
OkCupid data shows who you should message by age, and it's not who you'd think - dalequark
https://theblog.okcupid.com/undressed-whats-the-deal-with-the-age-gap-in-relationships-3143a2ca5178
======
program_whiz
The key here is the number of responses. The "rate" is high (so say 70% of 25
yo males respond to 50 yo women), but the actual number of occurences is low
(1% of time time messages were sent). That means 99% of messages were a more
typical situation (older men, younger women). I think a good anology is
professional tennis. The claim that "older tennis players win more than
younger players" would have similar graphs, since the ones that stuck around
to play at 40 tend to win more than the average 20 year old tennis player.
That may be true, but only because a small handful of prodigy-level tennis
players (Agassi, Sampras) will remain (because they can still win) to play by
the age of 40, while 10s of thousands of tennis players who are "pretty good"
will be in the typical ranks of major tennis tournaments in their 20s, and
phase out of the league as they age because they are no longer successful. I
think that shows that this article is a case of survivorship bias. Women who
have what it takes at 50 to attract a 25 year old guy (high energy, good
looks, money, personality, etc.) will do so, while 99% of women would fail,
but they aren't in the measurement pool because they already figured that out
5 years ago. One other observation, there's a big difference between "date"
(which in this case probably means sleep with, since its one conversation) and
"have a relationship", which is totally different. Lets see a comparison of
e-harmony or match (more geared to relationships), vs "single conversation" on
plenty of fish, or ok cupid (more geared to hookup culture). Or for that
matter, lets see how these encounters panned out in 3 months. My guess is most
20 yo guys aren't in a long-term-relationship with 55 yo women, even if they
are willing to hook up with pretty much any decent looking female.

------
usgroup
It looks more likely to me that someone made a calculation mistake. So easy to
mess up an aggregation. But IMO, if the output is unexpected it's usually
because you've done it wrong rather than because you've discovered that 30
year old men secretly prefer 65 year old women :)

~~~
maxander
Did you read the article? She finds that the typical pattern of men dating
younger women is _true_ , merely that there are more exceptions than one might
expect, and that older women have decent success rates with younger men. Note
that "younger men respond better to older women than older men do" doesn't in
the slightest imply that younger men prefer older women to younger women, or
even that older women _prefer_ older men. Despite the headline, it's not
shocking. And since OkCupid publishes lots of these "response rates by
category" blog articles, I'd imagine they have the math down by now. (Not that
they're exactly doing statistical validation on this, but still.)

~~~
usgroup
Check out the heatmap! 25yo respond to 50yo more than any other age if she
make the first move!

~~~
program_whiz
The key here is the number of responses. The "rate" is high (so say 70% of 25
yo males respond to 50 yo women), but the actual number of occurences is low
(1% of time time messages were sent). That means 99% of messages were a more
typical situation (older men, younger women).

I think a good anology is professional tennis. The claim that "older tennis
players win more than younger players" would have similar graphs, since the
ones that stuck around to play at 40 tend to win more than the average 20 year
old tennis player. That may be true, but only because a small handful of
prodigy-level tennis players (Agassi, Sampras) will remain (because they can
still win) to play by the age of 40, while 10s of thousands of tennis players
who are "pretty good" will be in the typical ranks of major tennis tournaments
in their 20s, and phase out of the league as they age because they are no
longer successful.

I think that shows that this article is a case of survivorship bias. Women who
have what it takes at 50 to attract a 25 year old guy (high energy, good
looks, money, personality, etc.) will do so, while 99% of women would fail,
but they aren't in the measurement pool because they already figured that out
5 years ago.

One other observation, there's a big difference between "date" (which in this
case probably means sleep with, since its one conversation) and "have a
relationship", which is totally different. Lets see a comparison of e-harmony
or match (more geared to relationships), vs "single conversation" on plenty of
fish, or ok cupid (more geared to hookup culture). Or for that matter, lets
see how these encounters panned out in 3 months. My guess is most 20 yo guys
aren't in a long-term-relationship with 55 yo women, even if they are willing
to hook up with pretty much any decent looking female.

------
arjie
I didn't know the OkCupid blog was operational. I thought match nixed it.
Thanks!

