I will say that running a dating site just broadly breeds a certain amount of cynicism
in a person so I can't say I was shocked exactly.
OKCupid is a dating site.
There's no reason for you to have ever heard of it if you've been married for ten years.
Or you have that special kind of marriage.
What we get on OKCupid is basically the data of the first impression.
The grist of it, the things we have to grind out findings from is just huge tables.
Imagine a text file that never ends.
That's basically what these databases are.
It's like a social science experiment in that you get findings
that seem like they're from a social science experiment
because you find out how many people say they believe in God and then do or don't believe in the death penalty.
Or, have sex on the first date. Any of this kind of crap.
Because dating is so personal, you get more of the person in the data.
We have this very old school vibe where we ask you questions about yourself that you long answer.
I think the questions literally asking you for a self summary, what you like to do on a Friday night,
what your favorite movies are, the first thing people notice about you.
These sort of open ended text things that you don't really see that much on the internet anymore.
Then you look at the words that are most unique to any of these groups.
You know, white women or latino guys or whatever.
You can get pretty interesting stuff by distilling it down along those lines.
You find the hardest core cliches that you can imagine.
So, this is what the algorithm spit out for all the four ethnicities and the two sexes.
It's so perfectly stereotypical, it's something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch almost.
For white dudes, you get stuff like "Huntin'" and "Fishin'". Blue eyes, blond hair, red hair.
For black dudes, you get dreads, you get neo-soul and Jamie Foxx.
For asian guys, the number one phrase is "tall for an asian."
Then you get, you know, Taiwanese, Chinese, that kind of ethnic descriptor.
People ask me a lot, what's the most exciting or surprising thing you found in the data.
The thing that I'm consistently surprised about is ironically how very stereotypical people are in aggregate.
In addition to race and gender, we obviously have people's age.
That's another thing that's very important in dating in general.
If a women is 25, she thinks 25-year-old guys are the best looking.
If she's 35, she thinks 35-year-old guys are the best looking.
If she's 20, 20.
So, there's kind of a nice parity up until the 40s.
You do sense kind of a psychological barrier around a 40-year-old guy for whatever that's worth.
But, guys basically -- whether a guy is 20, 25, 30, 50
They think 21, 20, 22. It's just all super young. Those are their hottest ages.
Guys will always send the hottest women on any given page the message.
Which means that everybody else gets ignored and that one person gets tons and tons of messages, so she's like I got to get out of here.
This is ridiculous, I'm gone.
Then it's the next hottest and the next... So, it's a very bad cycle
because then the guys don't get replies. So, we're always trying to mitigate this thing here.
So, we measure attractiveness very actively.
It kind of factors in subtlety to a lot of the site.
The racial picture isn't the most pleasant one.
It's definitely what you would expect if you're a very cynical person.
So, black users get a blanket -- both men and women -- 25% discount in terms of replies they get,
volume of messages they get, level of rating that they get from other users.
That's from not only whites, but asians and latinos.
You can ask people directly, "What do you think about interracial dating?"
You'll almost always get a, "Oh, that's something I'm totally cool with."
Or whatever. This attitude.
When they have to verbalize it. But, the way they act is definitely different than that.
Racial attitudes are so broad. It's not just this core of kind of racists just no, no, no, no, no.
Then, throwing off everyone else's more even handed votes.
It's pretty universal. People are vain and predictable and kind of stupid and kind of racist.
But, they're also very nice and smart and all the other things that are the opposite of those things.
Just very complex and that's what I love about this data.
You can examine the complexity in its fullness.
The goal in looking through all this data is to put a few numbers behind the mysteries of life.
As that occurred to me, it also occurred to me that a new tagline for OKCupid would be, "Making the ineffable totally F-able."
So, there.