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Alicorn comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - Less Wrong
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I don't specify my salary because if a woman bases her decision on my salary, I don't want to be with her.
Your logic is understandable, but it's the same logic people (particularly women) might use to leave off profile pictures - "gosh, if my scintillating personality won't cut it for Guy X, then I guess I don't want Guy X."
Salary (and looks) can be factors without being dealbreakers. Will I refuse to consider a guy because he's too much taller than me, or isn't currently making any money, or if he declares wooly spiritual beliefs, even if he's otherwise hot/responsible/sane? No. Does failing to disclose these items annoy me? Yes.
For most of us males, I think that looks certainly can be a dealbreaker, and someone who wants to find a male for whom it cannot be a dealbreaker is looking for a very unusual man.
Stats on OKCupid are either something about the person that you would enjoy in and of itself, or they're proxies for something about them you'd enjoy. Appearance is, by and large, something you'd enjoy directly, and there's no opprobrium attached to that enjoyment (except possibly in some subcultures I'm not so familiar with, I guess?).
Salary is, at best, a proxy for some other trait you'd enjoy, like intelligence, social competence, discipline, or whatever. However, it's a very loose proxy, and most of the things it's a proxy for have better indicators: a picture showing rock hard abs implies discipline better than a salary of $250K; the profile writing itself implies the intelligence level of the writer better than salary. This means that insisting on salary seems to imply that it's a trait, like appearance, that the person would want to enjoy directly, and our culture has many unflattering things to say about someone who primarily wants to enjoy the wealth of their date or partner. So, even for people who make something near the average of incomes in their cohort may leave off their salary, reducing by a bit the information provided to those like you who see it as a minor factor, while greatly reducing the risk of falling for someone who just wants access to their bank account.
The words "primarily" and "just" here seem to me unwarranted. Things can be important without being the only important thing.
I also think you're displaying little imagination about the usefulness of salary as information. For example, OKC has many questions about (and another sidebar slot for) persons' interests in/preexisting status regarding children. There are questions about marriage, etc. - lifestyle stuff. Salary is a factor in what kinds of lifestyles are available! Somebody who is trying the radical experiment of life off the grid by attempting to live off barter and urban farming without the use of filthy money isn't for me, any more than someone who abhors the institution of marriage and never wants children would be for me. Those lifestyles are not compatible with what I want.
Or to be yet more specific: Currently, I live with roommates who don't expect me to pay rent because I cook tasty food and do some cleaning. This is sort of like being a house spouse without the "spouse" part, and you know what? I like it as much as I thought I would! It suits me very well! I'd like to go on with this sort of lifestyle, barring the insistent knock of implausible opportunity, even after I settle into a long-term relationship. But the thing is - this arrangement only works with someone else funding the operation. People who cannot fund that operation (which funding doesn't take pockets with extradimensional space in them, just a steady and livable income) are not offering a lifestyle that is maximally appealing to me. That's a factor, even an important factor, without being a matter of me just wanting to dive into a potential match's wallet.
Understood. You've convinced me to put my salary back on my OKC profile.
Book you might be interested in: Home Comforts by a woman who takes all aspects of making a good place to live seriously.
That looks really neat! Wishlisted for later. :)
If under salary someone wrote "Enough to comfortably support a family", would that be enough information for you?
OKC doesn't support that in the sidebar, but supposing it did, that would be... peculiar, but considerably better than leaving it blank. I might ask in a message (if the profile otherwise passed muster) why a description was provided in lieu of a number (unless, hypothetically, descriptions rather than numbers were customary), but as descriptions go it would be very promising.
Just for another data point: As someone who also stated a preference for having that information available, I would find this sufficient. The description would have to be pretty specific, though--the idea is to get a sense of what kind of lifestyle the person's finances permit.
For young people, I doubt that “salary now” is such a strong factor in “kinds of lifestyles available by the time I'd want to start a family”. (Here in Italy, ISTM that most relationships start when people are still in university or younger, when their salary is zero or close to zero, and most people old enough to make more than $20,000/year already are in long-term relationships; I'm guessing it's not the same in America?)
ETA: disregard this comment, it's completely wrong because of my poor knowledge of English.
I thought some more and don't understand your point about factors vs dealbreakers. There's no distinction. If including salary on my profile will make more women message me, then salary was a dealbreaker for those women. A factor that doesn't make or break any deals has zero importance.
Let me see if I can rephrase usefully. (I suspect you just aren't using the word "dealbreaker" conventionally.)
Imagine that people who look at your profile are scoring you, with some traits worth points of various amounts (positive or negative). If you've mentioned enough things that earn you points and left out enough things that cost you points, you may get scored high enough that you get a message. Leaving your income off might lose you points, but you could probably make it up in other areas. For instance, I'd estimate that the "point" cost I assign guys on OKC for leaving income blank can be approximately compensated for if they announce that they want to have children someday. The guy who leaves out income but wants kids does about as well with me as the guy who says he makes some modest amount of money and doesn't mention children anywhere.
A dealbreaker is a different thing. It's negative infinity points. It doesn't matter what else you put on there if you also advertise a dealbreaker (there is no corresponding "plus infinity points" here) - it doesn't offset or compensate for positive traits, it renders them irrelevant. For instance, I wouldn't ever date a guy who smoked cigarettes. This doesn't change even if he looks like Sean Maher and has every nice thing to say in the world about marriage and children and we have identical tastes in music and he lives a block away and he's a vegetarian and we're a 99% match according to our questions and every paragraph in his profile is a masterpiece of humor and insight - smoking gets him a big ewwww, and while I'll wince as I close the tab, I will not message him unless it's to tell him that I wish he'd quit.
If more women message you when you start advertising your income, some of them might be doing so because you removed a dealbreaker. I would expect far more of them to be doing so because you've crossed a point threshold.
I came across a profile once that had a scoring game in the "message me if" field. Specifically, it was a list of traits the author found desireable, numbered by powers of two, and an invitation to send him the sum of the traits which applied to the reader. I was pretty amused by that.
I wonder how many potential matches know enough maths to realize why he used powers of two?
I suspect most of the ones who played the game at all.
I want to marry that person!
Thanks. Sorry. I shoulda thought a little more before making that comment.
Please tell me you were just joking/making a point and you've never actually messaged a stranger on OkC solely to tell them to quit smoking. :-)
I've never actually done this, no.
A dealbreaker is something that on its own automatically rules someone out. A factor is something that swings the overall impression positively or negatively but is not on its own a deciding factor independent of other factors.
Women are welcome to use any sort of logic and accept the consequences, just as I accept the consequences of my own choice. Filtering away many "unsuitable" women at the cost of annoying some "suitable" ones is a tradeoff I'm okay with. Can you argue that including my salary on my profile will make me better off overall, not just with respect to you?
That probably depends on your salary and the details of the preferences that caused you to leave it off (i.e. who exactly you hope to be filtering out/filtering in).