Slashdot Mirror

There is no definition for curvy.

Go to http://okcupid.com/ and set your preferences to "curvy" girls.

American curvy girls are fat

European curvy girls have "big tits/big ass" and are either normal weight or just slightly above average .. as in "curvy".

How a fat girl can think she has curves is beyond me :P

A minor point of order sir, "curvy" European girls are also fat. Americans are of European stock.

You must be thinking of Latinas, sadly a place where butt implants are a serious thing.

There is no definition for curvy.

Go to http://okcupid.com/ and set your preferences to "curvy" girls.

American curvy girls are fat

European curvy girls have "big tits/big ass" and are either normal weight or just slightly above average .. as in "curvy".

How a fat girl can think she has curves is beyond me :P

Single women without dependents make 8% more than their male counterparts

To be completely fair, this can be explained without necessarily attributing it to sexual discrimination. In general, when men and women are looking for partners, women care substantially more about how much their potential partner earns. (See, for example, the seventh plot on this page: the red-and-green heatmap. Men with low incomes get almost no messages in online dating.)

Men with low incomes, therefore, tend to remain single, and do not acquire dependents. So when you compare men and women *without dependents*, you're comparing the less-attractive, low-income men with a closer-to-representative group of women.

Whites consistently come out on top, and blacks consistently scrape the bottom, with black women scoring even worse than black men. Asian men also get screwed over, while Asian women do quite well.

Looking at the first plot in your link, I don't think that's the way I'd summarise it. To first order, I'd put it as: "Women prefer men of their own race, whatever that might be. Men are okay with women of any race except black.".

Some other first-order slices: "If you're a woman, it's best to be Asian. If you're a man, it's best to be white.".

You'd think pale skin would be a much bigger draw in the dating market, wouldn't you?

It is. OK cupid has done a bunch of studies on this over the years. Whites consistently come out on top, and blacks consistently scrape the bottom, with black women scoring even worse than black men. Asian men also get screwed over, while Asian women do quite well.

https://theblog.okcupid.com/ra...

Of course the offline dating market may not be quite the same as the online one ... feel free to conduct your own study and test that hypothesis.

Those numbers only apply to tinder-style speed dating though.

Actually, the 80-20 numbers come from OkCupid.

It is not just a sign that women are pickier, but also that THEY CAN'T DO MATH. They were not asked to judge if the men were "unattractive" in an absolute sense, but whether they were below the median. The men did it correctly, putting 50% above the cutoff and 50% below.

To add to it, according to okcupid data analysis (dating site) 80% of males were rated as "below average" by females:

https://theblog.okcupid.com/yo...

So, human skin color determines other characteristics?

Usually not, but it often correlates with other characteristics. For example, white skin tend to correlate with long nose although AFAIK they are completely separate traits. There are other indisputable correlations between skin color and other biological traits. So I don't think it is much of a stretch to assume that there are correlations with higher functions too.
Interracial procreation can blur these differences but we need both a change of mindset and a few generations to get there. Sexual preference still goes towards the same race group.

Culture matters too, but guess what, there are also correlations between culture and skin color too, and despite all the good talk about the "melting pot", the line may be a little bit blurry but it is still there.

Oh and sorry for beating the dead horse but you don't believe that correlation implies causation, do you?

Perhaps try a 'better' or different dating site?
I recommend http://www.okcupid.com/ [okcupid.com] plenty of women there who like engineers.

Um, yeah, that's the one I'm on. (I did briefly try Match.com, but I quickly concluded that it's a total scam and most of the women's profiles are fake. I get emails from Match.com every single day telling me I've gotten so many emails from women, when all I did was hastily put up a profile and never followed up when it became apparent they just wanted me to subscribe for $$$.)

The problem I currently have is the area I'm in, which is a rather conservative east-coast metro area with a large military presence. All the women here seem to love: country music, big dogs, Jesus, horses, "muddin'", and guns. My theory is that all the educated women from this area moved out when they went to college, and never came back.

My current plan is to move to a better metro area as soon as feasible given what's going on in my life. I'll spare you the story of how I came here; it was never intended to be a long-term move.

I'll keep in mind your idea about martial arts; that's a pretty good idea. I did that years ago when I had a girlfriend and did have some really cute girl hit on me; too bad I wasn't available.

