Given how much you have to say about it, have you considered just writing your own post as a followup? It would be easier to keep track of. :)
I’ve heard about the male/female difference in prioritization of looks/personality, but I hadn’t made the connection to the relative importance of different profile content. That’s definitely worth noting.
I’m wary of a common trap here, though. Broad heuristics are extremely valuable, if and only if no more specific heuristics are available. So, yes, it’s nice to have statistical data about all women everywhere … but if you can find out more about the kind of woman you personally want to date, that’s going to be more useful. People who are inclined towards precision and rationality are very rightly inclined to use information from well-analyzed studies over anecdotes of individuals. However, when the anecdote can give very specific information and the study cannot, the tradeoff may not be so simple.
To take a trivial example: If you know that Chez X is the most popular and highest-rated restaurant in your city, but a mutual friend tells you that your would-be date really wants to try Cafe Y, which are you going to suggest for the evening out? Okay, now what if a nationwide study concludes that most women like to see movies on dates, but all the women you know in your town prefer going dancing? As the breadth of the study subjects and the breadth of the anecdotal subjects converge, the study will have better data. Somewhere between there and the trivial example, there’s a line, and on the trivial example’s side of that line, you’re better off trusting your friend.
Perhaps one of the errors in my post was assuming that people on LW are seeking partners more like the sort of person who posts out on LW, and less like the average OKCupid member sampled on OKTrends.
Given how much you have to say about it, have you considered just writing your own post as a followup? It would be easier to keep track of. :)
I’ve heard about the male/female difference in prioritization of looks/personality, but I hadn’t made the connection to the relative importance of different profile content. That’s definitely worth noting.
I’m wary of a common trap here, though. Broad heuristics are extremely valuable, if and only if no more specific heuristics are available. So, yes, it’s nice to have statistical data about all women everywhere … but if you can find out more about the kind of woman you personally want to date, that’s going to be more useful. People who are inclined towards precision and rationality are very rightly inclined to use information from well-analyzed studies over anecdotes of individuals. However, when the anecdote can give very specific information and the study cannot, the tradeoff may not be so simple.
To take a trivial example: If you know that Chez X is the most popular and highest-rated restaurant in your city, but a mutual friend tells you that your would-be date really wants to try Cafe Y, which are you going to suggest for the evening out? Okay, now what if a nationwide study concludes that most women like to see movies on dates, but all the women you know in your town prefer going dancing? As the breadth of the study subjects and the breadth of the anecdotal subjects converge, the study will have better data. Somewhere between there and the trivial example, there’s a line, and on the trivial example’s side of that line, you’re better off trusting your friend.
Perhaps one of the errors in my post was assuming that people on LW are seeking partners more like the sort of person who posts out on LW, and less like the average OKCupid member sampled on OKTrends.