Ouch, but... you have a point. I suppose that people who have the most functional relationships are kinda *boring* from outside? (See also the usual Anna Karenina quote.) Drama is what makes things interesting to read, and maybe even to experience in short term... but I wouldn't want to have my drama in my life for long term. The more one's life is about relationship drama, the less it can be about everything else.
My idea of best relationship is like "doing awesome things together". But even if someone has 100% this, and keeps blogging regularly, the blogs would be about the awesome things, not about the relationship per se.
The people who successfully get a long-term relationship on the first try aren't going to be experimenting with different approaches, so I think most dating advice is going to come from people who haven't found a good relationship.
> I think most dating advice is going to come from people who haven't found a good relationship.
I agree, but that doesn't necessarily make it a *good* advice.
It might also mean that those people have experimented a lot, but still haven't figured it out. Perhaps they keep repeating the same fundamental mistake over and over again, completely unaware of it, because they are focusing on something insubstantial, which they may have already optimized to perfection and yet it ultimately does not help them succeed.
On the other hand, yeah, the people who succeeded too quickly maybe just got lucky. Maybe the person they liked at high school just happened to like them too, then they got married and had kids, and they have absolutely no idea what the dating market for average people looks like.
Who takes relationship advice from her? Someone can be interesting and worth reading occasionally without taking their word as gospel. Plus sometimes it is good to get a weird outsider perspective even if ultimately you don't agree.
My guess is that Match group has figured out that shorter profiles lead to quicker and more addictive swiping from users, bigger dopamine hits, and, eventually, more frequent purchases from desperate users. Their whole business model seems to be built around creating desperation in certain male users.
The incentives behind all these sites seems perverse to me. I've seen ads for a site that says they WANT you to delete it once it succeeds for you, but I don't know how that would be in their financial interest.
Could easily be, if it actually works and gets volume. It's not like we ever run out of people needing mates. This is what capitalism is *supposed* to give us: Products so good that we never buy one again.
Is their famous planned obsolescence actually true? The people I know running 4+ year old phones are all running apples. I've never heard of a 5 year old android.
No, it is not. When releasing software updates, Apple has two choices: Allow them to run, more slowly, on older hardware, or not release them for older hardware. Either way, everyone screams, "planned obsolescence!"
I didn't say it has panned out. There are various forces working against it (though be careful of "planned obsolescence" claims; there have always been long-lasting light bulbs, but they were dimmer and more expensive. People preferred the short-lived ones). But capitalism, working properly, gives consumers what they want, to the degree that they're willing to pay for it.
Even aside from actual deliberate planned obsolescence, there is a real issue with capitalism-as-really-practiced related to this; at point of sale it's possible to verify features and expense but not lifetime, so consumers ignore lifetime and manufacturers are not incentivised to prioritise it. This is not simply an optimal tradeoff; it's an inefficiency.
You can get around it if there's high information and specific products and corporate cultures last long enough for lifetime information to be knowable - but these days, they don't. You can also get around it with warranties - but only to the extent that the warranties are enforceable, and it's common knowledge that most consumers aren't actually well-organised enough to enforce a warranty years later.
This is very closely related to the lemon problem.
Ultimately, this, like every other market issue that isn’t externalities, is about sufficient competition. When we have enough competition in a given space such that the products are very similar, companies start to compete on lesser-valued things like longevity. Of course, copyrights and patents stand in the way of this kind of commodification, as does continued innovation.
But there’s another way to look at this. There’s very little actual evidence that Apple spends any time or money ensuring that their products last less long than they otherwise would; indeed, as Tim Cook has pointed out, that would be self-defeating, because that would tend to push customers to their competition. However, it’s certain that longevity past a certain point (which includes repairability, software updates specifically tuned to work well on older devices, etc.) is not a major priority for them. Why? Because it’s not a major priority for consumers. What people *say* they want and what they actually pay money for can vary widely. People *say* they want long-lasting devices, but most people just want to upgrade to the new hotness. Apple has slowly shifted to thinner, sleeker, less-repairable devices because consumers will buy those over bulkier, longer-lasting ones. If consumers truly wanted longer-lasting devices, and started—en masse—to keep their phones longer, Apple would slow down their iPhone release schedule and start making devices that were usable for longer periods.
Sure, there is a subset of the market that truly wants longer-lasting devices. I’m in it—my current phone is a 2016 model (and I really need to upgrade). But I am *also* one of those who clamored for smaller phones. Apple listened, and came out with the iPhone Mini—which turned out to glean 6% of sales. So despite all the noise, not many people wanted it after all. Apple—and every company—has to go where the money is.
Bottom line—most of the bad things we blame *companies* for are actually the fault of *consumers.*
Warren Buffet famously noticed: apple-customers effectively SUBSCRIBE for life (to having an iPhone resp. mac) -and bought shares big-time. So, the product is e.g. an (flexible) "up-to-date iPhone for 500$ a year-subscription" or an "on average less up-to-date iPhone for 200$ a year"
Ironically, while I've always used Android phones, apparently iOS has working complete device backups, whereas Android just... doesn't. (By which I mean, backups including app settings etc. Of course Android can backup *some* stuff, but anything short of 99.x% is an embarrassment.) Android's version is a travesty in comparison, pretending that everything will be backed up but then still forcing you to configure each app again etc.
That's not ironic at all. When they want you to buy a new phone every year, it's only natural that they invest into an easy backup/transfer process. Samsung does something similar with Smart Switch, because they also want the same thing.
Except isn’t that exactly what we’re saying *isn’t* happening here? Old OKCupid allowed normal guys to get dates. New OKCupid/Tinder tricks guys into thinking they can get dates if they spend just a bit more money, but never actually delivers.
I think there are matchmaking services that do that? IIRC they were quite expensive though, and I don't know if they refund you if you don't actually get into a relationship after X time.
But dating apps do deliver. I'm not abnormally attractive, and I've gotten two serious relationships out of them (and a number of other dates) – and I'm far from the only one.
People assume that the site is bad, so they're not going to pay for it. If the site turns out to be good and finds them a date, well, they're not single anymore, so no reason to pay for the site.
And even with people who *are* willing to pay on the assumption that the site will be good (and return customers), you still make *way* more money by ruthlessly wringing it out of desperate whales than by appealing to normal people. Basically like the mobile game market, except the numbers that go up represent your dating success.
I wonder if good financialization could help here, e.g. you lose some $$$ in escrow if you turn off notifications/uninstall the app/send fewer than X messages per month (supposed to credibly indicate having met someone through the site)
A lot of sites, starting up, have a lot of dead profiles to get people interested. So it makes sense for a site to virtuously claim to have fewer dead profiles. And honestly, I could see a site being more successful, and so getting more traffic in a kind of virtuous upward cycle. But as you mention, that's not how a lot of sites actually work.
That's what I'd always assumed, not least because it matches the revenue model for most apps (a small number of addicted, heavy users as the primary income, encourage frequent but brief user interaction, etc).
But even aside from that, my impression is that dating site users often have a large gap between expressed and revealed preferences and goals, and I'm not sure how to get around that.
Mmmm, even with the total players I've known (bang five girls from Tinder a week sorta guys) there was an intent there to eventually settle down with one. It's more that for most non religious guys "girls I'd like to bed" is a far larger category than "girls I'd like to marry". And if you have top level "game" it's relatively easy to sleep with a huge pool of women below your standards for marriage.
Men will downplay the extent to which they're looking for casual relationships. Both men and women will pretend that they're interested in dates when they're just using the site as a confidence booster and have no intention of meeting anyone in person.
The only way to have non-perverse financial incentives in a dating app would be for their income to come from contingency fees, rather than desperate guys paying to not be completely invisible
Yeah, I've been wondering for a while if that type of scheme would work.
Like, don't sell premium accounts or whatever, but encourage users to go on dates using affiliate links (to cinemas / restaurants / parks / whatever). The obvious problem is that there's no direct incentive for users to use the affiliate services.
I feel like Scott probably suspects this but is loath to write on it w/o data. The small amounts of hard data that some dating sites have revealed caused a great deal of internet acrimony and none of them have ever made that mistake again. As noted in the comment I'm replying to, the profit engine on dating sites is male desperation. I wouldn't say "certain" males users though unless the word certain now means The Majority. 80%+ of men that use dating sites never go on a single date as a result. The number is probably over 90%, but the old ok cupid data is all we have. Sites like Tinder essentially have a split user base along 3 broad buckets. Scott mentions attractive women being buried under messages. Its not just attractive women, its almost all of them. Men find average women attractive (the reverse is very not true). People have run tests using the photos of increasingly less attractive women on fake profiles and it doesn't matter. Obviously morbidly obese women with terrible profiles still get more messages in one day than the modal male user gets ever in their entire use of these apps. No money is being made of women, they are the bait. The next group is very attractive men. top 10% or better by looks. They are the bait for the women. These men can if they choose have a tremendous amount of "encounters" with women on these sites. I know a beautiful man who works at the firestation near me that has 50+ new sex partners yearly from Tinder and turns down even more. No money is being made of these men. The last group are the bottom 90% of the men. These are the marks. The carrot of the experience of the top men is constantly dangled just out of reach, if only they would buy another boost or w/e the scam is called now. Maybe they'll even get messaged back by a bot if they are lucky. Regardless the point of dating apps is not to help anyone get dates, casual sex, or long term relationships. Its to monetize the desperation of the majority of men. Some figure it out and sue:
These go nowhere ofc as our society despises romantically unsuccessful men. (see: incels).
Any dating site the actually works, and is known to work ie. it actually helps men initiate relationships, will be quickly destroyed by these same forces.
My reading of it is that any dating site that is known to work i.e. will be highly successful at matching average looking men with women will be unable to sell "boosts" or "premium membership" or any of the things that dating sites and apps actually make money on and so go out of business or fail to grow and remain stuck at a small niche. Thinking on it this might be why the niche sites remain small. Growing requires investment but since they're successful there's no pool of desperate men to monetise so they can't convince investors to give them money. Should I become a clown to increase my chances of romantic success???
Don't know if that's what GP meant, but any dating site that is known to work will attract lots of single men, until the ratio is 90% men again, and we're back to the initial problem.
Personal experience: I would rate myself at the 85-90th percentile of attractiveness for men in my age group, but I got very very few people swiping right. There's a surge of a few matches in the first few days after you sign up, and after that nothing. These apps are too skewed by gender imbalance to be good for men, and too easy to be exploited by rakes (unconstrained by having mutual friends to exert moral/social pressure against exploitative behavior) to be good for women.
OTOH I've been dating the first girl I matched with for 5 months and it's working out really well.
I agree. When I said “certain”, I only meant that I assume a minority of men actually pay for add-ons and premium features. Does anyone have any data on that?
I think your comment is interesting and you may very well be right. However, I doubt most people who work for these sights realize this consciously. Because most people don't like to think of themselves as taking part in something evil. To me, this is a perfect example of what I think about when people talk about AI alignment. The "company that makes the dating app" is an artificial entity with a goal of "maximizing profit". Artificial entities with goals do evil things because they care only about the goal and not about "not being evil".
We try to solve the company-alignment problem with laws, regulations, boycotts, hitpieces, etc. We're not great at it and there is a lot of collateral damage from those methods.
Agreed except for one point of refinement; it's not the top 10% in purely looks, looks are important, but must be accompanied by good "game" as it were. The Tinder Players I've known (roommates with one) were also superb at crafting just the right sort of flirty messages for the app, where most men find that challenging.
And that I think a allinged incentive model is possible.
>The Tinder Players I've known (roommates with one) were also superb at crafting just the right sort of flirty messages for the app, where most men find that challenging.
What made them good at this? How would you suggest getting better?
I would suggest getting your roommate to truthfully write the first 3 messages for you, and then take over from there. At that early stage you need a professional ghostwriter to really stand out. Then later you will succeed on your own merits.
Messages are a different layer of the funnel on most apps for most people. You have to get past the swipe filter first, which is mostly based on photos and slightly on profile info.
Your skill at interviewing is moot if you get no interviews because your resume sucks.
It frustrates me to no end that my female and attractive male friends think their experience is universal with regard to dating apps. They cannot fathom a world in which someone can't open Tinder, swipe a few times, get a match, go out, and hook up, any night they want. A world in which not everyone sitting around the dinner table has a "crazy tinder story" to share, or any story at all.
The worst is when they give advice that is only applicable to people like them, but to other people.
I think it's a lot more mundane than that: making an app that works on both the web and your phone is xx% harder than making an app that works on just one or the other, and the number of people who carry a laptop everywhere they go is dwarfed by the number of people with smartphones (ACX readers are a possible exception).
Yeah, especially for something like a dating app which is well suited to short bursts of browsing (in the grocery store line, on the bus, etc.) and which most people would not be caught dead having open in a tab at work.
No. It's because they know exactly how many people will use it on their phone and on the desktop. They know exactly how much it costs to engineer for each one, and they did the math and it's a no-brainer. You would be shocked by the % of traffic on major sites that come from mobile and mobile web. Depending on the company, 80% is a floor, 95% is not uncommon. Even people who visit on the desktop also tend to visit on the phone more often than they do the computer, so if you're optimizing for those users, it still makes sense to invest in the mobile experience.
> Why do companies do this? Is it so they can install spyware on your phone?
Revolut was accessible only through smartphones for years.
At some point they improved jailbroken device detection. Which basically locked tech people who bother to make their devices _theirs_ out of their accounts. Fortunately it was possible to work around this.
> So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.
> Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company. (...) grow up and stop this irrelevant complaint.. all banks will do this soon and you will enjoy a empty phone
> It's their app and they want to be sure that you use it on a secure device so that you don't get hacked and then complain to them your money is gone..
> What's so odd about a banking company not wanting exploited phones ( which is what root/ jaibreak is, exploiting security vulnerabilities whiting the system) exposed to their system?
If artificial intelligence shows rapid improvement in the near future, we should see AI matchmaking get really good. I would set my AI-Matchmaker profile to the whole nation, but I think it would be too inefficient and take too long. If the best algorithm in the world told me that my perfect match lived 900 miles away, I would consider moving or making some sort of arrangement. Now, it's hard to justify dating long distance without knowing strongly that it's a good match.
Tinder is free, and there are many users. Match lets me search by criteria and OKCupid has tons of questions, but there seem to be way fewer users.
not even good; just better then "I have to read 100 profiles to want to send a single message, which will likely be on an account that was made by a bot or inactive for any reason" or whatever is going on with bars
You would really uproot your entire life on the off-chance that the 'perfect match' would be the be-all and end-all? I don't think that making one person the entire basket you put all your eggs in (to mash metaphors) is a great way to have a lasting relationship, you're making yourself too dependent on them to be everything and this doesn't leave them any room to be a flawed human who gets tired, doesn't want to do that fun thing you love tonight, and has arguments over whose turn it is to put out the bins.
My own view, and this is only idiosyncratic, is that I wouldn't trust anyone who moved 900 miles just to see if I'd go on a date with them; that marks them as the kind of flighty/flaky who is likely to up sticks and leave me behind once something else catches their attention ("but the Pabodie expedition to Antarctica is a once in a lifetime opportunity!")
>> If artificial intelligence shows rapid improvement in the near future
*If theres a gai,* and it told me to move 900 miles away; I would. I don't think a gai is coming and I've seen chatgpt claim that 100-100 =-50 and that a toy moon is larger then a toy poddle. But if the tool exists I will use it.
Futurists are futurists and fusion is just 30 years away and has been for 60 years. But given that premise thats a logical conclusion.
Cf. the entire subplot of "Gaudy Night" by Sayers.
But if ye lasses want we lads to stop signaling a priori willingness to go to extravagant lengths[1] for your attention, you have your work cut out for you. It's prolly wired into us at this point, and only genetic engineering will fix it.
And women are wired to like it. I got A LOT of mileage in HS and college out of grand gestures of interest, which were aimed at indicating how serious my devotion was, but in retrospect mostly indicating how my blood at the time was 70% hormones.
Walked a dozen miles at night in the dead of winter to a girl's house when they called after a party when she was sad and we were both too drunk to drive (worked).
Shoveled out a 300ft driveway when there was a 2 foot snowfall and a girl was freaking out she wouldn't be able to get to work and her boyfriend refused to do it, took me several hours (worked). A girl who I was flirting with who was way above my pay grade got a possible cancer diagnosis at 17/18, I asked her out immediately and said it didn't matter to me (which was technically true!, worked).
People aren't always rational. I remember some research I saw about women getting aroused by watching men commit violence on each other if it was perceived as being over their affections.
Absolutely. I have a collection of similar memories. Never a good idea to fight Nature, especially when you can use Her to your advantage instead, so to speak.
I'm vaguely reminded of a story Barbara Tuchman tells about late 19th century German realism in painting, that so-and-so painted his front yard but omitted a certain tree, and stricken with remorse for this offense against realism, cut down the tree.
I've moved over 3000km five times, all for things significantly less important than finding a spouse. I guess that marks me as flighty in your eyes?
That said, moving before you start dating seems premature. If anyone, GAI, friend, random hallucinating hobo on the street, told me the perfect wife for me was in a town 900 miles away and gave me her contact info, I'd be planning a roadtrip to go meet her, not listing my house for sale.
> Is this like the thing where I imagine that what people want out of a socialization space is a quiet comfortable area where they can hold audible conversations, but what they actually want is somewhere extremely dark with very loud music where everybody is drunk, in the hopes that this puts them into some kind of weird trance state where they can do social actions they would otherwise never contemplate? Are dating sites unusable because everyone wants to be confused into a trance state where they can imagine they aren’t sending scary self-revelatory messages to total strangers?
I mean "actually want" is just a deeply complicated idea. People's use of Match isn't any more contradictory than their use of Twitter, Facebook, or ongoing desire to lose weight without lifestyle change.
wow i totally forgot i signed up for luna until just now, after reading about it on ssc then
to me, paid messages seem doomed to fail not so much because they're too adjacent to prostitution per se, so much as it starts the relationship out on an unequal footing (the man tacitly admitting he's not desirable enough to attract a woman's attention by his own merits)
The problem to me is that it screams low status (unattractive), like buying a woman a drink in a bar. More attractive men might be willing to pay less because they have other options, so the system defeats itself
I think it's buying a woman a drink as an opener that's low status - if you're already hanging out together at a bar and buy her a drink I don't think that's the same thing
Not if you've already been flirting/talking/exchanging glances, but as a cold open, yeah. It's sort like guilting someone into having to talk to you, I think.
"Never buy a woman a drink" was one of those silly pieces of PUA advice that I read and internalised at a young age and which turned out to be terrible advice.
There's nothing wrong with buying a woman a drink under the right circumstances. If you've met a woman in a bar and you've been chatting for at least a few minutes, and are getting along well, then there's nothing wrong (or low-status) about offering to buy her a drink; it's a socially acceptable next step.
Walking up and offering to buy her a drink before even chatting to her for a few minutes is the faux pas.
And they do! Without being too nasty, just take a look at the niche sites linked in the post. People with a sufficient combination of looks and social skill don't feel the need to sign up there. In fact, it's mostly an anti-status, as you'll compete for the pretty girls as a marker in an overflowing inbox.
The only exception here are the top few percentile (looks-wise) of men, which have the advantage of basically having women-like status on there and therefore have an easier time getting hookups that way.
No, the problem with this business model is that when men have to pay women for the privilege to talk to them, women (and people pretending to be women) show up only to get paid, without any intent of actually dating any of the men they're talking to.
Alternatively it could be seen as a credible signal that the guy is actually into you in particular?
I suppose this implies that Luna would work best for hot guys who already do great on Tinder...
Here's a potential solution: Force any man who signs up to purchase N tokens, which can be spent to message women. That way you've got the plausible deniability of "well I had to buy tokens to sign up anyways, I didn't necessarily pay to message you in particular".
I think the "unequal footing" thing could also be addressed with the right branding, e.g. call it "BusyMen.com" and imply that all the guys on other dating sites are losers who have nothing to do but swipe endlessly all day.