Perhaps try a 'better' or different dating site?
I recommend http://www.okcupid.com/ plenty of women there who like engineers.
Regarding dating women with kids, there is that invention of a baby sitter. You could help her organize one. Sure, you might be asked or feel obliged to pay for the sitter.
Also you might find it possible to 'date' her including the kid, like going into a zoo or a circus (cinema only works if you have time before or after the movie).
Another way to meet women in RL is to make sports. Go dancing. Best sport ofc is martial arts, some where groups are mixed gender. Karate, Aikido etc. even Judo is usually mixed gender. Or Caipoera, Escrima, Silat ... or simply do something exotic. There are plenty of sports where women train together with men. And like in everything: the amount of divorced or otherwise solo girls is in such an area just the same as everywhere else. Benefit: even if a women is slightly overweight, if they do sport they usually are attractive nevertheless (better muscles, more charisma, more self confidence).

> which means they must have looked at the photos to determine if they were attractive or not

That is quite an assumption. I can think of a ton of ways they could have an attractiveness measure without themselves digging into people's personal profiles. In fact, I did 5 seconds of googling and found this, which clearly suggests that they are asking other members to rate attractiveness of profile pictures: http://blog.okcupid.com/index....

> I know what people will say, they uploaded their photos to a web site and have no expectation of privacy.

They certainly don't have an expectation of privacy from their photo being seen by other users of the site. That's why they uploaded it! So what's the beef?

Not April's day joke. But a little bit misrepresentation. Prop 8. was about recognition of marriage by the state of California, it was not about whether or not same-sex marriage is legal or illegal. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Eich wants gay-couples to be outlawed.

From https://www.okcupid.com/

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid:

Google Chrome Internet Exploder Opera

They are not legally required to so why would they?

Because they can put it up on blog and make money out of ads? Because it works as a loss leader for their other paid services. Because it's cheap to publish these days and if you're going to do the research for your own curiosity why not publish?

Look at OkCupid. Publishing things like this

http://blog.okcupid.com/index....

Makes me like them a whole lot. Now I'm not really in the market for a US centric dating service but if I were I'd use them. Plus they could always write a book full of this sort of stuff.

Does everyone publish all their data? No of course not. Still the trend is that people increasingly do do it for the reasons mentioned.

A lot of men avoid overly-attractive women as they assume they're "high maintenance", and look for women in the next tier down (the "girl next door" type); they want someone who's attractive, but not so beautiful that they're going to be a PITA

I think you're right about the what but missed on the why. The reason men look for the "next tier down" women is that they're trying to reduce competition and maximize the "purchasing power" of their own attractiveness. Most of us realize we're not supermodel material and are looking for women who are flawed, but flawed in the right ways. Every flaw that we have, either male or female, will be a deal breaker for some and a non-issue for others. If you can find someone who has a number of flaws that are non-issues for you, you're essentially getting the perfect partner without having to be as perfect as you'd have to be to land someone without flaws.

One of the most interesting discussions about this subject is the OkCupid blog where they find that the women who get the most messages from men aren't the ones that get consistently ratings from men, regardless of how high those ratings are. The women that get contacted by men are the ones that consistently rate either very high or very low...it's the polarized opinions that matter. The example they cite is Kristin Bell vs Megan Fox...both, on average, are equally attractive, but one being far more polarizing than the other. Their contention is that Megan Fox, who many men simply aren't attracted to, would get far more attention from men despite the fact that Kristin Bell would almost universally be rated 4 out of 5 or higher.

Not that similar ... but http://okcupid.com/ already does a good job in matching people.
Also: this supermodell example is utter bullshit. Enough men just like an ordinary woman and enough women just want an ordinary man. How helpfull is a supermodell that is womitting twice a day and only wants sex once a week or a month?
There is much more to matching than just simple attractiveness.

"Outside of the norm" isn't synonymous with unattractive. In fact, it's been suggested that people with less-conventional features provoke more varied and extreme reactions, including both repulsion and extreme attraction.

Sure, your article proves your point and mine. Since it validates both claims, do you think it is worthwhile for either?

Realistically, there is a universal set for beautiful faces. Symmetry, 0.7 waist/hip ratio, accented cheekbones, eyes and diminished chin. And since we're discussing beauty, which many people believe to be subjective, you'll find just as many opinion pieces backed up by "science" as you will legitimate studies.

"Outside of the norm" isn't synonymous with unattractive. In fact, it's been suggested that people with less-conventional features provoke more varied and extreme reactions, including both repulsion and extreme attraction.

Methinks TFA is complaining about a problem that doesn't actually exist. At least from the male perspective, online dating has a great deal of friction.

