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The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
- reader5000 16y agoThose results are highly odd, but I don't think okcupid is mainstream enough to really glean any insight into racial psychology (if such a thing exists) from their data. Furthermore, they don't provide enough info on their analysis method, but I would be interested in seeing the results of a null-run: randomly assigning profiles to groups (rather than by race) and seeing what "statistically distinct" phrases arise (if the analysis is valid no phrases should arise). It would also be interesting to see them do the same analysis for other features such as height, income, photo attractiveness, etc. Similar analysis for craigslist personals by city: http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=42 http://blog.kiwitobes.com/?p=42
- narkee 16y agoThey do have an enormous sample size. Much, much larger than any rigorous scientific studies based on getting undergrads to fill out surveys. They've done similar analyses for things like self-reported heights, and photos: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online... http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/
- reader5000 16y agoNot really sure why this is getting upvoted and mine down, but it doesn't matter how large their sample size is since it's restricted to people who voluntarily sign up for an online dating website, specifically okcupid. As okc becomes more mainstream the data is more valid for the general population. But sample size is irrelevant here.
- narkee 16y agoFair enough. Although the data is presented in a non-rigorous, light-hearted manner, I guess a more accurate title would be "Stuff single, web savvy white people like"
- yalurker 16y agoInteresting read, a couple things come to mind though: how does "the people who have ok cupid profiles" vary against "the general population". Several things I suspect are skewed because of the population bias. Also, they say most of their users are urban, but I'm curious if people aren't prone to list themselves as the nearest big city rather than where they really live. For instance, I suspect everyone within 45 minutes of Des Moines is listing themselves as living there, rather than the tiny farm town / suburb they really live in.
- steveklabnik 16y agoGenerally, OKC's demographics are perceived as being college age, liberal, middle class, and alt friendly. I'm not sure they've ever directly posted demographic data, but that's their perceived demographic, at least.
- JohnnyBrown 16y agoAgreed. The white male info made me think "divorced 30-45 yo professional type" quite distinctly. (I'm a young white guy). Also, I bet this thread will get seriously contentious if not for the fact that the HN audience was depicted quite well there (based on my imaginary demographic profile of Hacker News).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- aristus 16y agoThat last stat about reading level bothers me. "Ok, before anyone gets offended about reading level vs race, let's show you a stat that confirms another stereotype: religious people are stupid! And atheists are smartest of all! Scientifically proven with a reading test based on the lengths of words, and metrics I just made up. And don't worry that almost half of the data points belie my analysis, ha ha ha, it confirms your prejudices, so it's ok!"
- superk 16y agoScientifically proven with a reading test based on the lengths of words, and metrics I just made up Actually they're using the Coleman-Liau Index, a computer readability formula going back to 1975.
- aristus 16y agoThe metric about adherence was made up and without explanation of how they categorized people. The Coleman-Liau Index is based on lengths of words, which proves... what, exactly? Many of the "most" religious people scored higher than the ones rated "meh". Also, agnostics are in the middle of the pack. So what does this chart predict? That certain self-selected religious categories in their dataset correlate with word length in the essays. Is that good statistics, or a confirmation of prejudices, ie, religious people are less intelligent? With all of those charts they passed over with "no comment", they saw fit to make a joke about a "Comic Sans Bible". It bothers me because it statistically shaky and baldly prejudiced. I would love to have a conversation about that, and I wish people would engage instead of downvote.
- moron4hire 16y agoI don't know if you've kept up with this OkCupid series, but there has always been an undercurrent of snide commentary towards Christians specifically and religious people in general. I especially "enjoyed" the break down by race. They admit that the site is primarily American in demographic, but there is no accounting for language proficiency being a barrier to entry to the site for users from non-English speaking cultures. If you care enough to learn English as a second language to the point where you can use OkCupid, then I expect you will learn to to a greater degree than a minimally literate, native English speaker.
- reader5000 16y agoEh their analysis method is not too hot. From the comments section: "The phrases included in the black boxes are the top 50 phrases most statistically correlated to that group. We calculated this as follows: 1. We calculated the frequency of every 1, 2, and 3 word phrase for the whole population. 2. We calculated those same frequencies within each race/gender pair. 3. For each phrase, we divided #2 by #1. 4. This is the propensity of a given group to use a given phrase. 5. The list you see is the phrases with the 50 highest ratios of #2/#1." So even if a group uses a phrase 1.001x more than the population average, it might still be listed, if there are no actual phrase-usage differences (i.e., all phrase ratios will be small, and the top 50 will be arbitrary).
- blahedo 16y agoIf they only use a phrase 1.001x more than the population average, it's going to be much further down on the list than the top 50, unless they use nearly every phrase less than the average (which, barring some extremely pathological outlier cases, is impossible).