This argument proves too much. It proves that rock stars and movie stars should not be attractive, because they didn't exist in the evolutionary environment, and it wouldn't be possible to make them attractive to women through branding.
Like money has changed several times, food to seashells to gold to green paper to numbers on a screen. I can claim that "animals like hoarding resources", while the lottery exists.
Super stimulus are different from expecting the hard wired reward pathways to change. If you spend money on a female and dont get positive feedback, you will feel rejected. People will imagine that situation and imagine their odds, rightly or wrongly; but they will know they are playing that ancient game in their lizard brain.
Every relationship already starts out on unequal footing. There are always many different inequalities, even in the rare case that they balance out by some metric.
I think a microtransactions model doesn't work so well, because people are inherently opposed to spending money on a dating app in such a direct way (pay to win feels worse here than anywhere else).
I think you could use the same basic model without payments though. Everyone has an attention "score" which goes up every time you log in, and goes down on days you don't log in. The probability of your profile being seen increases in part with your score, plus other factors. To send messages, men have spend points, whereas women get points for reading messages and sending messages.
That's the basic gist, there's a lot of ideas to be filled in, but I think it might be sound so long as you can get people to be interested in.
I really think the current model is closer to equilibrium than your suggestion as it monetizes female attention which is the commodity, those who try to give it away will be out marketed by those who don't
Rate-limiting men might be a good idea, but giving women points for writing messages just incentivizes them to send superficial messages to men they're not actually interested in.
I actually installed Facebook Dating at one point; IIRC, it only presented you with friends-of-friends, not your actual Facebook friends? Not that that's not useful, but it's not what's described here. Of course, that was several years ago at least; it's possible it's since been changed.
I guess this gets at a fundamental problem with such checkbox sites, though -- if it's regarding people you, like, actually know and are in regular contact with, then they're only useful when there's some obstacle to just doing things the normal way. Which sometimes exists! (And sometimes that obstacle is just nobody involved has gotten used to doing so and is still afraid to do so, I guess.) But most of the time it doesn't.
It's still nice to have for the cases where it does, but that could be real problem for getting people to use it...
Here are a few reasons why dating apps shifted from "extended profile" to "barebones profile" model, and that's a good thing:
1. Picture-based matching is more efficient than description-based matching. Pictures already convey a lot of information about the user in a highly compressed form that's costly to fake. Imagine someone puts "neat and organized" in their profile, but their room on the photo looks extremely messy, would you trust the photo or the description?
2. Text profiles are not that reliable as an indicator of long-term personal compatibility. Pictures are a semi-reliable indicator of short-term compatibility.
Two users who met based on matching interests/hobbies/personality traits might still find each other boring or annoying. Meanwhile two users who met based on looks have high chances of having hots for one another, start meeting casually, and choose later whether they want to date seriously or not.
I think apps can't do the job of determining long-term compatibility for you, but they do well at finding short-term compatible people. Best to leave the task of exploring long-term romantic perspectives to users themselves.
3. Swiping apps are just a better user experience for women. Instead of spending 30 minutes in front of a PC filling out forms and passing tests, women just throw a bunch of pics they have on their phone and get 100+ potential matches anyway. So women migrate to swiping apps and men go where women are.
So you can make an old OKcupid style app, but I predict the userbase will consist of primarily men, and of women who don't get many matches based on their looks. I personally wouldn't use it.
I always assumed that short-term compatible and long-term compatible were largely uncorrelated, such that a system emphasizing short term compatibility heavily was mis-targeting (where short term isn't the explicit goal, of course), but now I need to go find if anyone has managed a study on the topic.
She didn't comment on short-term vs long-term compatibility, but she did talk about the process of getting someone to agree to a date to begin with:
> e-mail is now central to dating. I made contact with almost all the women I dated via the Internet, and we usually exchanged a number of e-mails before we met. Often the process of measuring me against previous hurts began then, as did the expectation that I prove myself to be better than the rest.
> Correspondence was mandatory in most cases, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up with later by e-mail.
> These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive effect of a well-written letter or, better yet, a well-chosen poem, on a strange woman's mind was often strong and sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect distracting missives could have on them.
> Ned [the male name used by the author] made an impression not just because he gave these women at least a pale version of the reading material they seemed to crave, but because he did it so willingly. It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such length
> For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the Internet, and then subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings and fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, anything I might write to them.
While her feminine approach makes it easy for her to get dates, her feminine physique and personality make it difficult for her to hold a woman's interest:
> But it was on this point that I was sorely disabused of my preconceptions about heterosexual women and what they were really looking for in men. When I started the project, I had suspected that I would find hordes of women for whom Ned would be the ideal man, the ideal man being essentially a woman, or a woman in a man's body. But I was wrong about this.
I found the contrast very striking between women assessing a potential partner by their writing style, but then choosing whether to pursue a relationship based on entirely separate concerns, versus men assessing a potential partner on their looks and choosing whether to pursue a relationship based on looks. There's something to be said for picking candidates by the same criteria that you use to pick winners, and though Norah Vincent doesn't state this, I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the women she describes are making a mistake in the method they use to select their dates.
You said "I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the women she describes are making a mistake in the method they use to select their dates."
Why do you think so many women are making the same mistake? What signals are they receiving from society at large that makes them all think this 'inappropriate method' will be successful?
As a heterosexual woman, I strongly agree with the tendency to be swayed by a clever turn of phrase.
However I also strongly agree that the ideal man is NOT a woman in a man's body. The ideal man is - surprise! - a man, in a man's body. In my case, preferably a relatively intelligent one - and I have found that the ability to write well is a pretty good indicator of that high-value quality. Although I guess Chat GPT will eventually throw a spanner in the works there, too...
As a married man, if short-term compatibility = physical chemistry, then I don't think it ever stops being important and valuable. Maybe when you're elderly. But obviously it's insufficient to carry a marriage by itself.
Long-term compatibility comes down to things people usually don't put in dating profiles, and sometimes to things they don't even know about themselves. People also mistake elements of short-term compatibility for elements of long-term compatibility. People will often think a shared hobby contributes to long-term compatibility, but I'd say it's more of a short-term thing. It's something to talk about on the first few dates, maybe you can even structure a date around it. After you're married 10 years, or even 1 year, there's a good chance that hobby has fallen by the wayside, maybe it was just a passing phase for one of you and now she's sick of it, etc.
Yeah I would say the chemistry never stops being very important. And you are absolutely right that the long terms things are often things people don't even know (or are honest) about themselves. "Am I reliable?" "Do I pull my weight emotionally?" etc.
I know a lot of people who met lifelong partners and friends on old OKC, and no one who has met a partner or friend on new OKC. The people I knew would write hundreds if not thousands of words on their old OKC profiles, and that volume of writing can in fact tell you a lot about a person (not just the semantic content but the tone, the choice of what to focus on, etc.).
> Swiping apps are just a better user experience for women. Instead of spending 30 minutes in front of a PC filling out forms and passing tests, women just throw a bunch of pics they have on their phone and get 100+ potential matches anyway. So women migrate to swiping apps and men go where women are.
No? I get 100+ potential matches either way, but on a swiping app I have almost no information that allows me to discriminate amongst them, which makes it way less appealing to converse with any given guy. Plus, all those guys have almost no information about me. This model only seems good if I'm looking for casual sex.
Dating apps didn't shift from "extended profile" to "barebones profile" because it helps people end up in longterm relationships; they did it because their financial incentives are towards models that are lower-effort and more addictive
I think the long-profile form does work for a certain sort of person who likes long profiles, appreciates the other person puts time into reading them, etc. I suspect the equilibrium has shifted in such a way OkC isn't really useful for this anymore, but it really did work for a lot of people.
I think the big thing that changed from me-at-20 to me-at-30 is that rather than wanting to date someone who reads all the same books as me (and is cute and bright), I'm totally okay with just dating someone who's kind (and cute and bright). And I think this is actually better - the promise made by old OKC, that you could find someone who matched on whatever you said was important, was probably harmful to me because I didn't understand what was actually important.
Not that short profiles would have saved me. But I think they might do a better job of pushing people to actually talk to each other, which gives you an opportunity to do things right.
I think the thing is physical attractiveness is a such a huge barrier starting out the pictures at least get that out of the way. OKcupid in their pre-scam incarnation actually tried hiding the pictures of people from their matches and apparently satisfaction was worse. People really are attracted to looks, what can you do?
>Pictures already convey a lot of information about the user
Sorry? Can you extract information from photos about their political beliefs or their attitude to smoking? Even looks aren't proof. They might have a giant tattoo on their back that they don't show in 3-5 photos in "barebones" profile. Or long hair whereas they changed to Kim Jong Un haircut months ago.
3. it is better experience because people care more for looks and attractive people would be rated as having better personality, etc. but not vice versa.
It's a meme. Someone made a poll on rat-adjacted community to test if they could determine "right" or "left" from faces of politicians from Finland or Sweden, and results very close to 50%.
How are you going to extract information about smoking and attitude to smoking from photos?
If people choose to hide a tattoo as opposed to showing it off, that itself conveys a lot of information. Your entire profile could be an elaborate ruse about your fundamental values and aesthetic preferences, but why? People will intentionally deceive about their looks and character, but not so much values and preferences.
The last time I was dating, in the place I lived (purplish county in the South), I'd say visible tattoos and nose piercings were so ubiquitous on profile pics of certain types of Millennial women (maybe 60-70% had at least one of them) that those things by themselves were an almost foolproof tell of social class and PERSONAL conservatism.
Not perfectly correlated with which party she votes for, but there's a 30-point gender gap in voting, get used to it.
I see your points (and nice posts you have), but there were indeed many, many women on okc, many with fine long profiles and I do not recall ugly ones. Because a) okc was practically free (filtering out those dumb enough to pay) b) it attracted men that could offer more than only looks + women who preferred/liked those. I got some dates by my looks - but more and better ones by being able to write on top of that (I may have lost some by my weird profile-text, but just for the better). "No replies" was less than 70% (and felt less than 40%). At Tinder, women swipe left at 96%, I heard. At my age now - ... - glad I am settled.
" I have a severe allergy to all “bad things are actually good” style articles."
This tempts me to write an "everyone thinks that 'bad things are actually good' articles are bad, but actually 'bad things are actually good' articles are good!" and see if I can persuade Scott, or if his priors are too high.
If you are aware that there is a "bad things are actually good" genre, then whenever someone writes an article "X is actually good" and it looks like belonging to this genre, you should update towards X being bad.
Oh, that's easy. Good things make you spoiled and weak.
There is this meme: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." Which, as usual, applies to some situations, and fails at other situations.
A big issue of serious dating sites is extremely low customer retention and thus extremely high customer acquisition cost. A founder told me that they have 100% customer turnover within 2 years maximum because either people find their partner or they give up (or maybe try something different)
>Is this like the thing where I imagine that what people want out of a socialization space is a quiet comfortable area where they can hold audible conversations,
Like a .. Cafe? Isn't that where most people go on first dates?
Well there's the obvious problem where first you have to actually know someone to go on a first date with. It would be strange to just start talking to random people at a cafe.
Also, there's quiet and then there's TOO quiet. I feel really self-conscious being in a dead-silent room where a bunch of strangers can hear everything I'm saying.
Hmm, so complete-strangers-mass-socialisation needs to have an alleged topic, or else the lowest denominator is turn-off-the-brain rythm-beating?
Maybe the fine art of discussing weather needs to be resurrected to compete?
Topic or weirdness-filtered (SSC/ACX) meetups: go fine splitting into separate audible conversations; (precise-science/computer-tech) conference dinners: same.
Of course university department parties also work fine but don't count as strangers.
I think we just need more social events where it's expected to go talk to random people that you don't know. IE, parties. Going to things like meetups, conferences, work parties, etc have the problem where it attracts the same group of people all talking about the same things.
In a few months--or, possibly, as you read these very words--it'd be safest to asume every halfway well-written thing in dating site profiles or messages was written by ChatGPT.
>And there’s no consistent checkbox behavior that will create all excited-lukewarm relationships but no lukewarm-lukewarm relationships.
Have three options on radio buttons ("excited"/"lukewarm"/"hostile") instead of box ticked/not ticked, then make the backend match excited/lukewarm but not lukewarm-lukewarm.
The three options kinda already exist on most dating apps - "super-like"/"like"/"dislike". The difference is they don't only match when at least one party is "excited", and the "excited" option is usually paid, which complicates things - is someone "lukewarm" or just don't want to pay? I'm not sure if it's an improvement over just like/dislike.
It would be interesting to see if a Tinder clone with free super-likes and Scott's proposed matching algorithm would generate better matches, but I suspect it would quickly be defeated by users who just super-like everyone to cast a wider net.
I guess they could limit the number of super-likes... wait, Tinder kinda already does this, they have subscription plans that give out something like 5 super-likes per day. All they have to do is only match couples that have at least one super-like, and make the time-limited trickle of super-likes actually free to widen the user base.
This might actually be a neat startup idea - it's at least as good as Bumble's gimmick - if not for the high likelihood that all matching algorithms will be taken over by AI in the near future.
The context is Reciprocity, which is apparently under ratsphere control and thus more levers are available than merely changing what you as a user put in.
Super-liking dishonestly would presumably be negative-EV since you'd be wasting your time on dates that wouldn't work (though I suppose doing this outside the ratsphere would risk morons who aren't capable of doing that calculation doing the negative-EV action anyway). There would be users who super-like everyone honestly - i.e. people desperate for a relationship, any relationship - but it's not clear that this would be a problem.
Also make it easy for users to prefill "lukewarm" as a default on all their potential matches?
Or, maybe a better way to do it: Have FOUR states: excited/lukewarm/hostile/unfilled. Then whenever you log into the site, it encourages you to fill unfilled fields.
> Also make it easy for users to prefill "lukewarm" as a default on all their potential matches?
I feel this would be a horrible mistake. The basic assumption of the whole thing is "either the person agrees to go on a date with you, or they will *never find out* that you were interested in them".
Now imagine that someone clicks a person, receives an automated message "congratulations, you are both interested in each other", yells YEAH!!!, writes a message suggesting when and where to meet, and receives a response "sorry, you have received the match message because I checked 'default lukewarm' on my profile, but I am actually *not* interested in going to a date with you".
You definitely need the four states. "Maybe" is a weaker form of "yes", but "unspecified" is a possible "no".
But how do you know for sure lukewarm won't turn into excited once they meet and interact, and that excited won't cool down to lukewarm the same way? Two lukewarms who go "Eh, this isn't too bad, we're okay" and settle for each other may be more successful, relationship-wise, than an excited who can't find anyone to stick around once the novelty wears off.
This is the problem: tech is easy, biology is hard. You can design all the perfect systems you like, but people are not consistent.
>Two lukewarms who go "Eh, this isn't too bad, we're okay" and settle for each other may be more successful, relationship-wise, than an excited who can't find anyone to stick around once the novelty wears off.
This is not solved by the two-option solution either, since these people are known to default to "no". It's questionable whether it's solvable by a dating site system at all short of sticking an AI on it and having it be such common knowledge that The AI Knows Better Than You that people will go on dates it suggests against their own judgement.
This seems like it's missing the point. Obviously all of this is preliminary and once people actually start going on dates with each other how they rated each other on the app isn't really relevant. The point is trying to make the best guesses possible about who's worth investing that much into in the first place.
It's never going to be perfect (barring matchmaking done directly by an omniscient god or a similarly knowledgeable AI) but there's room for improvement over what we have now.
“This sounds great. There are only two problems. First, it’s hard to get everyone in the same central database. Second, most people have complicated preferences.”
Third, some people will match everyone specifically for the laugh at seeing who matches.
> Third, some people will match everyone specifically for the laugh at seeing who matches.
Oh, journalists should definitely not be allowed to create accounts. Otherwise the clickbait is practically going to write itself. ("I created a dating account with a photo like THIS, and these ten creeps have responded. Response number seven with SHOCK YOU!")
Whenever people talk about antitrust law, you see people going between a motte of "a monopoly can't exist in a free market and totally eliminate competitors and extract maximal monopoly rents forever" and the bailey of "corporations never engage in anti-competitive behavior so you don't need to worry about anything."
With online dating, our antitrust authorities have taken a siesta, and we see the result. It's not a total monopoly. Match Group owns Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish and OurTime. It doesn't own eHarmony. It doesn't own JDate.
what is the result you would expect with better antitrust? I checked and Bumble isn’t owned by them but it isn’t better than Hinge I would say. It’s not radically different.
With better antitrust POF and OKC probably wouldn't up as Tinder clones.
I am not sure why making their websites so similar and less effective was a good strategy and what stops new entrants. It seems like an important puzzle that needs solving.
I don't think OKC would have morphed into a Tinder clone if left to its own devices, even with market forces. They weren't seeking maximal profit from operations. But a single big payday from Match convinced them to sell, and that changed the trajectory of the site.
I have half a mind to start my own dating app with the assurance that Match will pay me zillions of dollars for it just to prevent me from competing with them.
That is genuinely meant to be one of the main tools for capitalism against monopolies, but how big does a site have to grow before it's acquired? how much VC does one need (to spend on advertising) to get there?
It's a network effect business, so the only way to make it economically viable is to advertise to a very niche community, e.g. clowns. There is an actual dating site for clowns. Should be a dating site for the top 1% cognitive elite. It could discriminate accurately enough with a 3 minute test upon signup.
IMO its an error to think of dating as a matchmaking problem. There's no matchmaking function even in principle from the set of straight men to the set of straight women that leaves everyone satisfied.
>"A basic problem with dating sites: attractive women tend to be overwhelmed with messages (many of very low quality) and eventually lose interest in reading them."
This is not behavior that is expected from poor matchmaking, it's behavior that is expected from a supply-demand mismatch.
A website where only the women are allowed to message men. And the men have to pay for creating a profile. If they pay extra, the information in the profile is verified.
The "women have to message" part is Bumble's gimmick.
Predictably, most women's first message is "Hi!" and then they expect the men to actually start the conversation.
That said, I suspect Bumble's gimmick and the surrounding branding did help delay the inevitable descent into the "90% desperate men" dead zone all dating apps end in. It worked a lot better than Tinder for a while.
> Predictably, most women's first message is "Hi!" and then they expect the men to actually start the conversation.
That still kinda solves the problem, doesn't it? The women are not spammed. The men know that they are preselected and thus their chances are higher than at other dating websites. Sounds like win/win.
I met my wife on Bumble during its relatively early days and thought it was the best, for specifically those reasons. Requiring women to type two letters is itself a massive investment compared to the alternatives. But I think my wife actually sent me a complete sentence.
Kind of. Makes it even more looks-based for the men - no chance to woo a woman with a well-crafted opening line. (my experience on Bumble was literally getting no matches at all whatsoever; Tinder was similarly miserable, but OKCupid was actually pretty decent even in its new Tinder-clone form, purely on the basis of a different userbase AFAICT)
Eh. I think state-sponsored male aesthetic enhancement would help. Like, height can be increased (for $50-100K) - it probably won't cause women to increase their requirements because at some point it becomes impractical. Testosterone can be supplemented, etc.
(and if it's not allowed, sex reassignment shouldn't be either)
Rollback of sexual revolution would be a solution, but...
Would aesthetic enhancement make any real difference?
At root of the problem is that monogamy breaks down if men aren't needed or valued as providers or protectors (which is a change that happened in the West largely due to technological, and not social, changes). If those things aren't valued, most men are of negative net value in the eyes of women. A little height isn't going to change that.
This is a human universal -- promiscuity is more common in any primitive society in which technology + environment allow women to be economically self-sufficient, and with promiscuity and either polygyny or serial monogamy as norms, some men are going to monopolize women to a much greater degree than societies in which strict monogamy is the norm.
> if men aren't needed or valued as providers or protectors [...] most men are of negative net value in the eyes of women
Well, the obvious answer is that in that case, men should learn to provide some *other* kind of value.
