taw comments on Shortness is now a treatable condition - Less Wrong

9 Post author: taw 20 October 2009 01:13AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 21 October 2009 02:21:43PM *  6 points [-]

Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:

We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn't reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.

Comment author: taw 21 October 2009 04:23:42PM 0 points [-]

They were measuring person-attractiveness, not picture-attractiveness.

Reply rates depend on what person's profile says, how they act in messaging etc. A black person with similar picture-attractiveness and height will be much less overall attractive than a white person.

Feel free to ask them for uncorrected data, or picture-attractiveness by race, the effect might very well turn out to be even stronger.