Tag: okcupid

elsewhere on the net, vacation edition

I’m hanging out in Boston for a few days, so blogging will probably be sporadic or nonexistent. Which is to say, you probably won’t notice any difference.

The last post on the Dunning-Kruger effect somehow managed to rack up 10,000 hits in 48 hours; but that was last week. Today I looked at my stats again, and the blog is back to a more normal 300 hits, so I feel like it’s safe to blog again. Here are some neat (and totally unrelated) links from the past week:

  • OKCupid has another one of those nifty posts showing off all the cool things they can learn from their gigantic userbase (who else gets to say things like “this analysis includes 1.51 million users’ data”???). Apparently, tall people (claim to) have more sex, attractive photos are more likely to be out of date, and most people who claim to be bisexual aren’t really bisexual.
  • After a few months off, my department-mate Chris Chatham is posting furiously again over at Developing Intelligence, with a series of excellent posts reviewing recent work on cognitive control and the perils of fMRI research. I’m not really sure what Chris spent his blogging break doing, but given the frequency with which he’s been posting lately, my suspicion is that he spent it secretly writing blog posts.
  • Mark Liberman points out a fundamental inconsistency in the way we view attributions of authorship: we get appropriately angry at academics who pass someone else’s work off as their own, but think it’s just fine for politicians to pay speechwriters to write for them. It’s an interesting question, and leads to an intimately related, and even more important question–namely, will anyone get mad at me if I pay someone else to write a blog post for me about someone else’s blog post discussing people getting angry at people paying or not paying other people to write material for other people that they do or don’t own the copyright on?
  • I like oohing and aahing over large datasets, and the Guardian’s Data Blog provides a nice interface to some of the most ooh- and aah-able datasets out there. [via R-Chart]
  • Ed Yong has a characteristically excellent write-up about recent work on the magnetic vision of birds. Yong also does link dump posts better than anyone else, so you should probably stop reading this one right now and read his instead.
  • You’ve probably heard about this already, but some time last week, the brain trust at ScienceBlogs made the amazingly clever decision to throw away their integrity by selling PepsiCo its very own “science” blog. Predictably, a lot of the bloggers weren’t happy with the decision, and many have now moved onto greener pastures; Carl Zimmer’s keeping score. Personally, I don’t have anything intelligent to add to everything that’s already been said; I’m literally dumbfounded.
  • Andrew Gelman takes apart an obnoxious letter from pollster John Zogby to Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. I guess now we know that Zogby didn’t get where he is by not being an ass to other people.
  • Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks points out that neuroplasticity isn’t a new concept, and was discussed seriously in the literature as far back as the 1800s. Apparently our collective views about the malleability of mind are not, themselves, very plastic.
  • NPR ran a three-part story by Barbara Bradley Hagerty on the emerging and somewhat uneasy relationship between neuroscience and the law. The articles are pretty good, but much better, in my opinion, was the Talk of the Nation episode that featured Hagerty as a guest alongside Joshua Greene, Kent Kiehl, and Stephen Morse–people who’ve all contributed in various ways to the emerging discipline of NeuroLaw. It’s a really interesting set of interviews and discussions. For what it’s worth, I think I agree with just about everything Greene has to say about these issues–except that he says things much more eloquently than I think them.
  • Okay, this one’s totally frivolous, but does anyone want to buy me one of these things? I don’t even like dried food; I just think it would be fun to stick random things in there and watch them come out pale, dried husks of their former selves. Is it morbid to enjoy watching the life slowly being sucked out of apples and mushrooms?

the OKCupid guide to dating older women

Continuing along on their guided tour of Data I Wish I Had Access To, the OKCupid folks have posted another set of interesting figures on their blog. This time, they make the case for dating older women, suggesting that men might get more bang for their buck (in a literal sense, I suppose) by trying to contact women their age or older, rather than trying to hit on the young ‘uns. Men, it turns out, are creepy. Here’s how creepy:

Actually, that’s not so creepy. All it says is that men say they prefer to date younger women. That’s not going to shock anyone. This one is creepier:

The reason it’s creepy is that it basically says that, irrespective of what age ranges men say they find acceptable in a potential match, they’re actually all indiscriminately messaging 18-year old women. So basically, if you’re a woman on OKCupid who’s searching for that one special, non-creepy guy, be warned: they don’t exist. They’re pretty much all going to be eying 18-year olds for the rest of their lives. (To be fair, women also show a tendency to contact men below their lowest reported acceptable age. But it’s a much weaker effect; 40-year old women only occasionally try to hit on 24-year old guys, and tend to stay the hell away from the not-yet-of-drinking-age male population.)

