Okay, so the pessimists (or realists, depending on who you ask) know that the statement “love sees no color” is a fallacy. But leave it to okcupid — a Web 2.0 dating site that emphasizes quizzes like “The What type Punk Rocker are you Test” and user badges like “Less Desiring of Love” — to post a whopper of a blog post on their blog called Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back, where a couple of engineers gathered profile data of a half a million okcupid profiles, put them into a couple of matrices full of red, yellow and green squares, and came up a troll-bait goldmine of a blog post, with soundbite gems such as “White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively.” But is there room for interpretation in this data? And now that we know the racial reply rates of Vampire Weekend emo boys and female bi-poly Burning Man fans, does this really tell us anything about, well, anything? (Full disclaimer: I’m part of the problem.)
(Hat tip: George)