DSimon comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: DSimon 22 January 2012 05:10:32PM *  6 points [-]

Sorry, I should have linked the article earlier instead of just the chart.

On sample size: Keep in mind that it isn't couples that are being looked at here, just comparisons between users' self-reports. Specifically, each question has two answers: The user's self-report, and what they would want a potential date to answer. The compatibility percentage is based on matching from A's wants to B's reports and vice-versa.

For the article, data was collected from a randomly selected pool of 500,000 straight users. The gender balance among straight users is about 60% men, 40% women, so that's about 25,000 men in each row and 17,000 women in each column. So each cell has about 400 million comparisons.