- byrneseyeview 16y agoThey're talking about the top fifty such phrases. It seems unlikely that there would be a demographic group that is proportionately less likely to use any arbitrary phrase. The only possibility is for a group's phrase usage to be statistically indistinguishable from the average. Fortunately, we can perform a sanity check: read some of the phrases to someone, and ask that person which group they think the phrases came from. I bet people will guess with high enough accuracy to establish that it's nonrandom.
- reader5000 16y agoI'm not saying the results were random. I'm saying they're not really allowing for a "confidence interval" in how many more times a certain group uses a phrase than average. For example if black men use "soul food" 30x greater than average that seems like a solid result. But if it's only 1.01x more than average that seems like noise.
- cullenking 16y agoI found this, like most of the other blog posts by the OK Cupid team, pretty genius. I am glad the people who sit on top of this goldmine of social information have a good sense of humor. It would be cool to see a statistician guest post. The OK Cupid people are great at coming up with ideas for analysis, but I'd love to see some solid stats behind some of their analyses.
- jbooth 16y agoYeah Sox!! I'm taking this as scientific evidence that liking the Red Sox makes people more attractive.
- bmelton 16y agoConsidering this is based on profiles from users at a dating site, wouldn't the inverse be more likely?
- jbooth 16y agoWell, one could say it's perceived as attractive, since they're putting it on their profiles. Of course, I wasn't really attempting to make a serious point. And the Sox are in a distant 3rd in the AL East right now anyways, which presumably explains the downvotes :)
- steveklabnik 16y agoWhile normally, I'd agree with you, OKC has a high poly and hookup population, so normal relationship scarcity constraints do not necessarily apply.
- dnautics 16y agoIt's interesting, I am asian, like soul food, but it's not something that would occur to me as putting on my profile. Similarly, I would write sashimi (if I ate it anymore) versus sushi, and I suspect that non-asians like sashimi just fine but wouldn't know to put it on... So the statistics point to self-cultural broadcasting, I think, more than preferences.
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y agoOn the other hand this is a data point. Knowing that the stuff you like with fish is called "sashimi" and the rice stuff is called "sushi" is a good indicator that you are asian. Just like knowing that different types of cheese should actually taste different is a good indicator that you are european.
- ovi256 16y ago>Just like knowing that different types of cheese should actually taste different is a good indicator that you are european. This is what prolonged exposure to soylent green does to you. Just kidding, we love Americans.
- Natsu 16y ago> Knowing that the stuff you like with fish is called "sashimi" and the rice stuff is called "sushi" is a good indicator that you are asian. Probably true statistically, but there are plenty of non-Asians like me who know the difference (sashimi is the raw fish, sushi is that which has sushi rice). But I'll never show up on their tests because I don't have an OKCupid profile and neither food is a favorite (they're okay, but definitely not favorites).
- eru 16y agoContinental European. (OK, the British have Stilton.)
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoI didn't know what "soul food" meant until I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Looking over the list[0], I see a number of things I greatly enjoy, but I'd normally just call it "food", or possibly "Southern food". I'm from the lower part of California's central valley, which has a distinctly Southern influence due to the dustbowl migration. My town is roughly 40% Hispanic, 45% White, and 5% Pacific Islander, so if the term is only widely used among the black population, it's no wonder I've never heard it. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soul_food_items http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soul_food_items
- superk 16y agoI thought it was interesting how the largest countries aren't the most nationalistic - no Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan, etc.. I also came away with an identity crisis - #1 good food (Soul) and seeing Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco and Talib Kwali in the top "stuff"... dammit I might be black. -
- powrtoch 16y agoOn the proper use of this data: Perhaps the easiest way to think of it is that the phrases are predictors for the race/sex, not the other way around. For example, you shouldn't expect every white male you meet to like Van Halen. However if someone says to you "I have a friend who's a big Van Halen fan", you're pretty safe in assuming that the friend is a white male. Likewise, it might be that only 10% of blacks like soul food. But if almost no other demographics like it, it will still show up high on their list. So "is black" does not strongly imply "loves soul food", but "loves soul food" does strongly imply "is black". In other words, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_theorem
- moultano 16y agoFor that reason, I'd be happier if they sorted by KL Divergence instead of just log-odds. That'd give a much better tradeoff between commonality and predictive power.
- lazyjeff 16y agoYou have a valid point but I'm guessing they avoided kl-divergence because it's 1) harder to explain 2) it's not symmetric, e.g. kl(asian, white) != kl(white, asian) 3) it needs a smoothing function for comparing distributions where not every element is in both distributions.
- lurchpop 16y agoa commenter on there made a good point about the "soul food" term, where that's also the name of a movie, book and tv series so it ends up being 3 (probably black) data points all counting towards 1.
