Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist And Kind Of Awful, According To The Co-Founder Of OKCupid
He can see everything in your dating profile, so he'd know.
OKCupid co-founder and huge nerd Christian Rudder is the guy who goes through all the data OKCupid collects — what its users like and don’t like, who they are demographically, what kind of people they find attractive — and looks for broader trends. He primarily does this stuff to better tailor the service to its customers, but along the way he’s basically been given a crash-course in Human Nature 101, and he shared what he’s learned so far with The Atlantic in an interview which you can watch below.
The takeaway points? People are a bit awful, apparently: “The thing that I’m consistently surprised about is how very stereotypical people are, in aggregate…it’s definitely what you would expect if you were a very cynical person”, according to Rudder.
The big example is that people will never say they don’t do interracial dating, but no one likes dating black people — except other black people. “Black users get a blanket 25 percent discount in terms of replies they get, volume of messages they get, ratings they get from other users, and that’s not only from whites but Asians and Latinos as well”, Rudder says.
Also, guys prize women in their early twenties, no matter how young — or old — the guy himself is. “Guys will always send the hottest woman on any given page the message, which means that everyone else gets ignored and that one person gets tons and tons of messages”. So that’s nice.
“People are vain and predictable, and kinda stupid, and kinda racist, but they’re also very nice and smart and all the other things that are the opposite of those things”, Rudder says, belatedly realising he just insulted pretty much everyone on Earth.
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Via The Atlantic.