Anyway, using this type of data, the OKCupid folks then generate this figure:

…which also will probably surprise no one, as it basically says women are most desirable when they’re young, and men when they’re (somewhat) older. But what the OKCupid folks then suggest is that it would be to men’s great advantage to broaden their horizons, because older women (which, in their range-restricted population, basically means anything over 30) self-report being much more interested in having sex more often, having casual sex, and using protection. I won’t bother hotlinking to all of those images, but here’s where they’re ultimately going with this:

I’m not going to comment on the appropriateness of trying to nudge one’s male userbase in the direction of more readily available casual sex (though I suspect they don’t need much nudging anyway). What I do wonder is to what extent these results reflect selection effects rather than a genuine age difference. The OKCupid folks suggest that women’s sexual interest increases as they age, which seems plausible given the conventional wisdom that women peak sexually in their 30s. But the effects in this case look pretty huge (unless the color scheme is misleading, which it might be; you’ll have to check out the post for the neat interactive flash animations), and it seems pretty plausible that much of the age effect could be driven by selection bias. Women with a more monogamous orientation are probably much more likely to be in committed, stable relationships by the time they turn 30 or 35, and probably aren’t scanning OKCupid for potential mates. Women who are in their 30s and 40s and still using online dating services are probably those who weren’t as interested in monogamous relationships to begin with. (Of course, the same is probably true of older men. Except that since men of all ages appear to be pretty interested in casual sex, there’s unlikely to be an obvious age differential.)

The other thing I’m not clear on is whether these analyses control for the fact that the userbase is heavily skewed toward younger users:

The people behind OKCupid are all mathematicians by training, so I’d be surprised if they hadn’t taken the underlying age distribution into consideration. But they don’t say anything about it in their post. The worry is that, if the base rate of different age groups isn’t taken into consideration, the heat map displayed above could be quite misleading. Given that there are many, many more 25-year old women on OKCupid than 35-year old women, failing to normalize properly would almost invariably make it look like there’s a heavy skew for men to message relatively younger women, irrespective of the male sender’s age. By the same token, it’s not clear that it’d be good advice to tell men to seek out older women, given that there are many fewer older women in the pool to begin with. As a thought experiment, suppose that the entire OKCupid male population suddenly started messaging women 5 years older than them, and entirely ignored their usual younger targets. The hit rate wouldn’t go up; it would probably actually fall precipitously, since there wouldn’t be enough older women to keep all the younger men entertained (at least, I certainly hope there wouldn’t). No doubt there’s a stable equilibrium point somewhere, where men and women are each targeting exactly the right age range to maximize their respective chances. I’m just not sure that it’s in OKCupid’s proposed “zone of greatness” for the men.

It’s also a bit surprising that OKCupid didn’t break down the response rate to people of the opposite gender as a function of the sender and receiver’s age. They’ve done this in the past, and it seems like the most direct way of testing whether men are more likely to get lucky by messaging older or younger women. Without knowing whether older women are actually responding to younger men’s overtures, it’s kind of hard to say what it all means. Except that I’d still kill to have their data.

elsewhere on the internets…

The good people over at OKCupid, the best dating site on Earth (their words, not mine! I’m happily married!), just released a new slew of data on their OKTrends blog. Apparently men like women with smiley, flirty profile photos, and women like dismissive, unsmiling men. It’s pretty neat stuff, and definitely worth a read. Mating rituals aside, thuough, what I really like to think about whenever I see a new OKTrends post is how many people I’d be willing to kill to get my hands on their data.

Genetic Future covers the emergence of Counsyl, a new player in the field of personal genomics. Unlike existing outfits like 23andme and deCODEme.com, Counsyl focuses on rare Mendelian disorders, with an eye to helping prospective parents evaluate their genetic liabilities. What’s really interesting about Counsyl is its business model; if you have health insurance provided by Aetna or Blue Cross, you could potentially get a free test. Of course, the catch is that Aetna or Blue Cross get access to your results. In theory, this shouldn’t matter, since health insurers can’t use genetic information as grounds for discrimination. But then, on paper, employers can’t use race, gender, or sexual orientation as grounds for discrimination either, and yet we know it’s easier to get hired if your name is John than Jamal. That said, I’d probably go ahead and take Aetna up on its generous offer, except that my wife and I have no plans for kids, and the Counsyl test looks like it stays away from the garden-variety SNPs the other services cover…

The UK has banned the export of dowsing rods. In 2010! This would be kind of funny if not for the fact that dozens if not hundreds of Iraqis have probably died horrible deaths as a result of the Iraqi police force trying to detect roadside bombs using magic. [via Why Evolution is True].

Over at Freakonomics, regular contributor Ryan Hagen interviews psychologist, magician, and author Richard Wiseman, who just published a new empirically-based self-help book (can such a thing exist?). I haven’t read the book, but the interview is pretty good. Favorite quote:

What would I want to do? I quite like the idea of the random giving of animals. There’s a study where they took two groups of people and randomly gave people in one group a dog. But I’d quite like to replicate that with a much wider range of animals — including those that should be in zoos. I like the idea of signing up for a study, and you get home and find you’ve got to look after a wolf “¦ .

On a professional note, Professor in Training has a really great two part series (1, 2) on what new tenure-track faculty need to know before starting the job. I’ve placed both posts inside Google Reader’s golden-starred vault, and fully expect to come back to them next Fall when I’m on the job market. Which means if you’re reading this and you’re thinking of hiring me, be warned: I will demand that a life-size bobble-head doll of Hans Eysenck be installed in my office, and thanks to PiT, I do now have the awesome negotiating powers needed to make it happen.