Men’s Rights Redditors find “ebonics” hilarious

(Also, an economic institute is not a social science institute, to refrain from the usual scathing critique of economists that social scientists usually have ready for them)

Science also states that Mr. Buttons has the smallest little nose of any cat in the world.

@Kendra

I LOVE Patrick Warburton. Dude’s voice is just MADE for comedy

To riff off of Shadow’s point, demonstrating an evolutionary heritage for psychological development of traits influenced by genetics isn’t on firm ground when you don’t have 99.99% of past human generations of people available to include in your sample – even if there are more people alive now than at any previous point in the past.

*because of

dang it

Ruby: Oh, so now it’s psudo-science if you don’t like the results? Studies from America, Austria, and Germany aren’t enough to convince you if you don’t want to believe it.

OK… one more time.

These

Studies.

It’s not that we are dismissing studies because we don’t like them, it’s because YOU AREN’T GIVING US ANY FUCKING STUDIES TO READ.

Honestly, I don’t even need these studies to know women are more attracted to men of means, like I don’t need a study to tell me that men are more attracted to beautiful women.

Which is the real crux of it. You don’t give a shit about the science, you’ve made up your mind, so any goddamned thing that supports you; EVEN WHEN IT’S BULLSHIT, is good enough.

I take back what I said to Red Locker.

You are worse than our run of the mill asshats. They at least pretend to be persuadable. Even NWO will respond to what one has said. It’s the same old gibberish, but he tailors it to the most recent response to get his attention.

You don’t. You just repeat yourself. No one has “come to their senses” and decided you understand science, and have figured out what it is what women want, so you just keep saying, “YOU WON’T LISTEN TO ME BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO FACE THE TRUTH!”, all the while saying that you don’t need to read any studies to tell you what you already know.

To which there is only one reply, Eppur si muove

I first liked Doad because he listened to peppermint patties.

In this light, our focus on inferring revealed preferences from the actions of dating site users may be seen as akin to implicit association tests (IATs) used in social psychology to study racial attitudes and stereotyping.

Inferring… not that there was an explicit statement as to what was going on, but the researchers; who admit to having a model in mind, looked at the data to see if it fit.

Not a test, but a glorfied, “gut check”.

They admit, at the outset that there may be more than one explanation for their results.

However, as pointed out by Kalmijn (1998) and others, several distinct mechanisms can account for the observed sorting patterns, and it is difficult to distinguish between the alternative explanations.

This environment allows us to use a straightforward estimation strategy based on the assumption that a user contacts a partner if and only if the potential utility from a match with that partner exceeds a threshold value (a “minimum standard” for a mate).

This where the problem of three economists attempting to make an anthropological judgement comes in. They are assuming the actor are 1: “rational” and 2: that they can judge the criteria being used to make the “threshold value” judgements.

It also assumes the desires in a dating site is finding a “mate”, not a person to date/shag for awhile.

From sociological studies, based on the number/nature of responses women get, it is not clear the men are, by and large, engaging in any more refined sorting mechanism than, “she’s not too old for me”.

For example, we calculate the additional income that black, Hispanic, and Asian men need to be as desirable to a white women [sic] as a white man.

They can’t show this. If we assume that people are more likely to find partners attractive who are in their race (debatable, there is strong evidence that the people who surround children in the period of time they are imprinting the idea of “attractive” is more important than their own race) then the people who are interested in dating outside their “in-group” are outliers. Being significantly off the mean makes it impossible to rule out the confounding variables.

It certainly isn’t possible to do it from response rates in an online dating site.

Most closely related and complementary to our analysis, both in terms of the focus on revealed preferences and the methodological approach, are two studies by Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica and Simonson (2005, 2006) that utilize data from speed-dating experiments conducted at Columbia University. Their results on gender differences and in particular same-race preferences are remarkably similar to ours, which is especially surprising given the different samples employed in our and their studies (Fisman et al. use a subject pool composed of graduate students). The research design of Fisman et al. has the advantage of eliciting information regarding match-specific components of utility (e.g. the perceived degree of shared interests) that are not observable in our data.