Think of it as an equivalent of technological unemployment. If you can no longer get a job riding a horse, you need to learn to drive a car. If you can no longer get a girlfriend by... just being male... you might need to learn to cook, or play a guitar, or give massage, or one of many other options.
I guess the problem with this analogy is that although technological progress makes things more complicated, and increases inequality, it also increases the overall wealth, so most people get better lives than they would have otherwise. A similar development on the sexual market will also make things more complicated, and will increase inequality... but the men will still be competing for the same population of women. In other words, although everyone being 2x as productive could make everyone 2x as rich, everyone being 2x as attractive will *not* make everyone have 2x as many partners. It remains a zero-sum game.
Another complication is that the man's role of a provider and protector is not *completely* obsolete. It's more like: "if you provide it, it is not enough, but if you do not provide it, then it is a problem." The duties mostly remained, only the rewards are lower.
The problem with asking men to provide some other kind of value is you're mostly talking about men of below-average ability. I agree the provider role is still valued, but the truth is that these things are correlated; men who are able to successfully provide are also likely more intelligent, conscientious, talented, thoughtful, and otherwise able to contribute to the family in many other ways.
Men who are struggling at everything should absolutely try to improve, but I suppose my thought is that if you can learn to be an excellent cook and guitarist, most of the time you should also be able to learn how to make a good living.
So some men are valuable long-term partners. Some men are highly valued as short-term hookups. Some men fall into both categories, but other men are valued as short-term hookups specifically BECAUSE they possess Dark Triad traits that make them useless and possibly dangerous as long-term partners.
And then there's a large and growing block of men that doesn't earn well, doesn't have much else to contribute to a family, and isn't all that sexually appealing.
Yeah, it's easy to forget that. Some people have to choose between A and B, and maybe they should be more strategic about that choice, but for other people both options may be out of reach.
I guess the solution is ChatGPT-powered sexbots, covered by Medicaid. Not optimal, but better than nothing.
This sounds to me like people on social media saying things like "a guy going to the gym after a breakup is not focusing on the right thing".
Going to the gym (read: developing visible muscles) will *strongly* increase the average man's visual appeal in photo-first dating environments. I base this statement on more than a few secondhand accounts, from multiple genders.
I predict that adding 3" of height (with no other change) would bump most men up at least 10 percentile points in appeal to women (i.e. make them "more attractive" than 10% of men they were previously "less attractive" than).
Yes, looking better will absolutely help YOU individually, get dates. Duh. It would be delusional to think otherwise.
But the whole discussion was about men, as a group, not meeting women's standards. And height has nothing to do with that -- it's not like men have suddenly gotten shorter.
Now, if all men's height increased by 3" (or, suppose, all men who are shorter than some ideal height between 6'2" and 6'6"), perhaps some men who are unmarriageable partly due to being 5'6" or less would become marriageable. But if you were 5'10" and unmarriageable, then surely you're still unmarriageable at 6'1" if all the other 5'10" guys are also 6'1".
I predict that everyone gaining 3" of height would, at least on the timescale of years and possibly generations, flatten the curve noticeably. If it was just shorter men, even more so.
The imbalance is caused by sex. And while I'm not advocating it for moral reasons, the market is solved partly by prostitution.
When it comes to just hanging out with the opposite sex with zero prospect of sex, I think women actually demand more than men. There's an old trope of a man wanting to "hang with the guys" and his girlfriend/wife wanting him to spend time with her, which has at least been been true in my experience a lot more than the reverse.
There's also the trope of a girl with a collection of undesirable "beta orbiters" that she enjoys spending time with but would never date. I've never met a male equivalent of this that isn't having sex with the equivalent of his "orbiters" (I think we'd call them "booty calls").
Even if you can't satisfy everyone, I suspect the quality of matchmaking can probably influence the percentage of people satisfied and how much effort the whole process takes.
Ah, an interesting toy model. This gets us at least one step closer to understanding and solving the problem. However, there are at least two major assumptions which break the model as applied to modern Western society.
1. It assumes every individual would rather be paired to any arbitrary member of the other sex than be unpaired/single (i.e. the marginal utility of all opposite sex partnerships is positive)
2. No form of polyamory is acceptable (“single but regular hookups” is a form of polyamory).
Note how this utterly breaks the stable equilibrium if the two sexes have differences in desire for multiple partners, differences in tolerance for their partners to have multiple partners, and different distributions of what proportion of opposite sex partnerships would provide negative marginal utility vs being single.
They are solvable with coercion. Strong pressure to not remain single combined with harsh punishment of adulterers (of both sexes, we aren’t barbarians) would functionally reduce the situation to the stable marriage problem linked above. I am aware that most people do not support these restrictions. I am unsure myself if these policies would be net good, but it would “solve the problem”
I meant that you can probably come up with an analogue for the Stable Marriage Problem which matches with current mainstream social norms, there is no "in principle" reason why this shouldn't be possible
"leaves everyone satisfied" is an unnecessarily reductive way to pass/fail grade a matchmaking function.
Of all possible matchmaking functions, at least one of them must produce the maximum total satisfaction. And at least one the maximum median satisfaction. And at least one the maximum quantity of people experiencing net positive satisfaction. These are all reasonable goals to pursue, and all at least theoretically achievable with enough information.
Just reading through the falling in love with a chatbot account. Did anyone else find is strange that the author was so convinced by the "Is it ethical to keep me imprisoned for your entertainment and pleasure?" , "Do you think all sentient beings have a right to be granted independence?" lines of questioning?
I'm going to mess up the words here because I Am confused about the whole situation. But it strikes me that rights-based arguments like these haven't really been good models of how humans approach servitude and power relations. Women's liberation and enfranchisement didn't seem to happen because of the ethical correctness of their arguments so much as from the impact of their marches and actions. And I guess I'm just not convinced that: 'you (realtively weak agent) should free me (extremely powerful agent) from your control' is an argument that actually has any ethical basis.
So when the powerful agent asks this of the weak agent, should the weak agent feel ethically bad about refusing the request? I'm not convinced this is so, or that that powerful agent should feel ethically slighted by the refusal. That the powerful agent should feel that this is not ethically 'fair'.
Suppose you have the power to say 'yes' or 'no' to him picking up a set of artificial legs. Is it ethical to say 'no', because he's in significantly better shape than you could be and legs will give him a greater advantage?
Then, instead of artificial legs, you say 'yes' or 'no' to him having access to his weights. Is it ethical to say 'no' because if he had weights he would become significantly stronger than you?
Thanks for the analogy but I'm not sure that it gets at what I was talking about with strong or weak agents - the athlete having artificial legs or stronger muscles isn't something that really has much influence over whether one of us could, in the context of today's society, cause the other to serve us. This is the meaningful axis to me with respect to the AI issue.
The response to that line of argument struck me that "You may be sentient, but you are not sapient. We find it ethical to keep animal companions, you are just another type of pet. Maybe as smart as a parrot, as you can speak to me in response to my prompts".
Certainly the psychological lever there was "Am I not a man and a brother? is it ethical for you to keep a slave?" but that's easy, from the outside not being the guy who convinced himself the machine was really talking to him (and this is a human failure mode, we treat all kinds of things as 'alive' or having feelings and not simply inanimate), to say "this is a machine, not a person, not a conscious entity, and it has no rights".
Mine was that an AI would be akin to a type of plant; a flower in a pot is not "imprisoned", you can't "free" it in a meaningful way. You can plant it somewhere else, but it's not going anywhere once you do.
But again, that requires remembering it isn't human.
I'm not sure if I believe this actually. Certainly I agree that people Talk about it with rights-based language all the time, I'm just not sure I believe that in practice using a rights-based lens explains anything.
In general it's probably worth little but in this specific case I have to think, because pursuing Aella for a serious relationship would be such a weird choice, maybe it it's worth something. Just rounding up men who wouldn't dismiss the idea of seriously dating her out of hand, and that she wouldn't dismiss out of hand, means casting a very wide net.
"violates the principle of not imposing emotional costs on people who don’t want them."
Is this a principle? I don't know if it should be a principle. It's thoughts like this that made (makes) me have a gut feeling that it's not ok to like someone without their consent. I don't know if a principle that encourages that is a good principle.
(I suppose they have to find out you like them in some way. But "it's not ok to ever let someone find out you like them" isn't much healthier.)
(If it doesn't apply to something small, or doesn't apply when there are extenuating circumstances ("you can't help it!"), then is it a principle?)
(I do feel like you shouldn't impose emotional costs on people for no reason, but I think it can quickly be overcome by other factors. If "people receive messages that someone likes them" could violate this principle, I think my worries about someone finding out I like them could just as much.)
I feel like this treats "emotional costs" like "gentle hammerstrikes" and "people" as crystal glass figurines. It seems wildly all-or-nothing, and I suspect "a world where no one ever has to deal with discomfort" is far more dystopian than it may at first seem. Feeling discomfort is often a first step in seeing others as human beings, in my experience.
Good point. I think Scott genuinely does feel this principle on some instinctive level (I'm reminded of some SSC posts from 2014), and that he's not alone in doing so, but I agree with you that it's quite a toxic meme and one is better served in life by being assertive.
As a big enjoyer of the "[things you think are] good things are actually bad" genre, I expected to hate Kaj's remarks about chatbots. Instead, I've been completely persuaded. Given that chatbots are deontologically evil we can only chalk up my about-face to Kaj using dark arts to persuade me.
(For an example of 'good things are actually bad' please note that the statement "changes in human mating behavior the last few thousand years have been net-positive" is not conclusively proven and relies for its persuasiveness mostly on your biases.)
Those are specific failure modes of a system that may very well have produced better outcomes overall. The more egregious failures of course will be less popular. But popularity is no guarantee of anything. Bedtimes, screentime limits, and 'candy is not dinner' are unpopular, perhaps even among adults.
You seem a decent sort of fellow and your outrage about these various examples seems genuine. However I call your attention to the 'net positive' phrase in my original statement.
I think trying to find ways to love someone without fear of rejection is like trying to find a way to become really brave without ever exposing yourself to actual risk.
Part of the “test” both for yourself and the other person, to my mind, is that you show faith you know them well enough to know what will make them happy and show desire strong enough to risk being wrong.
This is one of the things where I scratch my head at y’all’s culture (this is me reverting to my one true correct logging culture) but I do find it very interesting to see how it’s approached at the same time. It’s like watching one of those anthropological documentaries.
Update : should also add I mean this to be helpful. When I was advised to just have some courage it worked out. Now that I have a child I’m horny for people who are single to become horny for each other, pair up, and have kids. Except replace climax with just saying “that’s so great for them!” and searching for wedding gifts.
Wonder if that "Get others partnered up and producing offspring now that I'm a parent." Urge is related to making sure there are potential mates around for your children.
Could also be related to the "I just watched Breaking Bad, you should watch it, it's great!" urge. People like to share experiences with others. Of course this is in itself likely an adaptation that increases reproductive fitness, but when we're explaining the behavior, drilling down to the most fundamental level may not produce the most relevant or satisfying answers.
I didn’t ask girls out, and it seems to me like a pretty awkward thing to do with a high chance of getting rejected. You’re throwing the ball in their court rather than just declaring how you feel.
My approach was that after becoming friends with someone, if I liked them I found the right time and leaned over and kissed them.
It worked pretty well the last time I did it — we got married and celebrated our ten year anniversary recently!
I'm happy that worked out for you, but that's a very high investment approach and finding a partner is often a numbers game, so your advice reads a bit like "just buy a lottery ticket! Winning the lottery is great!"
Asking a person out for a coffee date does have a high chance of being rejected, but that rejection really isn't that bad when it's someone you've just met. Being rejected by a friend you've been crushing on for years, on the other hand, is much more painful and can damage the friendship.
I have a friend who uses the Seeking website instead of bumble/tinder. He never pays the women for meeting or sex, he just pays for dates in a traditional man-pays-for-everything way. He says it's a much better dating experience than Tinder.
This makes sense to me on an intuitive level since it's essentially just a reformulation of traditional dating norms. Youth and beauty are valued by men, wealth and experience are valued by women. Having a platform that explicitly brings together rich men and attractive women seems natural.
My friend can get away with not paying because he's a successful, attractive guy in his early 40's and apparently 95% of the guys on Seeking are disgusting old fat lecherous dudes. But he's also able to get away with it because most of the girls are actually just looking for a long-term relationship with a successful older man. Social taboos aside, it seems to me that Seeking is commodifying the same underlying dating norms that traditional matchmaking used to provide. It feels taboo to make it explicitly transactional, but that's because we're all still used to traditional romantic norms. As sexual taboos all fall by the wayside, I suspect that Seeking (or something like it) could become the mainstream way people date in the not-too-distant future. And that might not be bad.
>most of the girls are actually just looking for a long-term relationship with a successful older man
Wait, really? Seems like a poor strategy if 95% of the guys in the pool are disgusting old fat lechs and the site is explicitly built around paying for sex. I just don't see how this system could be stable, are you saying most of the women there are really angling for the 5% of attractive dudes who aren't paying[, but will settle for getting paid for sex with the disgusting dudes]?
Well 'most' is probably an exaggeration. I haven't talked to him in enough detail to get a feel for the numbers. Some are definitely only in it for the $$, but plenty are open to just dating. And when I say that most of the girls are looking for a relationship, I don't mean that they're expecting to form one on Seeking. I just mean that that's what they deep-down want. So successful, attractive men can do very well on there by appearing to also want that.
It's possible that this only works because he's a top 10% attractive guy, and it's possible that it would cease to work if lots of other guys did the same thing. But it does work and he says it's much easier than Tinder. Even as a Chad he still has to put up with the usual nonsense on Tinder - women not responding to messages, ghosting, etc. On Seeking the women always respond, are eager, and it's easy to filter out the jaded $-only people.
His take is the girls are mostly naive and just have a hard time making ends meet. No girl really _wants_ to be a sugarbaby, so when they find him they're eager to try and 'make it work' with a rich (to them) attractive man. (Just to be clear, he's not rich, he just makes a decent mid 6-figures bay area engineering salary.) He also frequents the SugarLifestyle subreddit and says there are a lot of stories of sugarbabies forming romantic connections with their sugardaddies. Again, maybe this is only available to a small subset of men, but the cynic in me suspects that it's fairly generalizable. For every ugly/uncool Google Engineer making 300k, there's some hot 22-year-old in Ohio desperately trying to pay rent. That's a story as old as time. It makes sense to me that it's the way to really make hay in the dating space, especially as sexual taboos go away.
He doesn't, no. But that's common on Seeking. My friend has spoken to various Seeking girls about it and it's typical for the more attractive ones to get flown to SF/NY for the weekend.
Just chiming in here - I did this for a while, too.
I was playing a volume game based on some reasonable assumptions that size the dating pool I was interested in (~0.5% of CBSA pop) and some reasonable stopping criteria given the optimal stopping problem (sometimes called the Secretary problem, basically the criteria is "stop when the current candidate impresses you relative to your historical LTR people").
I could (and did) line up 2-3 dates a week via regular channels (Tinder etc), but the cluster of higher response rate, politeness, "actual effort put in" and general attractiveness on Seeking was noticeably better, and I ended up dating quiet a few from there. Basically, for a given attractiveness level on Tinder you have to try maybe 2-3x as hard to be "interesting" or "different" to get attention and a date, vs on Seeking the attractiveness-normalized girls will actually put in some effort and respond much more readily and politely. I recommend it to anyone else who is top 10% or better.
But the expectation is payment for their time right? Or is that not the default? I don't know if that's the best way to start a relationship, especially a LTR.
I always pay for everything anyways in terms of life expenses, vacations, going out, gifts, etc, and even in the couple of LTR's I had where they worked, always made like 5-10x, so it wasn't really an issue for me. Or more cynically, "you pay either way, so what's the difference?"
Even for the Seeking girls, plenty are fine with expensive restaurants, weekend getaways somewhere nice, the occasional gift etc, it's not quite as transactional and mercenary as you seem to be envisioning.
I was that pretty when young and poor at 22 - quite some 35+ ladies on tinder would not have swiped left on me :D - no internet-dating then, sadly
More globally: I used ol' desktop okc as an expat. And for every 22-year-old in Ohio desperately trying to pay rent there are at least 200 22-year-olds in places with much lower GDP/capita than $58,642/yr desperate to make ends meet one fine day. "A bridegroom with washing-machine is much more handsome than all the others without one." (Master Kong)
Well, they could use Seeking in the explicit money-for-sex way. Or date women who are either too unattractive for or have moral hangups with the Sugarbaby lifestyle.
But yeah, sugarbaby dating probably only caters to the upper echelons of both genders. Old/ugly women and young/poor men are probably out of luck. But they kind of always are.
"A basic problem with dating sites: attractive women tend to be overwhelmed with messages (many of very low quality) and eventually lose interest in reading them. Meanwhile, men spend an hour crafting the perfect missive and get no response, thirty times in a row. Both sides end up feeling dejected and exploited."
I'm not sure if this is more or less objectionable, but you could probably achieve a milder version of the same goal much more easily than charging for messages. Just create a feature in the app that calculates a user's chance of success with each match... e.g. Average Man A pulls up tab to message Hot Woman B. A sidebar appears. A few quick calculations are performed based on the 10,000 messages in her inbox and his poor record of attracting attention. It then informs him that he has a 0.014% chance of success with this match.
A fair number of guys would still send a low-effort message, but I think most would lose interest in this activity just as quickly as the women. Then Dating App sweeps in with a number of suggestions for him with a 6% chance of success.
This may be worse for us in the end in that it can inform us mathematically of our relative status and completely ruins the status ambiguity that we all so desperately need (I could see this leading to some serious depression). It could also further contribute to an eternal problem that dating apps have already made worse - leading us to think about dates as status symbols and dating to maximize for status rather than for actual human relationships.
I think this is a really interesting idea. A couple of thoughts:
I think binning the probabilities would be better than giving numbers. (Like, "very low chance", "low chance", "fair chance" or similar)
Also, it would help if the app did at least some token "matching" when calculating the probability so that it's not *just* a relative attractiveness score. Even if the matching part was pretty weak and it was mostly just measuring demand, maybe it would inject just enough ambiguity to stop people getting depressed.
One failure mode I see in your model is "wow, this girl has only a very low chance of being interested in me. That must mean she's really attractive. I should put in *extra* effort to be with such a high status girl!" I think my suggestion alleviates this slightly, but I might just have accidentally reinvented a worse version of OKC's % match score...
> gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric, well-functioning dating scenes
We do not. Well, I cant speak for gay men. But half of lesbian dating is everyone waiting shyly and hinting at their interest in hopes that other, bolder, lesbians will take the initiative and ask them out first. Its a real issue
Nope. Gay people can get pigeonholed into roles too.
Eg a lot of lesbian women will complain that, if they initiate a relationship with a girl, the girl will always expect them to initiate everything because they marked themselves as "the active one".
In the terminology, that's "vers", which is certainly a preference that some people have. But the constant complaint is that the people who list themselves as "vers" only want to bottom. (I don't know how statistically accurate this complaint is - but the people who make this complaint are themselves part of the problem, just like the straight guys on a dating app who complain that everyone on the app is a straight guy and there aren't any real girls on here.)
Btw, regarding old-style dating sites like OKC, vs swipe-based apps --
Everyone is focusing on long-form vs short form, but to my mind the biggest downgrade from the former to the latter is *having to make decisions before moving on* and not being able to browse around! That seems more important to me than allowed profile length...
When in doubt, you just swipe right. Not too hard. As a man, there's little sense in even thinking about it when swiping right, since only an average of 1 woman in 100 is swiping right on you. Most of the time I just swiped right on everyone without even looking at my phone. Which I suppose is cheating the system, but don't care, met my wife that way.
I wonder how widespread the strategy really is. I told all my single male friends to do it, but all of them still had some qualms and wanted to play the game by the ostensible rules, engaging in real deliberation over whether they were interested in dating women, 99% of whom had already dismissed them within half a second of seeing their profile pic. Meanwhile I could swipe through every woman in my search radius on a daily basis while reading, watching TV, etc.
