andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-50 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Several people have asked me what I thought of this . For example, one colleague wrote: I thought you might find data of this quantity and quality as interesting as I do. In their latest blog entry, okcupid uses its very large dating-site userbase to assess the progression of social and economic views with age, and (taking into account self-specified importance of economic and social views) the resulting political affiliations. The final assessment is that the spectrum of views encompassed under “democrat” ends up being much broader than those under “republican”. I’ve seen this mentioned many times before, but I have never seen such pretty data illustrating the phenomenon. Perhaps this is more graphics to impress, rather than graphics in a typical statistical setting, but I find them captivating nonetheless. In any case, I would be curious to hear your opinions of this. My reply: It’s interesting stuff, although I wonder a lot about the representativeness of their sample
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 In their latest blog entry, okcupid uses its very large dating-site userbase to assess the progression of social and economic views with age, and (taking into account self-specified importance of economic and social views) the resulting political affiliations. [sent-3, score-0.868]
2 The final assessment is that the spectrum of views encompassed under “democrat” ends up being much broader than those under “republican”. [sent-4, score-0.409]
3 I’ve seen this mentioned many times before, but I have never seen such pretty data illustrating the phenomenon. [sent-5, score-0.153]
4 Perhaps this is more graphics to impress, rather than graphics in a typical statistical setting, but I find them captivating nonetheless. [sent-6, score-0.283]
5 My reply: It’s interesting stuff, although I wonder a lot about the representativeness of their sample. [sent-8, score-0.151]
6 For example, they talk about libertarian views, which happen to be held by only a small fraction of the population (but a larger fraction of people who are online). [sent-9, score-0.493]
7 Along similar lines, I think their two-dimensional scheme is misleading; I’d prefer to just label the axes as left/right on economic ideology and left/right on social ideology. [sent-10, score-0.296]
8 For example, where does government support for health insurance fit into this? [sent-11, score-0.146]
9 Or what about support for a graduated income tax or an estate tax, vs. [sent-13, score-0.551]
10 Conditional on total tax revenues being fixed, I don’t see the former as any more or less economically restrictive than the latter–it’s just restrictive to different people. [sent-15, score-0.981]
11 They interpret a cross-sectional pattern as age effects, but they could very well be cohort effects. [sent-17, score-0.317]
12 People in their 40s came of political age around the early eighties when Reagan was president. [sent-18, score-0.375]
13 Not to mention the fact that people in a dating site are far from typical of the population–I’m assuming the people in their 40s are mostly either divorced or never-married; either way, that’s a different perspective than a married person. [sent-19, score-0.44]
14 Similarly, the trend in social attitudes has got to be, at least to some extent, a cohort effect. [sent-20, score-0.254]
15 Americans have become much more liberal on gay rights but not on abortion. [sent-22, score-0.281]
16 Finally,the pretty graph that they show with red and blue is a bit misleading: it’s not a graph of Democrats and Republicans, it’s a graph of average opinions of people at different ages. [sent-24, score-0.653]
17 Getting to the specifics, I also don’t know why they’re so sure that nuns won’t have liberal views on gay marriage. [sent-25, score-0.815]
18 I once met a woman whose reason for joining an order of nuns was that, in her words, “I want to meet Sister Right. [sent-27, score-0.371]
19 ” In any case, I agree that age is a good variable to look at. [sent-28, score-0.174]
20 For a deeper look at systematic asymmetries between the Democratic and Republican parties in their political support, see Jonathan Rodden and Chris Warshaw’s article, “Why the Democrats Need Boll Weevils and Blue Dogs: The Distribution of Political Preferences across U. [sent-32, score-0.201]
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Introduction: Several people have asked me what I thought of this . For example, one colleague wrote: I thought you might find data of this quantity and quality as interesting as I do. In their latest blog entry, okcupid uses its very large dating-site userbase to assess the progression of social and economic views with age, and (taking into account self-specified importance of economic and social views) the resulting political affiliations. The final assessment is that the spectrum of views encompassed under “democrat” ends up being much broader than those under “republican”. I’ve seen this mentioned many times before, but I have never seen such pretty data illustrating the phenomenon. Perhaps this is more graphics to impress, rather than graphics in a typical statistical setting, but I find them captivating nonetheless. In any case, I would be curious to hear your opinions of this. My reply: It’s interesting stuff, although I wonder a lot about the representativeness of their sample
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