A couple people wrote me about this, from the last links post: “Perhaps the least surprising point is that [Ashley Madison] has almost no women on it,” and said that that was surprising, and/or that I’m a jerk for what that implies.

Surprise is to some extent in the eye of the surprised party, so I won’t argue with that, but I will note that “Attractive women who have NSA, one-off sex with a large number of total strangers” is actually a job description (one could even strike the word “attractive”). Which is fine—I’m not against that job and support legalizing it and other freedoms, but whenever possible look at what markets say about what people or groups of people want in the aggregate. Plus, women who want to meet strangers on the Internet for those sorts of things, one-off or ongoing, can do so easily through more conventional methods (OK Cupid, Tinder, whatever—ones that are said to be less gross and more normal). As I understand it, the honestly dishonest ones can disclose their status pretty easily on Tinder and elsewhere, and guys looking for that sort of arrangement appear to be not hard to find, per the first sentence of this paragraph. Generalizations allow of course for exceptions, and at least one or two of the people writing to me sound like they are exceptions, or they are portraying themselves as exceptions.

The “look first to markets for data” point is useful in all sorts of contexts. The other day I was chatting with a friend who said there are already “Too many people” in New York City; I observed that, if that were true, we’d see housing prices falling, and we in fact see the opposite—implying that most people think there are too few people in New York, and are willing to pay for all the people here. One does not have this issue in, say, Detroit, or Cincinnati. My point did not go over well, but perhaps that’s why people who use markets to extract and act on data make a lot of money doing so.

Edit: “Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site” provides more detail, especially how virtually none of the “millions” of supposed accounts created by women had ever checked their internal mail or chat.