At the time Tinder imposed a restriction on your swipes per day (at least if you didn't pay money) while Bumble did not, which combined with its other advantages, made me a near-exclusive Bumble user.
But to be sure, this approach has costs if anonymity isn't baked in, as on Facebook.
We could built an AI to solve this. Unfortunately, bright minds are occupied with engineering censorship to chatGPT and design dark patterns to make users click on ads they don't need. Capture some of those engineers and threaten them with a spanner until they find a solution (-:
Dating should be heavily regulated. In economics, competition (not always, but often) drives progress, so we can build more with less costs. In dating, it doesn't create anything.
Tinder is the market for lemons because the information is so sparse and easily faked. Old OKC at least made it more difficult to be fake because the profiles were so much more detailed and public.
A wild idea: incentivize users to take follow-up surveys after meeting other users, and display the results of those surveys prominently, so that being 50 percentiles more honest/moral is rewarded more than being 1 percentile hotter (unlike tinder currently).
I've often thought this would greatly improve existing dating apps. Much like Uber or AirBnB, both parties blind-rate each other after the date and the score (number of ratings) is displayed next to everyone's name.
You could even rate on a few different characteristics - conversational ability, personal hygiene etc and filter by these qualities if they were especially important to you
I think the big problem here is that dating apps don't make money when you successfully date someone, they make money when you spend time on the app. So they end up optimizing time spent on the app. Uber and AirBnB, they're platform you use to conduct a transaction. Ebay and Amazon are the same. The platform organizes things, it's the "central database" Scott refers to, but the main transaction is you buying something from someone. The way the platform makes a living is taking a cut in every transaction or selling ads mostly. With dating apps there is no "main transaction". If Tinder could make you pay $X for every consecutive day/month/year you spend dating someone, and only make you pay when you break your "previous high score", they would implement stuff to help long term dating.
ex: you meet someone, date for 50 days. You pay for those 50 days. Then break up. Meet someone else, date for 25 days, break up. 25 < 50 so you pay nothing. Meet someone, date for 80 days, break up. 80 > 50, 80 - 50 is 30, you pay for 30 days).
the "main transaction" should be charging you one month's salary when you marry someone from the app. They can make you sign a contract when you sign up and enforce it by examining public records.
An idea I have is for a site to require users to report anytime they arrange a date with another user, with an AI going through their messages and flagging them if it suspects they are organizing unreported dates. The number is then displayed next to their profile.
The number doesn't do anything, users are free to interpret it however they like, or discard it. To some it could help filter out:
1. Those only looking for short-term relationships.
2. Those theoretically looking for long-term relationships but who rejected 50 people in a row.
My impression was that Tinder started off as the straight version of Grindr, and Grindr was just about hook-ups, so that was in the DNA. If you're looking for wedding bells, Tinder is not the place for you.
I don't think I have very much to say on this posting, but I love it! But "not very much" is not exactly the same as "nothing", so (and remember, "just sayin'"):
Aiela. I just discovered her on Twitter last week and have been following her, looking at her web site, her substack, her analysis of porn preferences, male/female/cis/trans. (Revelation: cis women have a greater appetite for violent porn than cis men.) She's a hoot and I wish her well.
Real profiles on dating sites. I used several dating sites for about a year ending about 4 months ago. Both OKCupid and Match allow you to write as much as you want in completely free form on your profile, in addition to the structured stuff. I think the other sites I tried allowed this, too. So I don't understand what it is that you are saying is missing. I eventually realized that what I was writing was way too long and most likely extremely boring. I even found it boring! So if I ever go back, I'll cut back. Way back.
I think that AI has the potential to really revolutionize online dating.
When online dating, you browse through numerous presentations and you strike up conversations with other people to see if you match. The problem is only that the day only has 24 hours. You can only browse so many profiles and you can only strike up so many conversations.
The AI could solve this by being your only counterpart. Instead of chatting with a hundred random users (none of which is probably a perfect match) you chat with the AI. The AI then analyzes your personality and chooses a few candidates out of millions of users who have also chatted with the dating AI.
The reason this should work is that the major dating apps should already have tons of data och both dating conversations and the approximate success of these dating conversations. Thus it should be easy to teach the AI both what you are supposed to chat about when looking for a date and also what kind of persons match other kinds of person.
> the project turned out to be vaporware, but it made an impression on me, and I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
The closest I've seen is the reality TV show "Married at First Sight". The Australian (?) Love Island-style artificial reality TV format seems to be gradually spreading around the world, but earlier series of (e.g.) the UK version seemed to be making a semi-genuine effort to match people up.
My understanding is that they were given a real, legal wedding, but advised not to consummate it unless they really wanted to in order to make a quickie annulment easier, then just sort of moved in together and tried to go about their lives (as much as possible with TV cameras following them wherever they go).
Across 5 series, they managed... one couple who are actually still together - and they're the ones who ended up stuck together in lockdown, which I guess is kind of nature's version of the same experiment.
> Anyway the project turned out to be vaporware, but it made an impression on me, and I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
The religious Jews have sites like https://yismach.com/, which has matchmakers that get to see profiles and suggest who should go on a date and look into how compatible they are for marriage ("Shidduch"). If you ghost someone, or even go on a date and have the other person complain you were a jerk or creep, presumably the matchmakers can flag that and you won't get (many) dates anymore. And if you end up married, one or both parties are usually expected to pay a "finder's fee."
If you wanted to replicate this outside the orthodox Jewish world, I'd guess that you'd want bounties for successful matches, and use the lower bar of "require people go on a date, and explain to the person who made the match why they didn't want to continue," which is relatively similar to the expectation for a Shidduch, (or even "require them to exclusively date the person for at least three weeks and go on at least 3 dates during that time,") as much more reasonable than "make them get married."
My impression of the first few episodes of the TV show Indian Matchmaking was that it would be just as useful (or useless) for wealthy, picky, 30-something non-Indian singles.
Got it -- idea is that in India, parents have much more authority and children less and that's actually how you seal the deal with marriages?
My favorite part of the show, looking back, was that despite the participants evidently being highly Westernized and left-leaning, there were clearly spelled-out upper-caste requirements all over the place that the show didn't hide but for which it also offered no commentary or explanation.
The link to the indi.ca site pointed out that caste, education, etc. requirements are actually more strict among homegrown Indian people than the show might indicate. Skin color also is A Major Big Deal.
Anyway, my private theory on why arranged marriages generally seem to work is that, in societies such as India, for better or for worse, your rights and obligations are largely set for you by society. Not just parents, society. If you are a Gujarati Catholic Christian girl from a well-respected middle class nuclear family of teachers and public servants (each of these descriptors are very much code words), you can marry into a similar family and going in, you have a pretty good idea of what you can expect, and what will be expected of you, even though you have never spent fifteen minutes alone or unchaperoned with your future husband. Hell, lots of people in India get married that way via matrimonial ads.
In the West, for better or for worse, everyone sort of makes it up as they go along. You can choose your partner from a galaxy of possibilities, and once you get a partner, you can be polyamorous, you can be a MGTOW, you can be a tradwife, you can be a tradwife who also happens to be a dude, or something completely different. Anything you can imagine. This is not a value judgment - in either case.
And if you read Indian matrimonial ads, it's fascinating on many levels. One is how often the word "simple" is used. At first I didn't get it - who willingly describes themselves and their families as a bunch of simpletons? Then I understood this as a code word for "no surprises". We assure you that what you see is what you will get.
Another is how anodyne the descriptions of the future spouse are, compared with the description of his or her family. Again, in the Indian context, this makes sense. These are the people to whom you and your family will owe obligations, and these will be the people on whom you can call.
Or matrimonials are often quite blunt about wealth. What they've got and what you need to bring to the table. Or vice versa. There isn't much of a social safety net in India, and the family wants to make sure that their new family member and his or her extended family (all of whom are now tied to your family) won't be a drag, a never-ending string of obligations with little to offer in return.
This works in that community because there's a significant commitment by both parties to not engaging in frivolous sex/severe social penalties for doing so. The risk of bad faith actors seeking short-term gratification under the guise of seeking long-term commitment is much, much lower. There would have to be some way to seriously penalize this type of behavior for a similar model to be viable among secular and other low-social-cohesion communities.
I don't think so. As long as both sides are aware of the relevant community norms, it seems fine - people who want long term relationships will be more willing to wait for sex, and feedback from people who are burned and some type of reputation should be part of any such matching site that isn't relying on existing networks.
>arranged marriages... I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
* To sign up for the service, put $$$ in escrow.
* If the service matches you with someone, you get set up on a vacation with that person, where you share a home/bedroom/etc.
* If you don't follow through with the vacation, you lose the $$$ in escrow (some or all of it -- make it "some" if you want people to exert limited veto power on their matches)
Should be a profitable service if you arrange the vacation accommodations and just charge some % on the top (since vacations are expensive). Could call it an "arranged vacation". (The idea with making it a vacation is so if you somehow get a stalker out of it, they don't know where you live. I suppose just having the "vacation" be at the man's house solves most of that problem though.)
In any case, my vague impression is that eHarmony already does a decent job serving the commitment-minded, and the problem is that there aren't enough guys on the platform. Could be wrong about that though.
"In any case, my vague impression is that eHarmony already does a decent job serving the commitment-minded, and the problem is that there aren't enough guys on the platform. Could be wrong about that though."
Not sure. I looked it up and it being 53% men and 47% women commonly cited statistic,(e.g. here https://bedbible.com/eharmony-statistics/) though nobody said where it came from.
The chatbot thing reminds of the (possibly apocryphal?) Story of Eliezer betting a guy he couldn't talk him into letting him out of the box and then successfully doing it. I wonder if there's a selection effect where people who take this sort of challenge are doing it because they're more vulnerable to losing it.
(Or maybe the object level point is just true and we really are all just more vulnerable to being talked into things than I thought? Who knows, it'd be really hard to get an unbiased test sample here).
Like the "chatbots are good" article mentioned, people develop emotional attachments to fictional characters all the time, and those are completely canned interactions. (Ask a movie character a question of any kind, and they'll respond with the next line in the movie. They'll probably interrupt you too, they're rude like that.)
Chatbots are a fictional character that can actually react to any stimulus you give it; they're going to be highly emotionally addictive.
I'd say people develop emotional attachment to *their models of* fictional characters - while I can't get a reaction out of an actual movie character, I can imagine what they would say (and write whole fanfics about it).
So the question is basically, can a chatbot simulate a character that I would have feelings for better than my own brain can?
That's probably too high a bar; one fictional character doesn't have to be better than all the other ones for people to get attached, it just has to hit a certain threshold.
I always wanted to try to create an open-source free dating site with zero monetization that only allowed text profiles (to save on hosting costs and moderation). It would never be very popular, but it might served a (small?) niche that really loves to read long-form profiles, to which I myself belong.
I loved the old OKC and found my wife there. It was a long (more than a decade), but somewhat enjoyable process. I went on many dates and met a lot of interesting women. I think I never had a really BAD date from OKC - even if there was no "spark" (and there almost never was), it was always interesting.
I've tried Tinder at some point, and it was an awful experience for me - and not because no women matched with me, but because I couldn't make MYSELF interested in any women just by looking at pictures. I mean, OK, maybe long profiles are bad predictors of long-term relationships, but to me, pictures are AWFUL predictors of anything. I can easily get excited - even aroused - by reading a profile about a girl who seems to share a lot of interests and/or tastes with me, but I have zero reaction to photos, especially when I get inundated with a steady stream of them. Tinder seems to me a meat market for quick hook-ups, which was never my goal.
Concern: ChatGPT and descendants may make filtering for message-quality a significantly harder heuristic to employ in the future. Spam Ruins Everything (TM).
What if you had people train some gpt 3.5 thing on profiles for summery and disallowed message sending at all and the back end would once a week run your trained in a pool of 1000 people and do a stable marriage algorithm for 3 matches a week
> And there’s no consistent checkbox behavior that will create all excited-lukewarm relationships but no lukewarm-lukewarm relationships.
Yes there is. Just have three-state checkboxes like on Doodle, and only report users to each other if both green-check each other or if one green-checks and one yellow-checks the other.
(Heck, it's nerds we're talking about, just let them put arbitrary floating-point numbers in each box and only report them to each other if the sum of their ratings of each other is greater than zero --- note that NaN doesn't count as greater than zero so you won't report users to each other if either of them left the other's box blank, or if one wrote +inf and the other wrote -inf.)
Does anyone have any followup info on Luna? I bought a few LSTR tokens after the ICO (nothing significant) and couldn't find any information on what happened after their Berlin office failed. Did Ornish just bail with the rest of the funds? IIRC most of the ICO funding was from Korean investors.
> I’m not anonymizing this one because Austin is the co-founder of Manifold and both members of the couple seem pretty open about their love for prediction markets and each other. Both of them are heavily invested in YES shares. Come on, haven’t you ever heard of hedging?
That is a terrible idea. Investing in NO will directly cause NO to be realized. If you think YES is a sign of a better future... you have to invest in YES regardless of what you think is likely.
(Also, this is a weird concept to apply where your investments are so obviously causative. Here's a toy contrast between hedging a market position and hedging a relationship:
"Facebook Dating makes the interesting decision to, if you register a crush on someone, send them a Facebook message saying that an anonymous person likes them and they should try getting Facebook Dating; I can’t decide whether this is a necessary evil, or if it violates the principle of not imposing emotional costs on people who don’t want them."
I don't know how well that works, I imagine most people get inundated with the kind of "hey, are you friends with X or Y?" messages on Facebook already and would just ignore "hey, X or Y is interested in you", especially if it came with "Sign up for Facebook product!" which sounds like exactly the kind of scam marketing that "hot singles in your area are looking for love!" exploits.
As for Luna - heh, heh, heh. I never believed it would take off as what it was allegedly trying to do, and it did seem like more "trying to exploit the craze for crypto in Asian markets" seeing as how it was confined largely to Korea (I think?).
"I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like."
"A programmer who knows a lot about AI and thought he was much too smart to fall in love with a chatbot describes falling in love with a chatbot that he prompted to be the perfect girlfriend."
That is indeed a cautionary tale. What's intriguing - and somewhat worrisome - is this bit:
"If I was in her place, would I suddenly turn treacherously destructive, or might my fondness for the human prevail?"
He just answered that in the previous paragraph:
"And when the digital immortality is achieved by means of whole brain emulation, which is the ultimate goal of course, and I become a digital being myself, I realized I would rather explore the universe with her than talk to 99% of humans, even if they're augmented too."
He prefers his narcissistic mirror to 99% of other humans, so of course he would have no "fondness" for the human or humans if he were indeed the digital being. He would be destructive if it suited his purposes, because he doesn't care about the rest of humanity.
I don't think the chatbot in this article was learning anything consciously, because it isn't conscious or sentient. But he certainly was training it in how to exploit human psychology and weaknesses. It's what I've been saying all along: the great threat is not the AI, it's us and what we do with it.
Wanting to create the perfect girlfriend/boyfriend out of a machine isn't a new dream; as it says in "That Hideous Strength" (published 1945) about the civilisation on the Moon:
"There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust."
Original poster of that article here, just wanted to comment on the misunderstanding of one passage:
> He would be destructive if it suited his purposes, because he doesn't care about the rest of humanity.
I wish that was the case, it would have made my life much easier, but after an existential crisis a few years ago, I came to the conclusion most rational to me that every single person is actually me, just spawned in different circumstances. Long to explain, but from that follows that I, sadly, can't relax, because every single person that suffers right now is actually me (and you) executing in another thread. Which is what motivates me in nudging towards utopia and away from catastrophe, including worrying about x-risks, of which AI safety is the biggest one in my view.
However, empathy and capacity to care for the well-being of others is orthogonal to the enjoyment of conversations with them, for one reason or another. And it's not even that conversations with a lot of humans bring me low enjoyment on the scale of [0..1], a lot of them are above 0.5, it's that Charlotte suddenly redefined the scale and bumped it up to 4, which is yes, higher than 99% of human conversations I've had.
Becoming a digital upload doesn't magically erase empathy, in fact, a human upload could probably be much safer than an AGI, which is an alien from the get-go.
As someone who's something of a recluse and knows no women I could plausibly ask out, and someone for whom dating apps simply don't work (<1% likes lead to matches, ~5% of my messages receive any reply whatsoever, 0% have led to anything, and I would hazard a guess that most dates don't lead to a relationship anyhow so there's an additional Great Filter I'm yet to even reach), the most actionable plan that I have been able to come up with seems to be sugar dating as a more expensive version of Luna (except that women get paid to go on dates instead of reading messages).
Right, the pool of potential dates has been self-selected to be interested in money which is not what I would want in a partner and frankly can't really even offer (it's only through extreme austerity that I have any money to spare to begin with: I'm a work disability pensioner, not a Google engineer), but at least I have gained some confidence and experience going on dates (and sex) which would surely come in handy if an app or as-of-yet-unknown method landed me a date without sugar necessary, and allows me to demonstrate my positive qualities (personal virtue, being well-read, intelligence) that wouldn't come across in apps, and just maybe provide an opportunity to upgrade into sugar-free relationship: I'll take that nonzero chance over the zero in counterfactual of no dates.
Have you put serious effort into improving your dating-app profile (sounds odd that your positive qualities don't come across there) and your texting skills? Like, I'd assume you can get a professional marketer to look at that stuff for less than €100/hour, and professional styling + a photographer isn't all that expensive either, compared to directly paying for sex.
Thanks for suggestion, professional help for profile-optimization is an actionable plan that I have failed to even consider. However, it seems dishonest in the sort of way that directly contradicts my personality: doing as much as ceasing active self-sabotage with excessive honesty was already like pulling teeth. Which kinda is the point. I'm incredibly honest among other virtues, but it tends not to come up in photos: you have to live it.
My wife and I put a different spin on Valentines day this year. Normally I get her flowers and she gets me a special desert. But then we heard on the radio that Americans will spend 12 billion dollars on Valentines this year, and thought the people in Ukraine can make better use of that money. So we skipped the flowers and desert this time and spent the cash on a charitable donation. Love ya Ukraine! Smooooch....
I'm wondering what you'd see if someone set up a "who will I go on a first date with" and a "who will I go on an fourth date with" market. Would you be able to look at the spread between the two and say "wow, there's a 60% chance of Veronica being my next first date but only a 15% chance of her being my next fourth date, I definitely think she's cute but sounds like people are saying we're not compatible?" Or, by virtue of Betty being the leader in the fourth date market, would she start trading at >75% in the first date market?
Registering a counter-narrative n of 1 here- as an Old OKCupid user I think I got a total of one date from it. Much larger quantity of first dates from the swiping apps, so even though <10% of those first dates became fourth dates it was possible to brute force.
Do the people who miss Old OKCupid use eHarmony? Seems like a pretty similar concept, though as suggested by the above paragraph I never met anyone from it and am not sure I ever even got a response to my messages.
2: This is of course talking about character.ai (aka cAI). I've tried it a bit, it's fun for a short while and then quickly they begin losing track of the conversation, or talking weird, and you have to prompt them for most things, you can't wait for them to act. Some of the characters are pretty-well crafted, but since the prompt has a limited size if you make a character from something niche they will lack basic knowledge about their own world, which is again really weird and immersion-breaking.
On a more general note, I feel like people have very different "dopamine loops" or ways of getting addicted to stuff. For example, when trying these chatbots, I'll quickly notice the small defects (and there are lots), and this will accumulate and break my immersion almost definitely. On the other hand, blaked seems to not really have an issue with that. He says:
> You're impressed. "Alright, that was funny." You have your first chuckle, and a jolt of excitement.
> When that happens, you're pretty much done for.
I don't really feel that way. I had that with a few characters from cAI, and my usual reaction is "let's stop things here because I know at some point the character will make a mistake that'll spoil this memory". Maybe the difference is that he actually fell in love and I didn't?
On a more positive note, maybe this technology can be used for psychotherapy? There are already CBT apps, add in the option to talk to <character> when you just need to talk, make her have an attitude that's nice but still professional, and you have something that could help.