Umwelt:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

Feminism is partially to blame. Many women feel entitled to good lives with plenty of thrill and whatnot so they simply dump their boring husbands who slave away 12hr/day to support the family (women initiate divorce in 70% of cases). Ever heard women saying men have it so good, they live their sweet patriarchical lives with obedient housewives, dinners every day, sex every evening and whatnot, yet whining that there are no good men willing to marry on the horizon? The truth is the marriage is an increasingly lousy deal for men. Due to decades of lobbying based on 'will somebody please think of the women', the law is heavily stacked against men, when they marry they are literally at the mercy of their wives. Wives are entitled to half of wealth just because, can get their husbands arrested on their word alone (domestic violence even if it didn't happen), in case of divorce get child custody (and have men by the balls if they ever want to see the children), child support and/or alimony (material situation of the man doesn't matter at all and he can be forced to pay more than he earns).

While it is somewhat true that marriage is not as good of a deal for men as it used to be, that is not entirely a bad thing. Women have more career options than they used to. When you have no way to survive without the marriage, you are less likely to initiate a divorce. But, it is true that women more often are awarded alimony and custody and such. But this may be because often men are making more money than their wives. Here is the paradox though. Women's value on the dating market peaks at age 21. Men's peak value on the dating market is at age 36. So, after the divorce, men stand a much higher chance of finding a better mate than women do. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/

I'm a web developer and the question was equally stupid to me. Hell, I know OkCupid runs just about everything in C or C++ (or did, not sure about now), mostly as they do an insane amount of mathematical calculation and need it uber-optimized.

Well she's a self-defined "drama queen" :

"(originally posted by Rachel Haywire, 2/12/09)
[...]
Here is to the drama queens. Those of us who had so many issues we pushed every last person away. Here is to the drama queens. Those of us who dared to direct and star in this experience of human tragedy as opposed to blindly sit around laughing at the semi-divine comedy. Here is to those of us who refused to define our existence by a false notion of singular identity. Here is to us.

We may be your dancing monkeys but at least we are dancing. We will know each other by the scars that we wear with pride. Drama should be looked upon with utmost respect. The greater the drama the greater the person. The greater the play.

There are few things that define the existential crisis of humanity better than drama. Why be dismissive of this crisis when we can passionately engage in it?"

Does anyone know where the idea that gays are more promiscuous comes from? Take a look at the first chart here: note that the gay and straight curves (indicating number of sexual partners) are almost exactly the same.

I love how your evidence for group think and self-delusion can cut both ways. Have you applied your critical thinking to your own beliefs, or just those of others? Are you really on the right side of the fence?

A quote from one of your links:

Many of the most promising healing modalities are not just ignored by conventional medicine; they are in fact ridiculed. Homeopathy comes to mind. Homeopathy is discredited simply because the defenders of conventional medicine have no understanding of the mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work

The mechanism is bullshit, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be completely false. This doesn't surprise anyone, because homepathic remedies are just water. At best, homepathic remedies might be good for rehydration, but aren't even that best at that, because real scientists understand what actually happens in the human body and have developed rehydration formulas that are better than water.

What homeopathy is good for is finding poor experimental methods. Anyone who can demonstrate different results between two treatments, where one is water, and the other is also water has fucked up something very badly.

LENR is another good example that demonstrates just how difficult it is to get calorimetric measurements right, especially at low energy levels. The Rossi team in Italy for example seem to have missed the detail that the energy contained in wet steam is something like one-tenth of the energy in dry steam. That error is all it takes to completely delude themselves and their investors. That they have ignored advice that pointed out this error and continued to believe in whatever they want to believe is exactly the point that I think you were trying to make. So, who's deluded? The Rossi team, or the scientists who politely explained that a key measurement is incorrect by an order of magnitude?

Before you reply, look at my educational link first: the economic argument.

All Rossi has to do is turn his machine into a loop so that it provides its own input energy, and sell the excess to the grid. He doesn't need investors, he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. Anyone with the slightest common sense sitting on 'free energy' technology would require less than a decade to start the 'Fusion Energy Electricity Company' and make billions.

So why are all the LENR advocates still poor? Is "the man" keeping them down? Or is it more likely that their machines simply fail to work?

Why aren't psychics making billions on the stock market, or millions at poker tournaments?

My favourite example is Astrology. When people use actual numbers, it has no results whatsoever.

You don't even need a business incentive, the scientific community regularly hands out Nobel prizes to people that can demonstrate that the mainstream thinking is wrong.