So… a study which wasn’t based on income shows similar results, in terms of ratios of outgroup dating… so they assume that means income is the controlling factor. The use of, “especially surprising” is research speak for, “completely against our predictions”.

Again, this is a problem with economists doing anthropology (and a distinct problem with economists from the University of Chicago, given the influence of Steven J. Levitt), everything becomes an economic transaction.

For example, a man with a low attractiveness rating may not approach a highly attractive woman if the probability of forming a match with her is low, such that the expected utility from a match is lower than the cost of writing an e-mail or the disutility from a possible rejection. In that case, his choice of a less attractive woman does not reveal his true preference ordering. A priori, we expect that strategic behavior or fear of rejection should be most pronounced with respect to physical attractiveness. However, our analysis in Section 4 does not reveal much evidence for such strategic behavior.

Again, they say they expect a given behavior, and then say they can’t show this behavior is taking place.

I’m only on page five here. I don’t think this study really shows what you think it does.

Even if they are right, as to the behavior of women in the US, it doesn’t mean it’s genetic. These are economists, they are making a market-based assessment of the percieved utility of dating people. They are not making claims about the cause of such a result.

Which, of course, brings us to Cassandra’s prognostication. You’ve found a study. It doesn’t say what you say it does.

You will now throw a tantrum

You will throw a tantrum BECAUSE YOU’VE NOT READ A WORD WE’VE SAID ABOUT HOW SCIENCE WORKS.

Holy crap, how is Ruby still going?

Ruby: if you want to post another link to attempt prove your point, please, please make it a link to an actual study. Not an article. Not a video. Not Oprah. Not the Daily Mail. An actual write-up of an actual study. Those links you are posting are not studies. Okay?

Now, on to more fun topics.

What attracted YOU to your partner?

What first attracted me was, appropriately enough, joining forces with him to chew out sexist idiots on an internet forum that we’d both frequented for a while. He was hilariously snarky, and we got to chatting after verbally smacking the morons around for a while, and ended up talking for hours. He never stopped being a complete pleasure to talk to. (And he’s still great at eviscerating dumbasses – one of these days I should see if he wants to stop by here. He’d probably have fun with the local trolls.)

I was originally attracted to my girlfriend because she has a teacup tattoo on her neck, my boyfriend because he had a Touch Me I’m A Save Point button on his bag, and my partner because someone described him as “he’s incredibly kind and has incredibly long hair.”

ozy… why are you analysing the studies?

Didn’t you see there was a scientist involved… they are irrefutable.

My initial attraction to my partner was totally physical. He used to walk by my desk on his way to his own office. He had cute glasses, and a nice smile. But, hey, I’m physically attracted to lots of people, that’s not enough to get me thinking about starting something. No, what really sparked my interest was when I heard him talking to clients on the phone. He had the world’s best phone voice: considerate, easy-going, good-humoured. It was a phone voice that said “I’m a genuinely nice person,” and a nice person was exactly what I was looking for at that point in my life. Also, the sound of it was just plain sexy. What eventually brought us from mutual attraction to a first date was a very passionate discussion about Game of Thrones. Now, I think he’s the sexiest person in the world.

As it happens, my boyfriend is in better shape financially than I am, but that was not what attracted me to him. In fact, it was almost enough to make me not want to continue seeing him, since it was one of several power differences that we would need to negotiate if we entered into a relationship. We have strategies to deal with those kinds of things now, but they add a layer of complexity to our lives together. It’s definitely not a huge perk.

The first time I met my ex, she was sitting with her brother in his basement (I’d been friends with him for a while before I met her.) discussing the correct pronunciation of the Russian names in Anna Karenina.

She made a very strong impression on me. Specifically, of her being smart, gorgeous and interested in books and language.