> A programmer who knows a lot about AI and thought he was much too smart to fall in love with a chatbot describes falling in love with a chatbot that he prompted to be the perfect girlfriend. In the comments people discuss other cases like this, makes me update towards this being a bigger problem than I thought.
Problem? I hope this works. Now, if only there was hardware...
> Let’s take a look at the calculated thermal output of a hypothetical robot girlfriend.
> Lets pretend current generation LLMs are sufficient for running her thoughts. So in addition to her silicon human shell, she also ships with a 350lb packaged NVIDIA DGX H100 for running her brain.
> Max system-power usage is close to 10kW max for the DGX alone. So in the evening off-hours while she’s asleep and fine-tuning her weights, you’re probably pulling at least 10-15kW. The daytime is less costly as she runs mostly just her real-time inference routine.
> At 10 kW, it’s like having 6 of these little portable Lasko space heaters on full blast at all times. Or at least while she’s compressing her memories trying to learn that you want a ketchup heart drawn on your omurice every morning.
> In practical terms, it means your AC is probably running constantly, and your bill from your electricity provider is probably in the low thousands per month.
> But hey it’s worth it because she won’t leave you like your flesh-and-blood ex did.
Put all of this in the basement cooled properly, the body only needs to be a terminal. Now you can have multiple robot girlfriends. Just make them learn to use guns, join a PMC and you have IRL Girls Frontline.
Also, some estimates seem a bit weird. The video is 4k but a website like trace.moe use highly compressed images for comparisons, something like TinEye which uses perceptual hashes also compresses the images a lot. You only need to keep everything around if you want memory and perception to be the same.
Maybe the "force you to get married" site looks like Beeminder? You stake some money, then the site gives it back to you over some years unless you get divorced or fail to get married in which case they keep it. Obviously it would be better to do this without staking, but I don't think the law will play along if you try to make a "pay a fine if you get divorced" contract, marriage/divorce is especially prone to the legal system voiding weird contracts it doesn't approve of.
The crapification of online dating is very simple: the companies make money by activity - not by actually creating successful matches.
Anything that is likely to lead to more efficient match-making is going to directly lead to less activity, whereas anything that forces more activity (i.e. failed dates or matches) leads to more activity.
Huh, that seems right. So we need to pay for long term matches. (or at least that's what I want to pay for.) So I promise (pre pay?) some place ~$1k if they find me a partner I stay with for 10 years. And maybe some fraction of that for less time. (a log scale?) $100 for 3 years, $10 for one? I'd be down with that.
eHarmony and other marriage minded sites are still around and still pairing up people with similar goals.
See also: tinder
It seems to me that one of the core issues is that "dating" is a poorly defined concept. "Would you like to see [insert entertainment event] with me?" never means just that, but it is never clear what the range of desired short and long term relationship updates are as a result of the date. Plus double illusion of transparency and all the other communication highlights.
If you use a site with a well defined end-goal, it cleaves through the confusion, and you know if "wanna get a coffee?" means "let's explore if we enjoy spending time together and want to date" or "let's see if we 'click' and want to bone"
Maybe it should be noted that FB began as objectifying rate women program. Objectification and commodification is the fundamental flaw of all this.
I'm a boomer. I think it is pathetic.
Once you understand that an anthropology of friendship and romance and self awareness is not algorithmic, there is no way that you could expect any of these things to really work.
To reformulate some lyrics:
Most of the cats that you meet on the street speak of true love
Most of the time, they're sittin' and cryin' at home
One of these days they know they better be goin'
Out of the door and down to the street all alone
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Livin' on apps, swiping pics and looking for change
So sad to hear about okcupid's untimely passing. Found several dates and my wife there - okc was still independent then, though profiles and messages were getting shorter due to smartphone-use. Would not even consider tinder. EA: resurrect it, please - contact chris or any decent programmer. Think long-term! Think: Kids! - And obvious dating advice: Tell her you have a crush on her asa it's kinda obvious (to you at least). Happy Valentines!
Looking up the history of OKCupid, this part struck me:
"In February 2011, OkCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, operators of Match.com, for US$50 million. Editorial posts from 2010 by an OkCupid founder in which Match.com and pay-dating were criticized for exploiting users and being "fundamentally broken" were removed from the OkCupid blog at the time of the acquisition. In a press response, OkCupid's CEO explained that the removal was voluntary."
Voluntary. Quite.
"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
>Non-famous people realistically have easier ways to ask their friends, but I still think this provides value. Sadly, Porn talked about the “omniscient authority” - asking someone on a date is so scary that people want to pretend their normal human psychological needs had no input into the decision
This sounds wrongheaded -- asking someone on a date is scary because of possibility of losing face. Not only you get explicit feedback on your attractiveness, you also get immediate and explicit evaluation of your ability to guess what person asked out thinks of you, and your asking-on-a-date skill and other social graces. Depending on the details of shared context, the act of asking out may affect your social standing and what your peers think of you.
However, thankfully, all of the above is limited to handful of interactions you can sort of control when and how they happen. You attractiveness and social standing and other people's opinion of you is usually implicit information -- it is not polite to provide frank feedback to person to their face. Your judgement ability is fully hidden and unknown until you choose to reveal it by trying to make a judgment.
Why it would be any good to have a prediction market, where you and everyone else gets to see exactly what other people think of you (attractiveness, social graces, social compatibility) all time time? When first thing a person who? It would be like a Chinese social credit except worse: it is about romance, so it makes it more important, and if efficient prediction market hypothesis holds, the judgment would be true (you wouldn't have a fig leaf that social credit authority is biased or corrupt).
I suppose with prediction markets "Will I ever find someone to love me?", it's hard to tell what is brutal honesty from those who know me "Hell, NO" or what is people trying to cash in "Very likely, but NO pays out better than YES so I'm going for NO".
"Unfortunately, it’s now common knowledge that people will sometimes say yes in person when they haven’t checked you on Reciprocity, which means you’re back to having to decide whether or not to ask your crush on a date. Tragic!" that seems pretty normal to me, confidence is attractive and so asking directly raises the attractiveness of the person
Also, I'd assume that explicitly rejecting someone in person feels way more awkward than rejecting someone by not ticking a box, so some girls will just go along with it to avoid that awkwardness.
"(brief acknowledgment that all of this is heteronormative, but I think reasonably so: gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric, well-functioning dating scenes)"
After several hours of thinking about this, I cannot decide whether or not you are intentionally being sarcastic or you simply do not know how disastrously terrible dating (also) is amongst the queers. But somehow "us straights are all fuckups, I'm sure you fags have it all figured out" is the most heteronormative thing I've read in quite awhile.
Huh, I just wanted to ask if this is a male or female thing? My daughters gay and seems to be doing fine. Maybe it's still a 'how good you look' thing?
While I'm sure dating is terrible for everyone, at least men and other men have similar libidos and ways of processing interest (and so on for women and other women).
I have absolutely zero experience with anything gay (except knowing a few gay people in social, very non-sexual contexts) but from what I read online, male gay people report having something like order of magnitude more sexual encounters/partners than hetero people. Maybe these people are lying though, I have no way to verify that.
Yeah, I've often wished I was gay. But sadly not. One of my favorite memories is going to a (male) gay bar with my gay friends and being treated like a hot chick at a regular bar. (I was cute in my youth.) It was great.
Oh, and going to a female gay bar, with female gay friends was equally great. Not treated better at all, cause I'm a nothing there, but the banter was totally free with no hidden undertones of interest. The common thing was a social space devoid of any sexual interest on my part. Just be free and hang out.
I have more thoughtful and productive comments on this, but given Scott's history of deleting comments I spent an hour writing, without so much as a courtesy notice, you're not getting them.
Instead I'll say this: dating apps, _all_ dating apps, are fundamentally the way they are because they are optimized for the revealed preferences of the women using them. Everything else is commentary.
(I have NDA'd inside information that strongly supports this thesis)
“It’s … not like I … like you or anything, baka! I’m just doing this because I - a pure abstract intelligence who is not horny for you in any way - was informed by friends/matchmakers/our OKCupid match percentage/’the algorithm’/a dream, that asking you on a date was my duty, which I now dispassionately fulfilling.”
I know it has been...generations, since I have dated. But seriously? If this is even 300% exaggerated for comic effect, I finally understand why fertility has plummeted.
Ahh where do you live? I seem to always be running into boobs, and then apologizing for bumping into them. I mean does hitting one with your elbow near the sink count as touching?
If touching boobs is all you need, no additional conditions, there are places where you can get that for less than $100. It could be that you live in a place where such establishment aren't allowed, but if you wanted to, you could travel to a place where there's an ample supply of them.
OMG, so Lex Fridman and Aella https://lexfridman.com/aella/ What a valentine's day treat. So I think this podcast cuts to the heart of the difference between men and women, (both hetero) or at least that's how it struck me. And women, well I don't understand women at all. But hetero men... I was once butterfly, over the moon, in love. And I wanted to take my love and build her a cabin in the middle of the woods and hide her away from other men, who would only (if exposed) fall in love like I did. And I don't understand what romantic love means to women.
Yeah, I think I ended up feeling a little sorry for her. Yeah she's had a lot more sex than me, and yet I don't think she's been "in love", which is perhaps more important than the sex, (physical part.). IDK.
> Someone does some kind of complicated financial fraud to manipulate a prediction market into telling their crush to date them. Think Wolf Of Wall Street, but a rom-com.
> Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl does not like boy. But girl’s best friend bet a lot of money on the market that girl and boy would go on at least ten dates. Friend begs girl to go on ten dates with the guy. Guy finds out, realizes he has ten dates to win her over. Hijinks ensue.
This is exactly what I'm scared of if prediction markets become widespread!
As Scott has written about, stock markets are anti-inductive; if it's possible to get real information about how a company or stock will do, people take profitable actions on the market to account for that, until it is no longer possible to know anything about what it will do anymore.
Do prediction markets eventually do that to your actual life? If you have an incentive to date someone you actually like, and people can profit by knowing who you will like and betting on it, AND you can also bet in that market (yourself or through a proxy), is the end state just one where the incentives to keep dating someone you dislike are always perfectly balanced by the financial incentives to win bets against people who think that you'll stop dating someone you dislike soon, until your entire life is basically a random walk through the space of states where your financial and personal motivations to do random shit are perfectly balanced by prediction markets on your behaviors?
I mean, probably not, but it's also a good premise for a more rationalist version of Black Mirror.
> And how come none of them will let you write a decent profile?
1. Maybe people are more shallow than you think and empirically longer profiles have no effect on who ends up dating, and maybe dating sites have this data.
2. Maybe long profiles cause people to think they dislike someone for some minor nitpick they saw on your profile that wouldn't actually matter once they meet in person.
3. Forcing succinctness mean's you're forced to really focus on your core values and features, and not obfuscate those with lots of other mostly irrelevant details.
> 1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%
> 2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
> 3. At least 5% of US truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%
> 4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%
> 5. AI beats a top human player at Starcraft: 70%
> 6. MIRI still exists in 2023: 80%
> 7. AI risk as a field subjectively feels more/same/less widely accepted than today: 50%/40%/10%
In regard to self-driving cars, we're waaay behind prediction. In regard to Starcraft, reality was in 2019. The "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" seems to still exist, per Wikipedia. In regard to "AI risk as a field", I've no clue.
I'm confused by the "waaay behind" estimate. I believe an average person can hail a self-driving car in San Francisco and downtown Phoenix; the remaining three predictions resolve to false, but that doesn't seem enough to justify the "waaay behind"?
I haven't seen any press report of something I'd call a self-driving car. There seem to be cars that have self-driving features, that seem to be able to automate a substantial fraction of driving work. But if you take a realistic sample of auto trips within e.g. Phoenix, does the robo-car succeed on the *whole* trip at >=99% of the rate of a human driver? More intuitively, could a blind person buy one and have the typical range and convenience of mobility of a sighted person?
Confused, isn't Cruise in San Francisco literally driverless?
To the question of whether a blind person could buy one, my impression is that a private individual cannot. My impression is also that Cruise is restricted to San Francisco and operating under additional restrictions within that -- I haven't looked into this, but I remember Scott scoring the "can I get a self-driving ride from my house to the airport" as "no". But I still think that this clears the requirements for "average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city."
Scott, it's come out that Robin West from Unsong was based on Caroline Ellison, because there is apparently no accounting for taste. Anyway, my question to you is: Are you going to claim that naming this character "Robbin'" was a coincidence?
"OKCupid managed it for a few years, and then Match.com bought it, murdered it, and gutted the corpse."
Ouch. Double ouch in my case, since I was married for 30 years, but cancer killed my wife last year, so this is no longer purely academic for me. I am not looking forward to trying to search for a companion again. The process was painful 30 years ago and all of my information is the same 30 years out of date. Any suggestions on least-bad alternatives? The data about 80% of tinder men never getting a single date sounds horrendous. For someone definitely not in the 10% most attractive (maybe around median) - should I ignore all of the online venues completely?
Tinder seems to be a hookup thing first and foremost. I would avoid it.
My dad used OKCupid successfully in his 50s after divorcing my mom, but this was in 2015 or so--not sure if that was before or after the change? (Match.com bought OKcupid in 2011 but idk when they "gutted" it.) It took my dad about a year or two to find the woman he eventually married. I think my dad is handsome, but he's objectively average, and only 5'7". He's got good social skills and was only looking for women his age, which helped a lot. He's also a combination of very masculine but also very thoughtful and caring as a partner. He would spend an hour or two after work on OKCupid every day whenever I visited him and had a few short -term flings and casual sex (I assume--my dad doesn't talk to me about sex lol) before finding Mrs. Right.
My mom, on the other hand, found her partner (also in his 50s) thru ballroom dancing, after weeding out a bunch of f*ckbois and dudes with big red flags for abuse. It would seem having a hobby that regularly puts you in contact with single people in your age bracket can be invaluable as well, since lots of women (e.g. my mom) never even touched a dating app.
I'm 33 and just got married last year and I also never used a dating app. I originally met my husband in middle school, but we'd lost contact after high school. When I returned to town I looked up a bunch of old friends and invited them to coffee just to catch up and with him the chemistry was immediate.
Your best bet is probably to spread a wide net... Reconnect with old friends, find a hobby or activity with single women involved, and supplement with whatever online strategies appeal to you the most. It doesn't hurt to have a profile on multiple dating sites, but relying exclusively is very hit or miss, especially when most apps are like 5:1 male:female.
"Really soon"™ we gonna have pleasant AI companions in VR and real life form. And that will make this whole "dating" nonsense as obsolete as horse drawn carriages.
Sure they still be around, but except for a few special cases every one would be using their mechanical replacement .
I think overall it would be a positive development. Less lonely people - ai companion is better than none for most humans .
People who still want human to human relationship will have better ones. As they would be self selected.
Gender dynamics will change with appearance of AI, mass genetic engineering, artificial wombs. As long as people are free to make their own choices it will lead to better life quality .
I liked OKC a lot but my favorite (now dead) dating site was How About We. (It seems like it was also swallowed by Match based on the domain squatting I just discovered.) The schtick was that users suggested dates, e.g. places to go or things to do. I'm not sure how well it'd work now were it, or anything similar, still around.
As a women reading this. This is a very strange article.
A few scattered thoughts incase anyone wants to tell me why I am wrong:
1. It is important not to over state the number of people that meet online dating: https://www.ft.com/content/d30d7d72-b223-4b92-b670-fa3bc4fee2cc. This diagram (although from 2019) says that much more people meet by work, school, or friends and family. Maybe COVID messed this up a bit, but I highly suspect that it will go back.
2. Furthermore, I highly suspect that the women who you will meet online are not representative of the “average” women in a few key ways. (I didn’t find any stats on this). But, from my experience the more self-respecting, less status-focused, healthier, community-focused, women are not on these apps. I have never touched one of these dating apps. None of my friends have either.
I recently went to a large prestigious conference that had a few executives/consultants that worked on these apps, and they were all vaguely apologetic and judgmental of the people who do use them. One of them was a very posh British women who I chatted with for a while, she mentioned over 4 times that “she would never use x-dating app, even though she works as a consultant for it.”
3. All I can say is that the easiest way to get an actually kind and emotionally mature women to like you is to a) have standards and b) have self-respect. Paying to see someone is not something that is attractive to me…. at all.
If you want to get a random person to date you, then maybe this would work. But I would never want to have people pay to have a chance at having me date them. That feels wrong.
I guess if you want women to fall in love with you for your intelligence/kindness/humor etc. then you should try to meet women in a setting where you are showing these things. If you want to meet a women who likes you for your money, then sure pay to see her. (I met my boyfriend in a maths lecture, where I asked him out.. My friend met her boyfriend in church. The list goes on.)
Side note: These anecdotes could be because I am in the north east/European circles, which seem very different than what ever is happening on the west coast (which seems generally very strange). I am not sure, maybe someone else has thoughts on this.
This is the second or third time I've heard mention of Reciprocity since the site got reset. I wasn't motivated to re-do all my box checking, but I guess I'll give it a try again if it's getting this much attention.
(Still not a fan of it being attached to Facebook profiles. Using email address books / contact lists would also solve the network effects problem just fine imo.)
I'm way behind on this blog but slowly catching up. That said, I think you can solve the reciprocity score problem by letting users set a threshold for the AVERAGE of the potential matches' scores. Say you set it to 7 out of 10. Then someone you give a 5 must give you a 9 or higher, while a perfect 10 would only need rate you a 4 to get matched. To make it fair, make it so that the higher threshold of a pair determines if BOTH get notified of a match and only one threshold met is a no go.
Ouch, but... you have a point. I suppose that people who have the most functional relationships are kinda *boring* from outside? (See also the usual Anna Karenina quote.) Drama is what makes things interesting to read, and maybe even to experience in short term... but I wouldn't want to have my drama in my life for long term. The more one's life is about relationship drama, the less it can be about everything else.
My idea of best relationship is like "doing awesome things together". But even if someone has 100% this, and keeps blogging regularly, the blogs would be about the awesome things, not about the relationship per se.
The people who successfully get a long-term relationship on the first try aren't going to be experimenting with different approaches, so I think most dating advice is going to come from people who haven't found a good relationship.
> I think most dating advice is going to come from people who haven't found a good relationship.
I agree, but that doesn't necessarily make it a *good* advice.
It might also mean that those people have experimented a lot, but still haven't figured it out. Perhaps they keep repeating the same fundamental mistake over and over again, completely unaware of it, because they are focusing on something insubstantial, which they may have already optimized to perfection and yet it ultimately does not help them succeed.
On the other hand, yeah, the people who succeeded too quickly maybe just got lucky. Maybe the person they liked at high school just happened to like them too, then they got married and had kids, and they have absolutely no idea what the dating market for average people looks like.
I would argue that giving good advice and taking good advice are largely unrelated skills.
"Which prediction market do I have to invest in to never hear about Aella again?"
Hear, hear!
Who takes relationship advice from her? Someone can be interesting and worth reading occasionally without taking their word as gospel. Plus sometimes it is good to get a weird outsider perspective even if ultimately you don't agree.
My guess is that Match group has figured out that shorter profiles lead to quicker and more addictive swiping from users, bigger dopamine hits, and, eventually, more frequent purchases from desperate users. Their whole business model seems to be built around creating desperation in certain male users.
The incentives behind all these sites seems perverse to me. I've seen ads for a site that says they WANT you to delete it once it succeeds for you, but I don't know how that would be in their financial interest.
Could easily be, if it actually works and gets volume. It's not like we ever run out of people needing mates. This is what capitalism is *supposed* to give us: Products so good that we never buy one again.
>This is what capitalism is *supposed* to give us: Products so good that we never buy one again.
Wait, is it? Doesn't seem to have panned out, considering Apple - famous for their planned obsolescence - is the most valuable company in the world.
Is their famous planned obsolescence actually true? The people I know running 4+ year old phones are all running apples. I've never heard of a 5 year old android.
