[hughprime]

It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.

I think you need to look up how their "match %" is computed. It was described in an earlier post on that blog.

[codexon]

I don't think I do. I think you do.

"All OkCupid users create their own matching algorithms, so when we determine who matches who, we’re just crunching the numbers people give us."

Aspects like age/location can be included as part of the user matching algorithms if it is important to them. Overweight/has kids/ugly should be equally spread out between races and should not be dependent on race, especially only after the first message.

Therefore match % is basically everything except race that is important to the user.