Right on the money. Read the various blog entries on the OKCupid dating site, in particular this one with the curve showing exactly what you just said. Their statisticians are really good at extracting meaning from their mass of user stats.

This doesn't exactly address prevalence of rape fantasies, but rather willingness to play out a rape fantasy if your partner asks, which is probably correlated. It's an interesting read (as is every post on that blog).

I'm not on OKcupid and I'm not looking for dates, but I read OKcupid's statistics blog regularly with a lot of pleasure. The guys who run the site have fascinating insight and great data analysis skills. And they are also good at explaining things simply. Well worth reading for geek minded people. Especially if they don't have a mate yet !!!

And perhaps you should know that it may not be the best idea all the time.

There is "prior art" for this idea, if you know where to look. OKCupid.com has has a crowd-sourced "flagmod" system for its Web site for years.

if you also depend on the okcupid website to meet people, perhaps berto is the answer to your dreams.

Have you ever seen a man attack a women physically even once? I lose count of the number of times I've seen it the other way around and I doubt your experience is different. It's just that we don't classify women-on-man violence as violence. A slap is the typical example - it's violence when a man does it and not violence when a woman does it. Violence from both genders is directed at men far more than at women. The reason you are confused on this issue is that violence against women is considered to be a more serious matter than violence against men, so the discussion is always about violence against women even though it's much rarer. Here's a great example of that:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-13906762.html
This story makes it out to be a travesty that women are now more than half as likely to be assaulted as a man is. It carefully avoids the fact that men are still more at risk than women. I can't be bothered to find the real data on this as I forgot the url, but here's something for you to read: (the numbers in there are too low because men don't report when they are abused) http://www.oregoncounseling.org/Handouts/DomesticViolenceMen.htm

As for men wanting young women and women preferring same age partners, I don't know what rock you must have been living under to not know that, but here's some data:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-woman/

I'm an Apple and I like to take it. No wonder iPhone users have more sex.

I agree on every point, and I'd like to echo your sentiments. It frustrated me to no end the total lack of regard PoF has for it's users. What few changes have been made to the site over the 4 years I've been on it have been to drive their paid services. They make money hand over fist from their advertisers and invest nothing of it to improve the experience for their users. Instead, they go out and make insane ad buys on every site imaginable. Such that if you have a PoF cookie on your system you're constantly assaulted with banner images asking, "HAS A CUTE GIRL MESSAGED YOU ON POF TODAY!?!?!" I can tell you, "NO THEY HAVEN'T, SO PLEASE STOP ASKING!"

I can't get so much as a reply to a polite and thoughtful message on PoF, whereas my OkCupid inbox is filled with so many unsolicited messages from worthwhile girls that I don't have time to answer them all. That, in addition to the great analysis they provide on the OkTrends blog, the matching algorithm, the user tools, and the fact that I found out about OkCupid through a job-posting on a FreeBSD mailing list, should be all that any nerd/geek needs to know about where to go for online dating.

Hopefully this latest incident on PoF is the beginning of the end for that PoS, and I'll do anything within my power to hasten its demise. I discovered some time ago that I could circumvent the language filters on PoF by using HTML entities. (I should be able to swear in my profile if I damn-well please, TYVM) Now I'm thinking it's time to bump it up a notch and truly abuse their feeble system. Any suggestions?

OkCupid's blog OkTrends has a nice post about age vs. political ideology: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-democrats-are-doomed-or-how-a-big-tent-can-be-too-big/

I'll just leave this here...

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/taijiren/journal

Apparently a study by OKCupid confirms that Kodak's EasyShare cameras are complete shite.

Anecdotally, my sister randomly bought one right before a trip (from Costco) a few years ago, and not only did her vacation pix suck, the damn thing broke in less than 2 months. The charger/connector looked like ass (a whole damn docking station) , and the whole thing just smacked of bad ideas mashed together without any market analysis or taste.

Perhaps it's because Kodak didn't want to jeapordize their film business or because the lenses were all made by the japanese companies anyway? If I had a choice of a decent dSLR from Kodak (back in 2003ish), I might have purchased one... I still have my original Canon Digital Rebel and it still takes awesome pictures with a fixed 50mm f1/8.

The description in the profile is perfectly him, and the last login date was 2006. Also, pictures of him never before seen.

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/HarryHarrison

http://www.okcupid.com/profile/HarryHarrison

...though you'll need an OKC account to view it. http://www.okcupid.com/profile/HarryHarrison

Actually, the pay sites are confidence game scams for the most part. OKCupid, which is free to use, and offers value add on an otherwise useful site (that is, rather than a broken, useless site that you pay to make work) that is free.

