) it's what Hindu men do, or b) I don't like people who like ice cream to begin with, and I don't like Hindu men for that reason.

So it's not totally unrelated.

But is there anything you can replace "ice cream" with to make it a workable example? What _real_ questions are you likely to see this kind of Hindu-Hindu antimatching behaviour on?

s/ice cream/samsara/g

Arranged-marriage.

Sorry are you serious? Why would a Hindu that is pro-arranged marriage be on a dating website? Arranged marriages were a severe form of keeping the caste system in tact but that's not applicable now. But then again your type of logic can probably explain why Islamic people aren't liked since everyone is anti-terrorism.

Some Hindu men will say they like ice cream.

Some Hindu men will say they don't.

Well, I'm not sure why I was down-modded. However, I hope I didn't offend anyone. Race/religion can be touchy subjects.

If I had to guess, you got down-modded because you were ignoring the premise of the above statement that being a hindu man might be correlated to liking ice cream. You are free to disagree with that but you need to give a reason.

Of course, ice cream wasn't the point and other people gave better examples.

Unless there are very few Hindus using the site, in which case there could be (in the extreme) a single bad hindu-hindu match that skews everything.

We need error bars.

I was going to post a comment directly disagreeing with this, and citing the large number of Jewish dating sites, but these are really only used by people on the more religious end of the spectrum, so it is possible that the effect is more prevalent in the Hindu-Hindu match calculations than in Jew-Jew match calculations. I would posit, however, that this effect, along with the self-selection bias of using a multi-cultural dating website, is almost certainly the cause for the tendency for higher matches towards non-relgious people.

JDate and similar sites aren't exactly religious. There are lots of secular Jews who would prefer to date or marry another Jew, for ethnic, cultural, or national reasons.

True, I think part of the confusion stems from the fact that you can have "secular Jews," since the Jewish way of life seems to be a bit more than just about religion (not saying the religion isn't an important part of it). If someone were to say "secular Christian" I'd look at them funny.

Given that strongly religious people (of whatever religion) had a harder time matching, removing the most religious Jews would improve the compatibility of the remaining Jews.

... which means that the Hindus using OkCupid are those who are specifically not looking for a Hindu date.

Or maybe they are specifically looking for a non-Hindu date. I mean that they might be looking for a uncompromising relation, maybe easier with a person with different roots.

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