- ttdi 16y agoI'm really surprised by how they didn't mention one of the most striking results from the data: Latinos on OKCupid are much more likely to have the word "stationed" in their profile than other demographics. Based on this, it looks like the military contains a large proportion of Latinos ("stationed in [location]"). What are the demographics of the military versus the general population?
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y agoAccording to http://www.armyg1.army.mil/HR/docs/demographics/FY05%20Army%20Profile.pdf http://www.armyg1.army.mil/HR/docs/demographics/FY05%20Army%... Army: White 63.9%, Black 19.0%, Hispanic 10.3%, Asian 3.8% USA: White 75%, Black 12%, Hispanic 15%, Asian 4% So hispanic is underrepresented in the army and black over represented - of course you would have to balance these by age profile for each group and also consider US overseas territories that can join the army.
- haroldp 16y agoMaybe we looked at the wrong service, since the latino profile also mentioned "marines": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HispanicMilitary.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HispanicMilitary.jpg
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y agoSorry not American - didn't realize army didn't include marines.
- sesqu 16y agoAccording to this 2007 report on marines: http://www.cna.org/documents/D0016910.A1.pdf http://www.cna.org/documents/D0016910.A1.pdf Young blacks became underrepresented after the Iraq wars, but high NCO ranks are still heavily overrepresented. Conversely, marine accessions are on the rise for young hispanics, and they are now slightly overrepresented. High NCO ranks are underrepresented, but diminishingly so. So this is definitely a trend, but not a major one. Those mentions may have more to do with what contributes to the trend than be caused by it.
- proemeth 16y agoJudging by the stats (The Red Sox), we have strong US East Coast bias (due to user base).
- Lukeas14 16y agoI noticed this as well and came to the same conclusion considering I've never met a single Red Sox fan on the left coast. Although, it could be that east coasters all rally around one team, where as we're split between the Dodgers and the Giants, which would present a false bias.
- lanstein 16y agoYou have now.
- acon 16y agoReally interesting, but isn't this more about what white people want other people to think that they like, rather than what they actually like. It would be interesting to compare this to what they actually like, but I have no idea how to get that data.
- josefresco 16y agoFacebook maybe? And I don't mean pulling information from a profile but rather gleaning clues from status updates and comments. I would love to see a public vs private list of works these people would assign to themselves.
- patio11 16y agoThere's just so much that they execute well on that I hate to pick any bit of it, but one thing everybody with linkbait should probably do is create something spiritually similar to the bar which pops up when you're done with the article. It is a force multiplier for all pillar content you write, it increases the viral factor, and the way it grabs someone's attention just when their brain is known to be vacant is sixteen flavors of brilliant. I did something very similar for a client today, and after I get a little better at manipulating code to do it, I'm probably going to try something similar for getting trial signups. ("Looks like you're done reading about it. Feeling confused about what to do next? WHAM, signup box.")
- theycallmemorty 16y agoI too was intrigued by them and thought to myself just a week ago: "Those popup-at-the-bottom-of-the-page things are brilliant. I should email the Bingo guy and get him to A/B test them."
- patio11 16y agoI am rather more receptive to receiving that email than most companies would be, and if it comes with an offer to create MIT-licensed Javascript/CSS to make the UI happen, I'd probably have it live within an hour of receiving the code. That same test has been on my agenda since at least April, but front end is my weakest skill, so I keep pushing it back. I've got two partial implementations where I tried to follow tutorials and they just blew up on me. (I just starting scheming and dreaming about hire #1 yesterday, and it will almost certainly be a front end guy.)
- tuesdays 16y agoInteresting, I was thinking the exact opposite, since those bars are all super annoying.
- Perceval 16y agoI'm the same way. Whenever I encounter one, I tool around in AbBlock Plus for a while until I find the appropriate scripts to block.
- dasil003 16y agoIt struck me as sort of funny that the minority each had a common self-description (cool, funny, simple), but the closest thing white guys have is "I'm a country boy".
- alexophile 16y agoI doubt I'm alone here, but when confronted with the "insert fucking theory" I promptly went through the list of what white people like, inserting "fucking" anywhere I could... "Groundhog Fucking Day" kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
- awongh 16y agoseventh word for asian males: software developer....
- sjtgraham 16y agoI am white and like none of those things other than guitar and software. I suspect the case is similar for most of the HN readership. This should be called "what the lowest common denominator like"
- colinprince 16y agoRe; "I am cool" being in the top phrases. Could be used in a sentence, like "I am cool with that". Jus saying.
- mkyc 16y agohttp://stats.grok.se/en/201009/Soul_food http://stats.grok.se/en/201009/Soul_food