Deep within a lengthy story in the July 4 New Yorker about online dating (currently available online, but could migrate behind a paywall) a factoid to share with the person on the bar stool next to you.
And yet some questions are unpredictably predictive. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings. There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. (People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions.) Rudder has discovered, for example, that the answer to the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date. (That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other.)
This particular service, OK Cupid, is big on algorithms. Who’s to argue with algorithms?
I ALMOST blogged this, but knowing you were a NYer reader, I figured you’d beat me to it. It is with some pleasure that I find the post here…
I was out either drinking beer
orand having sex.