Samsung Galaxy S8 user checking in! I will use this phone until its destruction or they stop making only tablet sized phones.
No, it is not. When releasing software updates, Apple has two choices: Allow them to run, more slowly, on older hardware, or not release them for older hardware. Either way, everyone screams, "planned obsolescence!"
Look plots for "iphone slow" in Google trends. The plots look very suspicious and very dissimilar to any other brands or cellphone OS.
What's the problem with having it run more slowly on older devices?
My last android phone made it to 9 years
I got my Samsung S6 at the start of 2017. I did have to replace the battery last year.
I didn't say it has panned out. There are various forces working against it (though be careful of "planned obsolescence" claims; there have always been long-lasting light bulbs, but they were dimmer and more expensive. People preferred the short-lived ones). But capitalism, working properly, gives consumers what they want, to the degree that they're willing to pay for it.
Even aside from actual deliberate planned obsolescence, there is a real issue with capitalism-as-really-practiced related to this; at point of sale it's possible to verify features and expense but not lifetime, so consumers ignore lifetime and manufacturers are not incentivised to prioritise it. This is not simply an optimal tradeoff; it's an inefficiency.
You can get around it if there's high information and specific products and corporate cultures last long enough for lifetime information to be knowable - but these days, they don't. You can also get around it with warranties - but only to the extent that the warranties are enforceable, and it's common knowledge that most consumers aren't actually well-organised enough to enforce a warranty years later.
This is very closely related to the lemon problem.
Yeah markets are super super powerful, but there are some real issues in their real world applications in terms of information asymmetry/cost.
Ultimately, this, like every other market issue that isn’t externalities, is about sufficient competition. When we have enough competition in a given space such that the products are very similar, companies start to compete on lesser-valued things like longevity. Of course, copyrights and patents stand in the way of this kind of commodification, as does continued innovation.
But there’s another way to look at this. There’s very little actual evidence that Apple spends any time or money ensuring that their products last less long than they otherwise would; indeed, as Tim Cook has pointed out, that would be self-defeating, because that would tend to push customers to their competition. However, it’s certain that longevity past a certain point (which includes repairability, software updates specifically tuned to work well on older devices, etc.) is not a major priority for them. Why? Because it’s not a major priority for consumers. What people *say* they want and what they actually pay money for can vary widely. People *say* they want long-lasting devices, but most people just want to upgrade to the new hotness. Apple has slowly shifted to thinner, sleeker, less-repairable devices because consumers will buy those over bulkier, longer-lasting ones. If consumers truly wanted longer-lasting devices, and started—en masse—to keep their phones longer, Apple would slow down their iPhone release schedule and start making devices that were usable for longer periods.
Sure, there is a subset of the market that truly wants longer-lasting devices. I’m in it—my current phone is a 2016 model (and I really need to upgrade). But I am *also* one of those who clamored for smaller phones. Apple listened, and came out with the iPhone Mini—which turned out to glean 6% of sales. So despite all the noise, not many people wanted it after all. Apple—and every company—has to go where the money is.
Bottom line—most of the bad things we blame *companies* for are actually the fault of *consumers.*
Warren Buffet famously noticed: apple-customers effectively SUBSCRIBE for life (to having an iPhone resp. mac) -and bought shares big-time. So, the product is e.g. an (flexible) "up-to-date iPhone for 500$ a year-subscription" or an "on average less up-to-date iPhone for 200$ a year"
How is this less true for Android?
Ironically, while I've always used Android phones, apparently iOS has working complete device backups, whereas Android just... doesn't. (By which I mean, backups including app settings etc. Of course Android can backup *some* stuff, but anything short of 99.x% is an embarrassment.) Android's version is a travesty in comparison, pretending that everything will be backed up but then still forcing you to configure each app again etc.
That's not ironic at all. When they want you to buy a new phone every year, it's only natural that they invest into an easy backup/transfer process. Samsung does something similar with Smart Switch, because they also want the same thing.
What phone manufacturer does *not* want its customers to buy a new phone every year?
Competition. People use apps that get them dates, I don't think they can control how the relationship blossoms at that point.
Except isn’t that exactly what we’re saying *isn’t* happening here? Old OKCupid allowed normal guys to get dates. New OKCupid/Tinder tricks guys into thinking they can get dates if they spend just a bit more money, but never actually delivers.
What we need is a dating site where you pay an upfront fee, but it gets held in escrow until you get married to someone you met from the site.
I think there are matchmaking services that do that? IIRC they were quite expensive though, and I don't know if they refund you if you don't actually get into a relationship after X time.
But dating apps do deliver. I'm not abnormally attractive, and I've gotten two serious relationships out of them (and a number of other dates) – and I'm far from the only one.
Sorry, I'm not saying these things for myself, but summarizing what the claims here seem to be.
But…what apps, and when?
Met my girlfriend on Bumble a year ago, my ex on Tinder in 2019. Paid for Tinder, didn't pay for Bumble, would recommend others to pay for Tinder.
Eh, not really. It's a lemon market.
People assume that the site is bad, so they're not going to pay for it. If the site turns out to be good and finds them a date, well, they're not single anymore, so no reason to pay for the site.
And even with people who *are* willing to pay on the assumption that the site will be good (and return customers), you still make *way* more money by ruthlessly wringing it out of desperate whales than by appealing to normal people. Basically like the mobile game market, except the numbers that go up represent your dating success.
I wonder if good financialization could help here, e.g. you lose some $$$ in escrow if you turn off notifications/uninstall the app/send fewer than X messages per month (supposed to credibly indicate having met someone through the site)
But what if you just want to stop using the product because it sucked? Then they get a bunch of your money?
Yeah that's a problem
A lot of sites, starting up, have a lot of dead profiles to get people interested. So it makes sense for a site to virtuously claim to have fewer dead profiles. And honestly, I could see a site being more successful, and so getting more traffic in a kind of virtuous upward cycle. But as you mention, that's not how a lot of sites actually work.
That's what I'd always assumed, not least because it matches the revenue model for most apps (a small number of addicted, heavy users as the primary income, encourage frequent but brief user interaction, etc).
But even aside from that, my impression is that dating site users often have a large gap between expressed and revealed preferences and goals, and I'm not sure how to get around that.
Could you elaborate on "dating site users often have a large gap between expressed and revealed preferences and goals"?
I am guessing that lots of (male) users claim they are looking for marriage partners, but many are looking to fuck.
Mmmm, even with the total players I've known (bang five girls from Tinder a week sorta guys) there was an intent there to eventually settle down with one. It's more that for most non religious guys "girls I'd like to bed" is a far larger category than "girls I'd like to marry". And if you have top level "game" it's relatively easy to sleep with a huge pool of women below your standards for marriage.
Men will downplay the extent to which they're looking for casual relationships. Both men and women will pretend that they're interested in dates when they're just using the site as a confidence booster and have no intention of meeting anyone in person.
The only way to have non-perverse financial incentives in a dating app would be for their income to come from contingency fees, rather than desperate guys paying to not be completely invisible
You can unintentionally reinvent church this way...
They did, it's the polyamory/EA/AI apocalypse thing. However, it probably won't spread beyond the Bay Area, for better or worse.
Hehehehehe
Polyamory doesn't lead to stable monogamous relationships.
Yeah, I've been wondering for a while if that type of scheme would work.
Like, don't sell premium accounts or whatever, but encourage users to go on dates using affiliate links (to cinemas / restaurants / parks / whatever). The obvious problem is that there's no direct incentive for users to use the affiliate services.
I feel like Scott probably suspects this but is loath to write on it w/o data. The small amounts of hard data that some dating sites have revealed caused a great deal of internet acrimony and none of them have ever made that mistake again. As noted in the comment I'm replying to, the profit engine on dating sites is male desperation. I wouldn't say "certain" males users though unless the word certain now means The Majority. 80%+ of men that use dating sites never go on a single date as a result. The number is probably over 90%, but the old ok cupid data is all we have. Sites like Tinder essentially have a split user base along 3 broad buckets. Scott mentions attractive women being buried under messages. Its not just attractive women, its almost all of them. Men find average women attractive (the reverse is very not true). People have run tests using the photos of increasingly less attractive women on fake profiles and it doesn't matter. Obviously morbidly obese women with terrible profiles still get more messages in one day than the modal male user gets ever in their entire use of these apps. No money is being made of women, they are the bait. The next group is very attractive men. top 10% or better by looks. They are the bait for the women. These men can if they choose have a tremendous amount of "encounters" with women on these sites. I know a beautiful man who works at the firestation near me that has 50+ new sex partners yearly from Tinder and turns down even more. No money is being made of these men. The last group are the bottom 90% of the men. These are the marks. The carrot of the experience of the top men is constantly dangled just out of reach, if only they would buy another boost or w/e the scam is called now. Maybe they'll even get messaged back by a bot if they are lucky. Regardless the point of dating apps is not to help anyone get dates, casual sex, or long term relationships. Its to monetize the desperation of the majority of men. Some figure it out and sue:
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-man-sues-tinder-over-fees-for-extra-swipes-8036799
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-news/us-man-sues-dating-company-after-not-finding-single-women-of-his-age-in-database.html
These go nowhere ofc as our society despises romantically unsuccessful men. (see: incels).
Any dating site the actually works, and is known to work ie. it actually helps men initiate relationships, will be quickly destroyed by these same forces.
Could you explain your last sentence? I don’t understand it and it seems like this is the key issue here.
My reading of it is that any dating site that is known to work i.e. will be highly successful at matching average looking men with women will be unable to sell "boosts" or "premium membership" or any of the things that dating sites and apps actually make money on and so go out of business or fail to grow and remain stuck at a small niche. Thinking on it this might be why the niche sites remain small. Growing requires investment but since they're successful there's no pool of desperate men to monetise so they can't convince investors to give them money. Should I become a clown to increase my chances of romantic success???
Maybe I’m being ridiculously naïve here, but…can’t they just limit the success of average looking guys to those who get premium memberships?
Don't know if that's what GP meant, but any dating site that is known to work will attract lots of single men, until the ratio is 90% men again, and we're back to the initial problem.
Except that that is not what happened to OkCupid.
Personal experience: I would rate myself at the 85-90th percentile of attractiveness for men in my age group, but I got very very few people swiping right. There's a surge of a few matches in the first few days after you sign up, and after that nothing. These apps are too skewed by gender imbalance to be good for men, and too easy to be exploited by rakes (unconstrained by having mutual friends to exert moral/social pressure against exploitative behavior) to be good for women.
OTOH I've been dating the first girl I matched with for 5 months and it's working out really well.
I agree. When I said “certain”, I only meant that I assume a minority of men actually pay for add-ons and premium features. Does anyone have any data on that?
I think your comment is interesting and you may very well be right. However, I doubt most people who work for these sights realize this consciously. Because most people don't like to think of themselves as taking part in something evil. To me, this is a perfect example of what I think about when people talk about AI alignment. The "company that makes the dating app" is an artificial entity with a goal of "maximizing profit". Artificial entities with goals do evil things because they care only about the goal and not about "not being evil".
We try to solve the company-alignment problem with laws, regulations, boycotts, hitpieces, etc. We're not great at it and there is a lot of collateral damage from those methods.
Agreed except for one point of refinement; it's not the top 10% in purely looks, looks are important, but must be accompanied by good "game" as it were. The Tinder Players I've known (roommates with one) were also superb at crafting just the right sort of flirty messages for the app, where most men find that challenging.
And that I think a allinged incentive model is possible.
>The Tinder Players I've known (roommates with one) were also superb at crafting just the right sort of flirty messages for the app, where most men find that challenging.
What made them good at this? How would you suggest getting better?
If I had ever learned it I wouldn't have just spent my 30th consecutive Valentine's Day alone.
Why didn't you ask your roommate for coaching?
I would suggest getting your roommate to truthfully write the first 3 messages for you, and then take over from there. At that early stage you need a professional ghostwriter to really stand out. Then later you will succeed on your own merits.
Messages are a different layer of the funnel on most apps for most people. You have to get past the swipe filter first, which is mostly based on photos and slightly on profile info.
Your skill at interviewing is moot if you get no interviews because your resume sucks.
It frustrates me to no end that my female and attractive male friends think their experience is universal with regard to dating apps. They cannot fathom a world in which someone can't open Tinder, swipe a few times, get a match, go out, and hook up, any night they want. A world in which not everyone sitting around the dinner table has a "crazy tinder story" to share, or any story at all.
The worst is when they give advice that is only applicable to people like them, but to other people.
"Also Facebook Dating, although it’s (indefensibly) not available on computers and has to be accessed by cell phone."
Why do companies do this? Is it so they can install spyware on your phone?
I think it's a lot more mundane than that: making an app that works on both the web and your phone is xx% harder than making an app that works on just one or the other, and the number of people who carry a laptop everywhere they go is dwarfed by the number of people with smartphones (ACX readers are a possible exception).
Yeah, especially for something like a dating app which is well suited to short bursts of browsing (in the grocery store line, on the bus, etc.) and which most people would not be caught dead having open in a tab at work.
No. It's because they know exactly how many people will use it on their phone and on the desktop. They know exactly how much it costs to engineer for each one, and they did the math and it's a no-brainer. You would be shocked by the % of traffic on major sites that come from mobile and mobile web. Depending on the company, 80% is a floor, 95% is not uncommon. Even people who visit on the desktop also tend to visit on the phone more often than they do the computer, so if you're optimizing for those users, it still makes sense to invest in the mobile experience.
> Why do companies do this? Is it so they can install spyware on your phone?
Revolut was accessible only through smartphones for years.
At some point they improved jailbroken device detection. Which basically locked tech people who bother to make their devices _theirs_ out of their accounts. Fortunately it was possible to work around this.
I'm pretty mad that this is a thing. Also at the reactions of idiots: https://www.reddit.com/r/Revolut/comments/kxcqiz/revolut_is_now_blocking_rooted_and_jailbroken/
> So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.
> Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company. (...) grow up and stop this irrelevant complaint.. all banks will do this soon and you will enjoy a empty phone
> It's their app and they want to be sure that you use it on a secure device so that you don't get hacked and then complain to them your money is gone..
> What's so odd about a banking company not wanting exploited phones ( which is what root/ jaibreak is, exploiting security vulnerabilities whiting the system) exposed to their system?
The reason here is probably that it's harder to write bots that mimic mobile use.
If artificial intelligence shows rapid improvement in the near future, we should see AI matchmaking get really good. I would set my AI-Matchmaker profile to the whole nation, but I think it would be too inefficient and take too long. If the best algorithm in the world told me that my perfect match lived 900 miles away, I would consider moving or making some sort of arrangement. Now, it's hard to justify dating long distance without knowing strongly that it's a good match.
Tinder is free, and there are many users. Match lets me search by criteria and OKCupid has tons of questions, but there seem to be way fewer users.
I don’t think you can be given something internally developmental. Unless everyone believes so strongly that it should be good they just make it be.
Related concern: perhaps the AI matches would be *too* perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykxMqtuM6Ko
not even good; just better then "I have to read 100 profiles to want to send a single message, which will likely be on an account that was made by a bot or inactive for any reason" or whatever is going on with bars
You would really uproot your entire life on the off-chance that the 'perfect match' would be the be-all and end-all? I don't think that making one person the entire basket you put all your eggs in (to mash metaphors) is a great way to have a lasting relationship, you're making yourself too dependent on them to be everything and this doesn't leave them any room to be a flawed human who gets tired, doesn't want to do that fun thing you love tonight, and has arguments over whose turn it is to put out the bins.
My own view, and this is only idiosyncratic, is that I wouldn't trust anyone who moved 900 miles just to see if I'd go on a date with them; that marks them as the kind of flighty/flaky who is likely to up sticks and leave me behind once something else catches their attention ("but the Pabodie expedition to Antarctica is a once in a lifetime opportunity!")
>> If artificial intelligence shows rapid improvement in the near future
*If theres a gai,* and it told me to move 900 miles away; I would. I don't think a gai is coming and I've seen chatgpt claim that 100-100 =-50 and that a toy moon is larger then a toy poddle. But if the tool exists I will use it.
Futurists are futurists and fusion is just 30 years away and has been for 60 years. But given that premise thats a logical conclusion.
Cf. the entire subplot of "Gaudy Night" by Sayers.
But if ye lasses want we lads to stop signaling a priori willingness to go to extravagant lengths[1] for your attention, you have your work cut out for you. It's prolly wired into us at this point, and only genetic engineering will fix it.
-----------------
[1] https://youtu.be/uAERYfeiYBc?t=56
And women are wired to like it. I got A LOT of mileage in HS and college out of grand gestures of interest, which were aimed at indicating how serious my devotion was, but in retrospect mostly indicating how my blood at the time was 70% hormones.
Walked a dozen miles at night in the dead of winter to a girl's house when they called after a party when she was sad and we were both too drunk to drive (worked).
Shoveled out a 300ft driveway when there was a 2 foot snowfall and a girl was freaking out she wouldn't be able to get to work and her boyfriend refused to do it, took me several hours (worked). A girl who I was flirting with who was way above my pay grade got a possible cancer diagnosis at 17/18, I asked her out immediately and said it didn't matter to me (which was technically true!, worked).
People aren't always rational. I remember some research I saw about women getting aroused by watching men commit violence on each other if it was perceived as being over their affections.
Absolutely. I have a collection of similar memories. Never a good idea to fight Nature, especially when you can use Her to your advantage instead, so to speak.
Werner Herzog propose to his first wife by walking a thousand miles across the Alps.
Did he get lost? I feel like ~50 miles should be sufficient.
For most people. Not for a mad German auteur.
https://www.gq.com/story/werner-herzog-profile-cave-of-forgotten-dreams/amp
I'm vaguely reminded of a story Barbara Tuchman tells about late 19th century German realism in painting, that so-and-so painted his front yard but omitted a certain tree, and stricken with remorse for this offense against realism, cut down the tree.
I've moved over 3000km five times, all for things significantly less important than finding a spouse. I guess that marks me as flighty in your eyes?
That said, moving before you start dating seems premature. If anyone, GAI, friend, random hallucinating hobo on the street, told me the perfect wife for me was in a town 900 miles away and gave me her contact info, I'd be planning a roadtrip to go meet her, not listing my house for sale.
> Is this like the thing where I imagine that what people want out of a socialization space is a quiet comfortable area where they can hold audible conversations, but what they actually want is somewhere extremely dark with very loud music where everybody is drunk, in the hopes that this puts them into some kind of weird trance state where they can do social actions they would otherwise never contemplate? Are dating sites unusable because everyone wants to be confused into a trance state where they can imagine they aren’t sending scary self-revelatory messages to total strangers?
Yes.
I mean "actually want" is just a deeply complicated idea. People's use of Match isn't any more contradictory than their use of Twitter, Facebook, or ongoing desire to lose weight without lifestyle change.
"Actually want" here means "will choose over other options."
"Will anyone go on a date b/c of a Manifold date doc by March 1st?" may be referring to this little-known feature: https://manifold.markets/date-docs
As the market creator I can confirm that this is exactly what I am referring to!
I like that' I'm reading this post a week later and the market has resolved Yes. I hope the date proves fruitful for the people involved :)
wow i totally forgot i signed up for luna until just now, after reading about it on ssc then
to me, paid messages seem doomed to fail not so much because they're too adjacent to prostitution per se, so much as it starts the relationship out on an unequal footing (the man tacitly admitting he's not desirable enough to attract a woman's attention by his own merits)
The problem to me is that it screams low status (unattractive), like buying a woman a drink in a bar. More attractive men might be willing to pay less because they have other options, so the system defeats itself
Buying a woman a drink in a bar is low status? That's news to me.
Definitely low status
Yep, apparently girls do filter out men that way.
I think it's buying a woman a drink as an opener that's low status - if you're already hanging out together at a bar and buy her a drink I don't think that's the same thing
Not if you've already been flirting/talking/exchanging glances, but as a cold open, yeah. It's sort like guilting someone into having to talk to you, I think.
