[aristus]

That last stat about reading level bothers me. "Ok, before anyone gets offended about reading level vs race, let's show you a stat that confirms another stereotype: religious people are stupid! And atheists are smartest of all! Scientifically proven with a reading test based on the lengths of words, and metrics I just made up. And don't worry that almost half of the data points belie my analysis, ha ha ha, it confirms your prejudices, so it's ok!"

[untamedmedley]

If the goal of black and latino OKC members is to attract members of the opposite sex within their race (which is most likely the case), then it would make sense that they would communicate in their own vernacular.

That is, a black person who is otherwise educated might use a phrase that makes perfect sense to other black people (e.g. "where dey do dat at?"; often used to express confusion at someone's ridiculous behavior) but that isn't clear to the mainstream. Latinos may pepper their profiles with Spanish words.

Asians might do this too if there wasn't so much ethnic/linguistic diversity among the Asian American population. As such, they likely use "safe" mainstream wording.

All this is to say that there are reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence that could have caused this sort of result.

[xiongchiamiov]

My technical writing professor always told us to try and reduce the complexity of our writing (I think she used Flesh Kincaid). Perhaps more of us white people have had similar teachers, and took their advice to heart.*

* Unlikely, but hey, I might as well bring it up, since we're talking about flaws in the analysis.

[superk]

Scientifically proven with a reading test based on the lengths of words, and metrics I just made up

Actually they're using the Coleman-Liau Index, a computer readability formula going back to 1975.

[aristus]

The metric about adherence was made up and without explanation of how they categorized people. The Coleman-Liau Index is based on lengths of words, which proves... what, exactly? Many of the "most" religious people scored higher than the ones rated "meh". Also, agnostics are in the middle of the pack.

So what does this chart predict? That certain self-selected religious categories in their dataset correlate with word length in the essays. Is that good statistics, or a confirmation of prejudices, ie, religious people are less intelligent?

With all of those charts they passed over with "no comment", they saw fit to make a joke about a "Comic Sans Bible".

It bothers me because it statistically shaky and baldly prejudiced. I would love to have a conversation about that, and I wish people would engage instead of downvote.

[moron4hire]

I don't know if you've kept up with this OkCupid series, but there has always been an undercurrent of snide commentary towards Christians specifically and religious people in general.

I especially "enjoyed" the break down by race. They admit that the site is primarily American in demographic, but there is no accounting for language proficiency being a barrier to entry to the site for users from non-English speaking cultures. If you care enough to learn English as a second language to the point where you can use OkCupid, then I expect you will learn to to a greater degree than a minimally literate, native English speaker.

[aristus]

Si -- they should have corrected for second languages and proficiency, if they were serious. My big beef is the implication that word length obviously correlates with intelligence instead of, say, pretention.

[zzzmarcus]

They probably could have been more scientific with their study as you're pointing out. However, despite the flaws, their conclusions seem to be consistent with actual, scientific studies of the correlation between IQ and Religiosity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence#St....

[aristus]

Sure, it seems to agree with those studies. But let's suppose that the religion vs word length chart is a valid measure of intelligence.

Are you then prepared to defend the same conclusion about the race vs word length chart? Or will you start looking for confounding factors, eg, Latinos trend Catholic? If so, think about why you accepted the religion claim on its face, but examined the race claim more carefully.

[eru]

Word length also correlates well with being German or Dutch.

[steveklabnik]

They also allow you to input the languages you speak (which include C++ and Lisp, btw) and how well you speak them and then write your profile in each of those languages, so they have extra data about it.

[_delirium]

You can take the data without the commentary, though. The results actually fit nicely with a "pseudointellectual, tries to sound smart" stereotype I have about internet atheists. (I'm an atheist myself, but can't stand reddit.com/r/atheism types.)

[eru]

Yes, there's not too much to talk about in atheism. (Or at least not much worth listening to.)

[meelash]

At least for Muslims, there is an obvious flaw since Islam forbids dating. So people that self-identified as "very serious" are pretty much by-definition not that. And since it is, among all the practices of Muslims, one that is popularly known and probably even overemphasized (relative to other practices), a large population of those that self-identified as "somewhat serious" are probably guilty of being a bit generous with themselves.

At the end of the day, of course, correlation does not imply causation. If either religious people get their panties in a bunch and overly-defensive or irreligious people start gloating, both are simply demonstrating that their dogma is overriding their intelligence.