Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

NancyLebovitz

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

If people haven't you should read the OKtrends blog, especially about what makes a good picture (good quality camera etc).

Also a bit about what people are looking for dating wise would be useful. Generally that is too dull to put in the profile itself, but required for advice I think.

My profile is currently moth-balled, and not really designed to be attractive (I did get accused of being narcissus, which put me off making it more attractive). I found it horrendously addictive interacting with people and looking at the breadth of humanity and their hopes and dreams.

If not people are nosy, I will divulge my okc identity via private message. I am also quite happy to give out awards, if people want them. Or just look at your visitor list for the guy with the round blue sunglasses on.

I like the OkTrends blog; the analysis is more casual than scientific, of course, but the content is stuff that I was really interested to learn.

Also, as a more general point, I think that non-scientific but enormous back-of-the envelope calculations (like OkTrends) are a good supplement to tiny but scientifically designed studies. If the big&sloppy approach and the little&precise approach give completely different results, that's cause for further investigation. Pre-Internet, we didn't have the opportunity to do that much big&sloppy statisti... (read more)

3Wei Dai16y

The author of that blog seems to give advice based purely on statistical correlation without making any effort to distinguish between correlation and causation. See this post for example.

4Relsqui16y

While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages--basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you're female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you're male--but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than "UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.") Similarly, knowing that "vegetarian" is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren't one. Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you're trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn't roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don't. If you don't believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW's readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They're not all inane, but ... (I suppose I'm making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I'm wrong, feel free to disregard.) By the way, just in case you don't feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I've seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn't make the stunt any less scummy. Don't get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actu

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Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

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Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

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