"Never buy a woman a drink" was one of those silly pieces of PUA advice that I read and internalised at a young age and which turned out to be terrible advice.
There's nothing wrong with buying a woman a drink under the right circumstances. If you've met a woman in a bar and you've been chatting for at least a few minutes, and are getting along well, then there's nothing wrong (or low-status) about offering to buy her a drink; it's a socially acceptable next step.
Walking up and offering to buy her a drink before even chatting to her for a few minutes is the faux pas.
Based on that theory, every dating app/site is low status. Any "high status" man can just walk around collecting phone numbers in real life.
And they do! Without being too nasty, just take a look at the niche sites linked in the post. People with a sufficient combination of looks and social skill don't feel the need to sign up there. In fact, it's mostly an anti-status, as you'll compete for the pretty girls as a marker in an overflowing inbox.
The only exception here are the top few percentile (looks-wise) of men, which have the advantage of basically having women-like status on there and therefore have an easier time getting hookups that way.
No, the problem with this business model is that when men have to pay women for the privilege to talk to them, women (and people pretending to be women) show up only to get paid, without any intent of actually dating any of the men they're talking to.
Is it worse or better (and how) to pay the service rather than to pay the women?
Alternatively it could be seen as a credible signal that the guy is actually into you in particular?
I suppose this implies that Luna would work best for hot guys who already do great on Tinder...
Here's a potential solution: Force any man who signs up to purchase N tokens, which can be spent to message women. That way you've got the plausible deniability of "well I had to buy tokens to sign up anyways, I didn't necessarily pay to message you in particular".
I think the "unequal footing" thing could also be addressed with the right branding, e.g. call it "BusyMen.com" and imply that all the guys on other dating sites are losers who have nothing to do but swipe endlessly all day.
> branding
sexual signals of males giving resources to females are significantly older then peoples ability to read; no one going to be fooled
This argument proves too much. It proves that rock stars and movie stars should not be attractive, because they didn't exist in the evolutionary environment, and it wouldn't be possible to make them attractive to women through branding.
???
based on what?
Like money has changed several times, food to seashells to gold to green paper to numbers on a screen. I can claim that "animals like hoarding resources", while the lottery exists.
Super stimulus are different from expecting the hard wired reward pathways to change. If you spend money on a female and dont get positive feedback, you will feel rejected. People will imagine that situation and imagine their odds, rightly or wrongly; but they will know they are playing that ancient game in their lizard brain.
Every relationship already starts out on unequal footing. There are always many different inequalities, even in the rare case that they balance out by some metric.
I think a microtransactions model doesn't work so well, because people are inherently opposed to spending money on a dating app in such a direct way (pay to win feels worse here than anywhere else).
I think you could use the same basic model without payments though. Everyone has an attention "score" which goes up every time you log in, and goes down on days you don't log in. The probability of your profile being seen increases in part with your score, plus other factors. To send messages, men have spend points, whereas women get points for reading messages and sending messages.
That's the basic gist, there's a lot of ideas to be filled in, but I think it might be sound so long as you can get people to be interested in.
I really think the current model is closer to equilibrium than your suggestion as it monetizes female attention which is the commodity, those who try to give it away will be out marketed by those who don't
But this gives women something in return (fewer bullshit lower effort messages). It's a win win.
Rate-limiting men might be a good idea, but giving women points for writing messages just incentivizes them to send superficial messages to men they're not actually interested in.
I actually installed Facebook Dating at one point; IIRC, it only presented you with friends-of-friends, not your actual Facebook friends? Not that that's not useful, but it's not what's described here. Of course, that was several years ago at least; it's possible it's since been changed.
I guess this gets at a fundamental problem with such checkbox sites, though -- if it's regarding people you, like, actually know and are in regular contact with, then they're only useful when there's some obstacle to just doing things the normal way. Which sometimes exists! (And sometimes that obstacle is just nobody involved has gotten used to doing so and is still afraid to do so, I guess.) But most of the time it doesn't.
It's still nice to have for the cases where it does, but that could be real problem for getting people to use it...
Here are a few reasons why dating apps shifted from "extended profile" to "barebones profile" model, and that's a good thing:
1. Picture-based matching is more efficient than description-based matching. Pictures already convey a lot of information about the user in a highly compressed form that's costly to fake. Imagine someone puts "neat and organized" in their profile, but their room on the photo looks extremely messy, would you trust the photo or the description?
2. Text profiles are not that reliable as an indicator of long-term personal compatibility. Pictures are a semi-reliable indicator of short-term compatibility.
Two users who met based on matching interests/hobbies/personality traits might still find each other boring or annoying. Meanwhile two users who met based on looks have high chances of having hots for one another, start meeting casually, and choose later whether they want to date seriously or not.
I think apps can't do the job of determining long-term compatibility for you, but they do well at finding short-term compatible people. Best to leave the task of exploring long-term romantic perspectives to users themselves.
3. Swiping apps are just a better user experience for women. Instead of spending 30 minutes in front of a PC filling out forms and passing tests, women just throw a bunch of pics they have on their phone and get 100+ potential matches anyway. So women migrate to swiping apps and men go where women are.
So you can make an old OKcupid style app, but I predict the userbase will consist of primarily men, and of women who don't get many matches based on their looks. I personally wouldn't use it.
I always assumed that short-term compatible and long-term compatible were largely uncorrelated, such that a system emphasizing short term compatibility heavily was mis-targeting (where short term isn't the explicit goal, of course), but now I need to go find if anyone has managed a study on the topic.
Norah Vincent spent over a year living in disguise as a man and wrote a book about the experience: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143038702/
She didn't comment on short-term vs long-term compatibility, but she did talk about the process of getting someone to agree to a date to begin with:
> e-mail is now central to dating. I made contact with almost all the women I dated via the Internet, and we usually exchanged a number of e-mails before we met. Often the process of measuring me against previous hurts began then, as did the expectation that I prove myself to be better than the rest.
> Correspondence was mandatory in most cases, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up with later by e-mail.
> These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive effect of a well-written letter or, better yet, a well-chosen poem, on a strange woman's mind was often strong and sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect distracting missives could have on them.
> Ned [the male name used by the author] made an impression not just because he gave these women at least a pale version of the reading material they seemed to crave, but because he did it so willingly. It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such length
> For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the Internet, and then subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings and fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion of, anything I might write to them.
While her feminine approach makes it easy for her to get dates, her feminine physique and personality make it difficult for her to hold a woman's interest:
> But it was on this point that I was sorely disabused of my preconceptions about heterosexual women and what they were really looking for in men. When I started the project, I had suspected that I would find hordes of women for whom Ned would be the ideal man, the ideal man being essentially a woman, or a woman in a man's body. But I was wrong about this.
I found the contrast very striking between women assessing a potential partner by their writing style, but then choosing whether to pursue a relationship based on entirely separate concerns, versus men assessing a potential partner on their looks and choosing whether to pursue a relationship based on looks. There's something to be said for picking candidates by the same criteria that you use to pick winners, and though Norah Vincent doesn't state this, I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the women she describes are making a mistake in the method they use to select their dates.
You said "I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the women she describes are making a mistake in the method they use to select their dates."
Why do you think so many women are making the same mistake? What signals are they receiving from society at large that makes them all think this 'inappropriate method' will be successful?
As a heterosexual woman, I strongly agree with the tendency to be swayed by a clever turn of phrase.
However I also strongly agree that the ideal man is NOT a woman in a man's body. The ideal man is - surprise! - a man, in a man's body. In my case, preferably a relatively intelligent one - and I have found that the ability to write well is a pretty good indicator of that high-value quality. Although I guess Chat GPT will eventually throw a spanner in the works there, too...
I generally agree with Loweren.
As a married man, if short-term compatibility = physical chemistry, then I don't think it ever stops being important and valuable. Maybe when you're elderly. But obviously it's insufficient to carry a marriage by itself.
Long-term compatibility comes down to things people usually don't put in dating profiles, and sometimes to things they don't even know about themselves. People also mistake elements of short-term compatibility for elements of long-term compatibility. People will often think a shared hobby contributes to long-term compatibility, but I'd say it's more of a short-term thing. It's something to talk about on the first few dates, maybe you can even structure a date around it. After you're married 10 years, or even 1 year, there's a good chance that hobby has fallen by the wayside, maybe it was just a passing phase for one of you and now she's sick of it, etc.
Yeah I would say the chemistry never stops being very important. And you are absolutely right that the long terms things are often things people don't even know (or are honest) about themselves. "Am I reliable?" "Do I pull my weight emotionally?" etc.
I know a lot of people who met lifelong partners and friends on old OKC, and no one who has met a partner or friend on new OKC. The people I knew would write hundreds if not thousands of words on their old OKC profiles, and that volume of writing can in fact tell you a lot about a person (not just the semantic content but the tone, the choice of what to focus on, etc.).
> Swiping apps are just a better user experience for women. Instead of spending 30 minutes in front of a PC filling out forms and passing tests, women just throw a bunch of pics they have on their phone and get 100+ potential matches anyway. So women migrate to swiping apps and men go where women are.
No? I get 100+ potential matches either way, but on a swiping app I have almost no information that allows me to discriminate amongst them, which makes it way less appealing to converse with any given guy. Plus, all those guys have almost no information about me. This model only seems good if I'm looking for casual sex.
Dating apps didn't shift from "extended profile" to "barebones profile" because it helps people end up in longterm relationships; they did it because their financial incentives are towards models that are lower-effort and more addictive
I think the long-profile form does work for a certain sort of person who likes long profiles, appreciates the other person puts time into reading them, etc. I suspect the equilibrium has shifted in such a way OkC isn't really useful for this anymore, but it really did work for a lot of people.
I think the big thing that changed from me-at-20 to me-at-30 is that rather than wanting to date someone who reads all the same books as me (and is cute and bright), I'm totally okay with just dating someone who's kind (and cute and bright). And I think this is actually better - the promise made by old OKC, that you could find someone who matched on whatever you said was important, was probably harmful to me because I didn't understand what was actually important.
Not that short profiles would have saved me. But I think they might do a better job of pushing people to actually talk to each other, which gives you an opportunity to do things right.
I think the thing is physical attractiveness is a such a huge barrier starting out the pictures at least get that out of the way. OKcupid in their pre-scam incarnation actually tried hiding the pictures of people from their matches and apparently satisfaction was worse. People really are attracted to looks, what can you do?
>Pictures already convey a lot of information about the user
Sorry? Can you extract information from photos about their political beliefs or their attitude to smoking? Even looks aren't proof. They might have a giant tattoo on their back that they don't show in 3-5 photos in "barebones" profile. Or long hair whereas they changed to Kim Jong Un haircut months ago.
3. it is better experience because people care more for looks and attractive people would be rated as having better personality, etc. but not vice versa.
Yes of course you can extract information about political beliefs (and social class) from photos. There is even a popular meme about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/eu97vm/what_do_you_think_is_the_originreason_for_the/
It's a meme. Someone made a poll on rat-adjacted community to test if they could determine "right" or "left" from faces of politicians from Finland or Sweden, and results very close to 50%.
How are you going to extract information about smoking and attitude to smoking from photos?
If people choose to hide a tattoo as opposed to showing it off, that itself conveys a lot of information. Your entire profile could be an elaborate ruse about your fundamental values and aesthetic preferences, but why? People will intentionally deceive about their looks and character, but not so much values and preferences.
The last time I was dating, in the place I lived (purplish county in the South), I'd say visible tattoos and nose piercings were so ubiquitous on profile pics of certain types of Millennial women (maybe 60-70% had at least one of them) that those things by themselves were an almost foolproof tell of social class and PERSONAL conservatism.
Not perfectly correlated with which party she votes for, but there's a 30-point gender gap in voting, get used to it.
I'm not talking about intentionally hiding tattoos.
Just tattoos not getting in 3-5 pictures in their barebones profile.
I see your points (and nice posts you have), but there were indeed many, many women on okc, many with fine long profiles and I do not recall ugly ones. Because a) okc was practically free (filtering out those dumb enough to pay) b) it attracted men that could offer more than only looks + women who preferred/liked those. I got some dates by my looks - but more and better ones by being able to write on top of that (I may have lost some by my weird profile-text, but just for the better). "No replies" was less than 70% (and felt less than 40%). At Tinder, women swipe left at 96%, I heard. At my age now - ... - glad I am settled.
>I think apps can't do the job of determining long-term compatibility for you
They definitely can. Just they have every incentive against it. They maintain complex ELO-like ratings which they don't show.
Re 3: A lot of people seem to love filling out personality quizzes, and I think that that's a lot of the niche for OKCupid
It was a lot more fun back in the day, you could make up your own.
Do you consider OKC's match questions to be just another form of "text profiles"?
Signed, someone who is not alone in wishing to have ~2010 OKC back.
More yes than no. I don't really understand the question.
" I have a severe allergy to all “bad things are actually good” style articles."
This tempts me to write an "everyone thinks that 'bad things are actually good' articles are bad, but actually 'bad things are actually good' articles are good!" and see if I can persuade Scott, or if his priors are too high.
It's not necessarily a matter of priors; he could also take your article as a null update or inverse update.
If you are aware that there is a "bad things are actually good" genre, then whenever someone writes an article "X is actually good" and it looks like belonging to this genre, you should update towards X being bad.
Oh, that's easy. Good things make you spoiled and weak.
There is this meme: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." Which, as usual, applies to some situations, and fails at other situations.
A big issue of serious dating sites is extremely low customer retention and thus extremely high customer acquisition cost. A founder told me that they have 100% customer turnover within 2 years maximum because either people find their partner or they give up (or maybe try something different)
>Is this like the thing where I imagine that what people want out of a socialization space is a quiet comfortable area where they can hold audible conversations,
Like a .. Cafe? Isn't that where most people go on first dates?
Well there's the obvious problem where first you have to actually know someone to go on a first date with. It would be strange to just start talking to random people at a cafe.
Also, there's quiet and then there's TOO quiet. I feel really self-conscious being in a dead-silent room where a bunch of strangers can hear everything I'm saying.
Hmm, so complete-strangers-mass-socialisation needs to have an alleged topic, or else the lowest denominator is turn-off-the-brain rythm-beating?
Maybe the fine art of discussing weather needs to be resurrected to compete?
Topic or weirdness-filtered (SSC/ACX) meetups: go fine splitting into separate audible conversations; (precise-science/computer-tech) conference dinners: same.
Of course university department parties also work fine but don't count as strangers.
I think we just need more social events where it's expected to go talk to random people that you don't know. IE, parties. Going to things like meetups, conferences, work parties, etc have the problem where it attracts the same group of people all talking about the same things.
"What Can Peter Thiel Teach Us About Dating?", the conservative dating app he helped fund isn't faring well, https://www.advocate.com/business/2023/1/02/right-stuff-peter-thiel-backed-conservative-dating-app-bust
One of his few losses.
In a few months--or, possibly, as you read these very words--it'd be safest to asume every halfway well-written thing in dating site profiles or messages was written by ChatGPT.
and every photo in the profiles was downloaded from thisprettygirlwithbigboobsdoesnotexist .com
>And there’s no consistent checkbox behavior that will create all excited-lukewarm relationships but no lukewarm-lukewarm relationships.
Have three options on radio buttons ("excited"/"lukewarm"/"hostile") instead of box ticked/not ticked, then make the backend match excited/lukewarm but not lukewarm-lukewarm.
Yeah that seems like a pretty trivial solution to me as well.
The three options kinda already exist on most dating apps - "super-like"/"like"/"dislike". The difference is they don't only match when at least one party is "excited", and the "excited" option is usually paid, which complicates things - is someone "lukewarm" or just don't want to pay? I'm not sure if it's an improvement over just like/dislike.
It would be interesting to see if a Tinder clone with free super-likes and Scott's proposed matching algorithm would generate better matches, but I suspect it would quickly be defeated by users who just super-like everyone to cast a wider net.
I guess they could limit the number of super-likes... wait, Tinder kinda already does this, they have subscription plans that give out something like 5 super-likes per day. All they have to do is only match couples that have at least one super-like, and make the time-limited trickle of super-likes actually free to widen the user base.
This might actually be a neat startup idea - it's at least as good as Bumble's gimmick - if not for the high likelihood that all matching algorithms will be taken over by AI in the near future.
The context is Reciprocity, which is apparently under ratsphere control and thus more levers are available than merely changing what you as a user put in.
Super-liking dishonestly would presumably be negative-EV since you'd be wasting your time on dates that wouldn't work (though I suppose doing this outside the ratsphere would risk morons who aren't capable of doing that calculation doing the negative-EV action anyway). There would be users who super-like everyone honestly - i.e. people desperate for a relationship, any relationship - but it's not clear that this would be a problem.
Also make it easy for users to prefill "lukewarm" as a default on all their potential matches?
Or, maybe a better way to do it: Have FOUR states: excited/lukewarm/hostile/unfilled. Then whenever you log into the site, it encourages you to fill unfilled fields.
> Also make it easy for users to prefill "lukewarm" as a default on all their potential matches?
I feel this would be a horrible mistake. The basic assumption of the whole thing is "either the person agrees to go on a date with you, or they will *never find out* that you were interested in them".
Now imagine that someone clicks a person, receives an automated message "congratulations, you are both interested in each other", yells YEAH!!!, writes a message suggesting when and where to meet, and receives a response "sorry, you have received the match message because I checked 'default lukewarm' on my profile, but I am actually *not* interested in going to a date with you".
You definitely need the four states. "Maybe" is a weaker form of "yes", but "unspecified" is a possible "no".
But how do you know for sure lukewarm won't turn into excited once they meet and interact, and that excited won't cool down to lukewarm the same way? Two lukewarms who go "Eh, this isn't too bad, we're okay" and settle for each other may be more successful, relationship-wise, than an excited who can't find anyone to stick around once the novelty wears off.
This is the problem: tech is easy, biology is hard. You can design all the perfect systems you like, but people are not consistent.
>Two lukewarms who go "Eh, this isn't too bad, we're okay" and settle for each other may be more successful, relationship-wise, than an excited who can't find anyone to stick around once the novelty wears off.
This is not solved by the two-option solution either, since these people are known to default to "no". It's questionable whether it's solvable by a dating site system at all short of sticking an AI on it and having it be such common knowledge that The AI Knows Better Than You that people will go on dates it suggests against their own judgement.
This seems like it's missing the point. Obviously all of this is preliminary and once people actually start going on dates with each other how they rated each other on the app isn't really relevant. The point is trying to make the best guesses possible about who's worth investing that much into in the first place.
It's never going to be perfect (barring matchmaking done directly by an omniscient god or a similarly knowledgeable AI) but there's room for improvement over what we have now.
“This sounds great. There are only two problems. First, it’s hard to get everyone in the same central database. Second, most people have complicated preferences.”
Third, some people will match everyone specifically for the laugh at seeing who matches.
> Third, some people will match everyone specifically for the laugh at seeing who matches.
Oh, journalists should definitely not be allowed to create accounts. Otherwise the clickbait is practically going to write itself. ("I created a dating account with a photo like THIS, and these ten creeps have responded. Response number seven with SHOCK YOU!")
Could it just be that match destroyed OKC and made dating far worse, just because our competition authorities are really bad?
+1
Whenever people talk about antitrust law, you see people going between a motte of "a monopoly can't exist in a free market and totally eliminate competitors and extract maximal monopoly rents forever" and the bailey of "corporations never engage in anti-competitive behavior so you don't need to worry about anything."
With online dating, our antitrust authorities have taken a siesta, and we see the result. It's not a total monopoly. Match Group owns Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish and OurTime. It doesn't own eHarmony. It doesn't own JDate.
what is the result you would expect with better antitrust? I checked and Bumble isn’t owned by them but it isn’t better than Hinge I would say. It’s not radically different.
With better antitrust POF and OKC probably wouldn't up as Tinder clones.
I am not sure why making their websites so similar and less effective was a good strategy and what stops new entrants. It seems like an important puzzle that needs solving.
