Just kidding. But those of you who know about opportunity costs (what Echidne could earn if she wasn't fashioning and researching blog posts) might be aware of the sacrifices I make for your well-being. (Let's see if guilting works here!)
***
A conversation I had with some people tried to establish what percentage of American men become biological fathers during their lifetimes. One person Googled for the answer and found a summary of supposedly a CDC study from 2006 with this information:
By the age of 44, only 47% of American men are fathers.
Wow! That cannot be right, right? (And no, it's not right.)
But if you Google, say, "percentage men fathers, " the link to that summary is the third on the first results page.
This is a huge problem, because the real statistics, more recent ones, give us a very different percentage:
Most estimates of fertility measures for men and women aged 15–44 in 2011–2015 were similar to those reported in 2006–2010. For 2011–2015, 85.0% of women had given birth and 80.4% of men had fathered a child by ages 40–44.
Bolds are mine.
I have no idea why that 2006 summary is so wrong*. But note that anyone trying to find a quick Google answer to the question will be badly misinformed.
And so in no time at all we might find the incels quoting that 2006 summary to explain why only the alpha males are allowed to mate, how they are justified in hating all womankind, and how beta males are undergoing extinction by women not allowing them to pass on their seed**.
At the minimum we are going to find all sorts of people making theories about why so few men become biological fathers when most women become biological mothers.
All because of flawed data.
The point here is naturally that the validity and reliability of online information matters, and Google should take those demands more into account in creating their algorithms.
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* And it had to be wrong in 2006, too. I have contacted the website and asked them to remove the flawed summary. I'm sure they will do that when pigs fly.
** Because men are much more likely to become first-time parents after the age of forty-five than women, the overall percentages of men and women who are biological parents during their lifetimes is probably roughly the same at the end of one's life. This is awkward for the incel theories.