The number of people who are partnered vs single is 70%. If 60% of those met via dating apps, that's 42% of the total.

You're still not slicing thin enough.

If 60% of the couples who got together in 2022 met on dating apps, and people who got together in 2022 constitute 5% of all couples, that's still possible (and probable), then those couples will still only be 3% of the total. Pretty easy to add up to 11% that way when you start including all the 10-year-old relationships, the 20-year-old relationships, etc.

If it were flat at 60% for all years then no, it wouldn't add up.

But if you look at the area under the curve, it's still pretty small comparatively speaking because it's such a recent phenomenon. (And not every year would actually count equally for the whole data set, but it's displayed in this chart as every year adding up to 100% for its own year.)

About half of those under 30 (53%) report having ever used a dating site or app

Yes, but that's a bigger denominator, and includes single people, and even those who have never been on a date. The headline question is what percent of couples met through different methods, not what percent of individuals, including those who are not currently in a couple.

So it doesn't make sense that more people would have met their current partner through a dating app than have ever used one.

It could be that a higher percent of couples met online than the percent of people who have ever used online dating. If you have a data set where online dating is literally the only way to meet people, but only half of the people are trying that method, you'd have the situation where 100% of couples met online but only 50% of people have ever tried online dating (this hypothetical is purely to demonstrate the math, not claiming that this is in any way a reflection or the actual data).

It's entirely possible (and I'd argue is likely) that the 53% who have used dating services are more likely to be in couples than the 47% who haven't. And so that larger subset of the 47% would therefore be excluded in the "percent of couples" data.

mostly I'm just bothered by the apparent lack of any way to confirm the authenticity of the graph and its relationship to the source material

The 2019 paper I've linked is authored by the maintainers of the linked data set, and contains a very similar graph with an earlier cutoff (2017 data). I'm sure those authors know their data set. It's just most of their papers using this data is paywalled, and the data is mainly used for other types of analyses.

If I have time I might be able to download the data set from a computer and just map it either naively or by applying the correct weights.

but the study they are citing doesn't seem to confirm anywhere close to the 60% figure, it seems to be saying 11.5% instead

I think you've linked the variable of all couples regardless of when they got together. If 11.5% of all couples met online, whether they met in 2023 or 1975, then that doesn't actually disprove the line graph (which could be what percentage of couples who met in that particular year met through each method).

The researchers who maintain the data set you've linked published an analysis of the 2017 data showing that it was approaching 40% towards the most recent relationships being formed, in 2017. I could believe that post-covid, the trends have approached 60%.

Yeah, one night stands can turn into lasting relationships. I know a decent number of married couples who met in zero-commitment contexts, whether it's a hookup from a bar or while on vacation in a tourist town or things like that. Or even meeting on a hookup-oriented app that somehow turned into a not-just-for-hookups service after becoming acquired by Match, but during the phase when it was most definitely mainly for no-strings hookups.

Probably. But it's also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

For humans, it's estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

But that's the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

And then there's unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don't sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.

Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude

Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?

You're comparing animals with fat throughout the muscle to birds that don't.

No, I'm comparing the same species of animal. We've gone from 100+ day old birds weighing 2.5 lbs to 47 day old birds weighing 6.5 lbs in the last century. That seems comparable to the difference between old roosters for coq au vin or old dairy cattle for vaca vieja and their respective supermarket counterparts.

Also, the connective tissue only starts to break down once getting to about 192f and needs to hang out for a good while between there and 210 to slowly break down.

No, collagen starts to break down slowly as low as 130°F, but the breakdown speeds up as the temperature rises. There are ways to play around with this with different techniques, where doneness is more than just getting the meat to temperature. It's why poaching chicken used to be more common than it is today. It's why chicken wings taste best when double fried. It's why confit works so well for duck legs.

Also, steak was best 200 years ago as it is now.

Ok, again, if you've ever had to work through cooking something like vaca vieja, you'll notice that it doesn't cook the same way as a steak that's been dry aged, or a regular steak at Costco, or a lean grass-fed steak. If your steak technique is the exact same for all of them, you're probably missing out.

And I'm guessing the NY Times wasn't exactly building this conclusion based on only steak recipes. 150 years is gonna have a lot of non-steak recipes in the mix.

Methods changed because we got better at cooking.

That's part of it. But also, trends come and go. I'd rather have a 1950s cheeseburger than a 1990s cheeseburger, and much of the post 2010 scene has been re-implementing some old techniques that fell out of favor (smashing patties, simpler bread for buns, fewer toppings) and a backlash at some of those things that got out of control. Cocktails went through something similar too, with old classics coming back (either as is or with a new variation).

I'm sure any comprehensive catalog of recipes over decades is going to include some fads that fizzled out, like low fat stuff in the 90's, etc. It's not some kind of inexorable march of progress.

I'm betting chicken always could have cooked faster.

Chicken can be cooked to temperature quickly, but that alone likely wasn't enough. We know this for plenty of cuts of pork and beef that the connective tissue needs time to break down, not just a pure cook to temperature (see braising, smoking, and sous vide techniques).

Something like coq au vin, which was developed for cooking older, tougher roosters, traditionally calls for a low and slow cook to break down the tougher animal.

You can also see the difference when buying cuts like vaca vieja (old dairy cattle slaughtered for meat), which calls for different preparation based on the tougher meat.

So no, I can believe the meat itself is very different today, and the recipes adjusted to the change in ingredient characteristics. We've documented that the manner of raising animals is totally different, so why would you be skeptical that the meat is different?

I would think that an ad for something would paint that thing in a favorable light, not make it look gross and weird and unappealing.

Same but also because I haven't felt the desire to get taco bell without having been drinking first.

Interesting that egg sizing labels aren't that universal. In the U.S. most big stores primarily stock Large (minimum weight 56.7g) and Extra Large (63.8g), while Jumbo (70.9g) is still probably more common than Medium (49.6g).

(My methodology for getting weights was that I used the government labeling requirements for minimum weight per dozen, converted ounces to grams, divided by 12).

I mean that's basically why a lot of us are great at small talk: we actually do care about the contents of that low stakes conversation with strangers.