Anyway, their blog ripped apart the pay sites with their own numbers. The end conclusion... paying for online dating is for suckers.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/

Its absolutely scathing. Ok, they are a competing site, but, their assessment seems quite strong and correct.

-Steve

Well according to , iPhone users have more sex. Doesn't say if it's straight sex, but it's a pretty significant difference.

Ave. number of sexual partners @ age 30

That image says nothing about how much sex they are having.

Well according to , iPhone users have more sex. Doesn't say if it's straight sex, but it's a pretty significant difference.

One of the most interesting thing I ever read on the liberal vs conservative debate comes from a dating site which did analysis of its members: OkCupid blog. Take a look at the 1st diagram and the consequences: liberals belong to 3 varied groups of people while conservative are more unified... Probably explains why the US democrats never seem to get their things together while having 'better' ideas.

The research has been done!

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

They didn't miss it. They covered it in a different analysis.

REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.

The full analysis is here (scroll down a bit):

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/

    It would have been nice if they referenced the original article, and used known information about the site, it would have made things clearer.

    The sample set was 30 year old men and women. OKCupid is all about asking questions and matching people. There's no way to verify your answers. I could say "I've had thousands of sexual partners."

    The entire question becomes, how many partners would do you want to advertise that you've had? If you say too few, you may be a prude, an asshole, or just plain unattractive. If you say too many, you're a slut.

    So the chart simply shows that iPhone users tend to claim higher numbers, while Android and Blackberry users don't feel the need to compensate as much by claiming large numbers.

    Do I really need to say that I had sexual relations with well over a dozen women between the ages of 16 to 30? It's probably not in my best interest. Obviously lying and saying that I had only slept with a very small number would be bad. You want to convey the message that you're not a slut, but you also don't want to appear inexperienced. For guys, we won't find too many women who actively seek out virgins. Women tend to like to have partners that know what they're doing.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

OkCupid is a dating site that does its own research. Wired is just a thief. Way more info on OkCupid, fyi. For example, how to be attractive in photos.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/

An examination of 7000 dating profiles, looking at the number of contacts from the opposite sex based on their picture.

Slashdotters, don't forget the standard caveats of examining the results of any study, but this is an interesting read nonetheless.

You know that things would be different for me if I was a minority?

Yes, because I am one. I'm half Filipino.

I would not be where I am today if I was minority? You are basically directly implying that everyone that is not a minority is a racist or more directly that all whites are racists.

No, I'm saying that the fact that you're white gives you an advantage in the job market where they may prefer to hire whites.

Who is the racist in this conversation?

You are, you've got a problem with identifying the problems your race created.

Some minorities are brought up being told they will be a victim of racism and that it is a fact of life they must deal with on a daily basis.

Because they do.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

Sure, this is dating, but this is just one hell of an example.

I am not a minority and I've been in groups of people that made comments about minorities but I have NEVER heard of a decision being made because of race, they were nothing but ignorant comments the same as a group of men make a comment about some good looking secretary or make fun of a POS car someone drives or the fact that some loser is still wearing a members only jacket in 2010.

Like you're doing? You know nothing about white privilege. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege Yes, it's wikipedia, but it's a good start on the subject.

If there is some type of inside secret meetings where racism is discussed at a higher level, I have never been a part of it or witnessed it and I'm 40 years old and have been around.

Did you go to College? Did you happen to stop by the humanities department and check out the racial studies classes? Sociology perhaps?

Everyone single co worker I have ever worked with that was fired or let go around me I personally feel was justified because of job performance or because they were the last one in and the first one let go. I KNOW racism happens but it happens both ways people and it is no where near as prevalent as some minorities think it happens.

Great. You've got one datapoint but there are millions out there. Look at the data.

How are you going to get users to take the How Dutch Am I test before accessing the web page?

Easy.
Pirate Bay: "Welcome to Pirate Bay! The happiest site on earth! Are you Dutch?"
German Answers: Nien.
Pirate Bay: "You may pass"
Pirate Bay: "Welcome to Pirate Bay! The happiest site on earth! Are you Dutch?"
Japanese Answers: Iie.
Pirate Bay: "You may pass"
Pirate Bay: "Welcome to Pirate Bay! The happiest site on earth! Are you Dutch?"
Dutch Answers: Ja.
Pirate Bay: That'll be 30,001 euros for a day pass.

How are you going to get users to take the How Dutch Am I test before accessing the web page?