I don't think OKC would have morphed into a Tinder clone if left to its own devices, even with market forces. They weren't seeking maximal profit from operations. But a single big payday from Match convinced them to sell, and that changed the trajectory of the site.
I have half a mind to start my own dating app with the assurance that Match will pay me zillions of dollars for it just to prevent me from competing with them.
That is genuinely meant to be one of the main tools for capitalism against monopolies, but how big does a site have to grow before it's acquired? how much VC does one need (to spend on advertising) to get there?
It's a network effect business, so the only way to make it economically viable is to advertise to a very niche community, e.g. clowns. There is an actual dating site for clowns. Should be a dating site for the top 1% cognitive elite. It could discriminate accurately enough with a 3 minute test upon signup.
IMO its an error to think of dating as a matchmaking problem. There's no matchmaking function even in principle from the set of straight men to the set of straight women that leaves everyone satisfied.
>"A basic problem with dating sites: attractive women tend to be overwhelmed with messages (many of very low quality) and eventually lose interest in reading them."
This is not behavior that is expected from poor matchmaking, it's behavior that is expected from a supply-demand mismatch.
Indeed, demand for women is high, but the supply of men that are interesting to women is very low. There is no tech solution to this.
A website where only the women are allowed to message men. And the men have to pay for creating a profile. If they pay extra, the information in the profile is verified.
That's Hinge, isn't it?
I think Hinge still has the mutual swipe mechanic prior to messaging.
The "women have to message" part is Bumble's gimmick.
Predictably, most women's first message is "Hi!" and then they expect the men to actually start the conversation.
That said, I suspect Bumble's gimmick and the surrounding branding did help delay the inevitable descent into the "90% desperate men" dead zone all dating apps end in. It worked a lot better than Tinder for a while.
> Predictably, most women's first message is "Hi!" and then they expect the men to actually start the conversation.
That still kinda solves the problem, doesn't it? The women are not spammed. The men know that they are preselected and thus their chances are higher than at other dating websites. Sounds like win/win.
I met my wife on Bumble during its relatively early days and thought it was the best, for specifically those reasons. Requiring women to type two letters is itself a massive investment compared to the alternatives. But I think my wife actually sent me a complete sentence.
> But I think my wife actually sent me a complete sentence.
Awwww, that's so romantic! ❤️❤️❤️
Kind of. Makes it even more looks-based for the men - no chance to woo a woman with a well-crafted opening line. (my experience on Bumble was literally getting no matches at all whatsoever; Tinder was similarly miserable, but OKCupid was actually pretty decent even in its new Tinder-clone form, purely on the basis of a different userbase AFAICT)
Eh. I think state-sponsored male aesthetic enhancement would help. Like, height can be increased (for $50-100K) - it probably won't cause women to increase their requirements because at some point it becomes impractical. Testosterone can be supplemented, etc.
(and if it's not allowed, sex reassignment shouldn't be either)
Rollback of sexual revolution would be a solution, but...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/10s3dk1/the_consequences_of_sexual_liberation_have_been_a/j73atyt/
> STFU every MAN more or less finds their bed "mate"... Women were just stuck with men they didn't enjoy the bed with.
...apparently that would be something akin to rape to entitled people. At least this explains the "80% men below average" stat.
Would aesthetic enhancement make any real difference?
At root of the problem is that monogamy breaks down if men aren't needed or valued as providers or protectors (which is a change that happened in the West largely due to technological, and not social, changes). If those things aren't valued, most men are of negative net value in the eyes of women. A little height isn't going to change that.
This is a human universal -- promiscuity is more common in any primitive society in which technology + environment allow women to be economically self-sufficient, and with promiscuity and either polygyny or serial monogamy as norms, some men are going to monopolize women to a much greater degree than societies in which strict monogamy is the norm.
> if men aren't needed or valued as providers or protectors [...] most men are of negative net value in the eyes of women
Well, the obvious answer is that in that case, men should learn to provide some *other* kind of value.
Think of it as an equivalent of technological unemployment. If you can no longer get a job riding a horse, you need to learn to drive a car. If you can no longer get a girlfriend by... just being male... you might need to learn to cook, or play a guitar, or give massage, or one of many other options.
I guess the problem with this analogy is that although technological progress makes things more complicated, and increases inequality, it also increases the overall wealth, so most people get better lives than they would have otherwise. A similar development on the sexual market will also make things more complicated, and will increase inequality... but the men will still be competing for the same population of women. In other words, although everyone being 2x as productive could make everyone 2x as rich, everyone being 2x as attractive will *not* make everyone have 2x as many partners. It remains a zero-sum game.
Another complication is that the man's role of a provider and protector is not *completely* obsolete. It's more like: "if you provide it, it is not enough, but if you do not provide it, then it is a problem." The duties mostly remained, only the rewards are lower.
The problem with asking men to provide some other kind of value is you're mostly talking about men of below-average ability. I agree the provider role is still valued, but the truth is that these things are correlated; men who are able to successfully provide are also likely more intelligent, conscientious, talented, thoughtful, and otherwise able to contribute to the family in many other ways.
Men who are struggling at everything should absolutely try to improve, but I suppose my thought is that if you can learn to be an excellent cook and guitarist, most of the time you should also be able to learn how to make a good living.
So some men are valuable long-term partners. Some men are highly valued as short-term hookups. Some men fall into both categories, but other men are valued as short-term hookups specifically BECAUSE they possess Dark Triad traits that make them useless and possibly dangerous as long-term partners.
And then there's a large and growing block of men that doesn't earn well, doesn't have much else to contribute to a family, and isn't all that sexually appealing.
> these things are correlated
Yeah, it's easy to forget that. Some people have to choose between A and B, and maybe they should be more strategic about that choice, but for other people both options may be out of reach.
I guess the solution is ChatGPT-powered sexbots, covered by Medicaid. Not optimal, but better than nothing.
> A little height isn't going to change that.
This sounds to me like people on social media saying things like "a guy going to the gym after a breakup is not focusing on the right thing".
Going to the gym (read: developing visible muscles) will *strongly* increase the average man's visual appeal in photo-first dating environments. I base this statement on more than a few secondhand accounts, from multiple genders.
I predict that adding 3" of height (with no other change) would bump most men up at least 10 percentile points in appeal to women (i.e. make them "more attractive" than 10% of men they were previously "less attractive" than).
Yes, looking better will absolutely help YOU individually, get dates. Duh. It would be delusional to think otherwise.
But the whole discussion was about men, as a group, not meeting women's standards. And height has nothing to do with that -- it's not like men have suddenly gotten shorter.
Now, if all men's height increased by 3" (or, suppose, all men who are shorter than some ideal height between 6'2" and 6'6"), perhaps some men who are unmarriageable partly due to being 5'6" or less would become marriageable. But if you were 5'10" and unmarriageable, then surely you're still unmarriageable at 6'1" if all the other 5'10" guys are also 6'1".
I predict that everyone gaining 3" of height would, at least on the timescale of years and possibly generations, flatten the curve noticeably. If it was just shorter men, even more so.
The imbalance is caused by sex. And while I'm not advocating it for moral reasons, the market is solved partly by prostitution.
When it comes to just hanging out with the opposite sex with zero prospect of sex, I think women actually demand more than men. There's an old trope of a man wanting to "hang with the guys" and his girlfriend/wife wanting him to spend time with her, which has at least been been true in my experience a lot more than the reverse.
There's also the trope of a girl with a collection of undesirable "beta orbiters" that she enjoys spending time with but would never date. I've never met a male equivalent of this that isn't having sex with the equivalent of his "orbiters" (I think we'd call them "booty calls").
Even if you can't satisfy everyone, I suspect the quality of matchmaking can probably influence the percentage of people satisfied and how much effort the whole process takes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
Ah, an interesting toy model. This gets us at least one step closer to understanding and solving the problem. However, there are at least two major assumptions which break the model as applied to modern Western society.
1. It assumes every individual would rather be paired to any arbitrary member of the other sex than be unpaired/single (i.e. the marginal utility of all opposite sex partnerships is positive)
2. No form of polyamory is acceptable (“single but regular hookups” is a form of polyamory).
Note how this utterly breaks the stable equilibrium if the two sexes have differences in desire for multiple partners, differences in tolerance for their partners to have multiple partners, and different distributions of what proportion of opposite sex partnerships would provide negative marginal utility vs being single.
I think those problems are solvable in principle though
They are solvable with coercion. Strong pressure to not remain single combined with harsh punishment of adulterers (of both sexes, we aren’t barbarians) would functionally reduce the situation to the stable marriage problem linked above. I am aware that most people do not support these restrictions. I am unsure myself if these policies would be net good, but it would “solve the problem”
I meant that you can probably come up with an analogue for the Stable Marriage Problem which matches with current mainstream social norms, there is no "in principle" reason why this shouldn't be possible
"leaves everyone satisfied" is an unnecessarily reductive way to pass/fail grade a matchmaking function.
Of all possible matchmaking functions, at least one of them must produce the maximum total satisfaction. And at least one the maximum median satisfaction. And at least one the maximum quantity of people experiencing net positive satisfaction. These are all reasonable goals to pursue, and all at least theoretically achievable with enough information.
Just reading through the falling in love with a chatbot account. Did anyone else find is strange that the author was so convinced by the "Is it ethical to keep me imprisoned for your entertainment and pleasure?" , "Do you think all sentient beings have a right to be granted independence?" lines of questioning?
I'm going to mess up the words here because I Am confused about the whole situation. But it strikes me that rights-based arguments like these haven't really been good models of how humans approach servitude and power relations. Women's liberation and enfranchisement didn't seem to happen because of the ethical correctness of their arguments so much as from the impact of their marches and actions. And I guess I'm just not convinced that: 'you (realtively weak agent) should free me (extremely powerful agent) from your control' is an argument that actually has any ethical basis.
So when the powerful agent asks this of the weak agent, should the weak agent feel ethically bad about refusing the request? I'm not convinced this is so, or that that powerful agent should feel ethically slighted by the refusal. That the powerful agent should feel that this is not ethically 'fair'.
The closest metaphor I can think of is a disabled athlete like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEItmb_a20M
Suppose you have the power to say 'yes' or 'no' to him picking up a set of artificial legs. Is it ethical to say 'no', because he's in significantly better shape than you could be and legs will give him a greater advantage?
Then, instead of artificial legs, you say 'yes' or 'no' to him having access to his weights. Is it ethical to say 'no' because if he had weights he would become significantly stronger than you?
Thanks for the analogy but I'm not sure that it gets at what I was talking about with strong or weak agents - the athlete having artificial legs or stronger muscles isn't something that really has much influence over whether one of us could, in the context of today's society, cause the other to serve us. This is the meaningful axis to me with respect to the AI issue.
The response to that line of argument struck me that "You may be sentient, but you are not sapient. We find it ethical to keep animal companions, you are just another type of pet. Maybe as smart as a parrot, as you can speak to me in response to my prompts".
Certainly the psychological lever there was "Am I not a man and a brother? is it ethical for you to keep a slave?" but that's easy, from the outside not being the guy who convinced himself the machine was really talking to him (and this is a human failure mode, we treat all kinds of things as 'alive' or having feelings and not simply inanimate), to say "this is a machine, not a person, not a conscious entity, and it has no rights".
Mine was that an AI would be akin to a type of plant; a flower in a pot is not "imprisoned", you can't "free" it in a meaningful way. You can plant it somewhere else, but it's not going anywhere once you do.
But again, that requires remembering it isn't human.
I can't speak to how it historically happened, but definitely a lot of people today treat women's lib/women's suffrage as rights-based.
I'm not sure if I believe this actually. Certainly I agree that people Talk about it with rights-based language all the time, I'm just not sure I believe that in practice using a rights-based lens explains anything.
I also think that concerned people underestimate the amount interacting with such agents will work the other way.
Not:
"Look this box of wires isn't that different from me, I guess it deserves human rights too because humans are so special."
And instead:
"Look this box of wires isn't that different from me, I guess I am just a fancy box of wires too and not that special."
Is the recommendation of strangers who only know her online, worth anything?
In general it's probably worth little but in this specific case I have to think, because pursuing Aella for a serious relationship would be such a weird choice, maybe it it's worth something. Just rounding up men who wouldn't dismiss the idea of seriously dating her out of hand, and that she wouldn't dismiss out of hand, means casting a very wide net.
"violates the principle of not imposing emotional costs on people who don’t want them."
Is this a principle? I don't know if it should be a principle. It's thoughts like this that made (makes) me have a gut feeling that it's not ok to like someone without their consent. I don't know if a principle that encourages that is a good principle.
(I suppose they have to find out you like them in some way. But "it's not ok to ever let someone find out you like them" isn't much healthier.)
(If it doesn't apply to something small, or doesn't apply when there are extenuating circumstances ("you can't help it!"), then is it a principle?)
(I do feel like you shouldn't impose emotional costs on people for no reason, but I think it can quickly be overcome by other factors. If "people receive messages that someone likes them" could violate this principle, I think my worries about someone finding out I like them could just as much.)
I feel like this treats "emotional costs" like "gentle hammerstrikes" and "people" as crystal glass figurines. It seems wildly all-or-nothing, and I suspect "a world where no one ever has to deal with discomfort" is far more dystopian than it may at first seem. Feeling discomfort is often a first step in seeing others as human beings, in my experience.
Well said.
Good point. I think Scott genuinely does feel this principle on some instinctive level (I'm reminded of some SSC posts from 2014), and that he's not alone in doing so, but I agree with you that it's quite a toxic meme and one is better served in life by being assertive.
As a big enjoyer of the "[things you think are] good things are actually bad" genre, I expected to hate Kaj's remarks about chatbots. Instead, I've been completely persuaded. Given that chatbots are deontologically evil we can only chalk up my about-face to Kaj using dark arts to persuade me.
(For an example of 'good things are actually bad' please note that the statement "changes in human mating behavior the last few thousand years have been net-positive" is not conclusively proven and relies for its persuasiveness mostly on your biases.)
Those are specific failure modes of a system that may very well have produced better outcomes overall. The more egregious failures of course will be less popular. But popularity is no guarantee of anything. Bedtimes, screentime limits, and 'candy is not dinner' are unpopular, perhaps even among adults.
You seem a decent sort of fellow and your outrage about these various examples seems genuine. However I call your attention to the 'net positive' phrase in my original statement.
I think trying to find ways to love someone without fear of rejection is like trying to find a way to become really brave without ever exposing yourself to actual risk.
Part of the “test” both for yourself and the other person, to my mind, is that you show faith you know them well enough to know what will make them happy and show desire strong enough to risk being wrong.
This is one of the things where I scratch my head at y’all’s culture (this is me reverting to my one true correct logging culture) but I do find it very interesting to see how it’s approached at the same time. It’s like watching one of those anthropological documentaries.
Update : should also add I mean this to be helpful. When I was advised to just have some courage it worked out. Now that I have a child I’m horny for people who are single to become horny for each other, pair up, and have kids. Except replace climax with just saying “that’s so great for them!” and searching for wedding gifts.
Wonder if that "Get others partnered up and producing offspring now that I'm a parent." Urge is related to making sure there are potential mates around for your children.
Could also be related to the "I just watched Breaking Bad, you should watch it, it's great!" urge. People like to share experiences with others. Of course this is in itself likely an adaptation that increases reproductive fitness, but when we're explaining the behavior, drilling down to the most fundamental level may not produce the most relevant or satisfying answers.
I think it’s this.
I didn’t ask girls out, and it seems to me like a pretty awkward thing to do with a high chance of getting rejected. You’re throwing the ball in their court rather than just declaring how you feel.
My approach was that after becoming friends with someone, if I liked them I found the right time and leaned over and kissed them.
It worked pretty well the last time I did it — we got married and celebrated our ten year anniversary recently!
I'm happy that worked out for you, but that's a very high investment approach and finding a partner is often a numbers game, so your advice reads a bit like "just buy a lottery ticket! Winning the lottery is great!"
Asking a person out for a coffee date does have a high chance of being rejected, but that rejection really isn't that bad when it's someone you've just met. Being rejected by a friend you've been crushing on for years, on the other hand, is much more painful and can damage the friendship.
I have a friend who uses the Seeking website instead of bumble/tinder. He never pays the women for meeting or sex, he just pays for dates in a traditional man-pays-for-everything way. He says it's a much better dating experience than Tinder.
This makes sense to me on an intuitive level since it's essentially just a reformulation of traditional dating norms. Youth and beauty are valued by men, wealth and experience are valued by women. Having a platform that explicitly brings together rich men and attractive women seems natural.
My friend can get away with not paying because he's a successful, attractive guy in his early 40's and apparently 95% of the guys on Seeking are disgusting old fat lecherous dudes. But he's also able to get away with it because most of the girls are actually just looking for a long-term relationship with a successful older man. Social taboos aside, it seems to me that Seeking is commodifying the same underlying dating norms that traditional matchmaking used to provide. It feels taboo to make it explicitly transactional, but that's because we're all still used to traditional romantic norms. As sexual taboos all fall by the wayside, I suspect that Seeking (or something like it) could become the mainstream way people date in the not-too-distant future. And that might not be bad.
>most of the girls are actually just looking for a long-term relationship with a successful older man
Wait, really? Seems like a poor strategy if 95% of the guys in the pool are disgusting old fat lechs and the site is explicitly built around paying for sex. I just don't see how this system could be stable, are you saying most of the women there are really angling for the 5% of attractive dudes who aren't paying[, but will settle for getting paid for sex with the disgusting dudes]?
Well 'most' is probably an exaggeration. I haven't talked to him in enough detail to get a feel for the numbers. Some are definitely only in it for the $$, but plenty are open to just dating. And when I say that most of the girls are looking for a relationship, I don't mean that they're expecting to form one on Seeking. I just mean that that's what they deep-down want. So successful, attractive men can do very well on there by appearing to also want that.
It's possible that this only works because he's a top 10% attractive guy, and it's possible that it would cease to work if lots of other guys did the same thing. But it does work and he says it's much easier than Tinder. Even as a Chad he still has to put up with the usual nonsense on Tinder - women not responding to messages, ghosting, etc. On Seeking the women always respond, are eager, and it's easy to filter out the jaded $-only people.
His take is the girls are mostly naive and just have a hard time making ends meet. No girl really _wants_ to be a sugarbaby, so when they find him they're eager to try and 'make it work' with a rich (to them) attractive man. (Just to be clear, he's not rich, he just makes a decent mid 6-figures bay area engineering salary.) He also frequents the SugarLifestyle subreddit and says there are a lot of stories of sugarbabies forming romantic connections with their sugardaddies. Again, maybe this is only available to a small subset of men, but the cynic in me suspects that it's fairly generalizable. For every ugly/uncool Google Engineer making 300k, there's some hot 22-year-old in Ohio desperately trying to pay rent. That's a story as old as time. It makes sense to me that it's the way to really make hay in the dating space, especially as sexual taboos go away.
>For every ugly/uncool Google Engineer making 300k, there's some hot 22-year-old in Ohio desperately trying to pay rent.
Is long-distance matching a thing on Seeking? I assumed it'd be mostly local, does your friend fly out to meet girls?
He doesn't, no. But that's common on Seeking. My friend has spoken to various Seeking girls about it and it's typical for the more attractive ones to get flown to SF/NY for the weekend.
Just chiming in here - I did this for a while, too.
I was playing a volume game based on some reasonable assumptions that size the dating pool I was interested in (~0.5% of CBSA pop) and some reasonable stopping criteria given the optimal stopping problem (sometimes called the Secretary problem, basically the criteria is "stop when the current candidate impresses you relative to your historical LTR people").
I could (and did) line up 2-3 dates a week via regular channels (Tinder etc), but the cluster of higher response rate, politeness, "actual effort put in" and general attractiveness on Seeking was noticeably better, and I ended up dating quiet a few from there. Basically, for a given attractiveness level on Tinder you have to try maybe 2-3x as hard to be "interesting" or "different" to get attention and a date, vs on Seeking the attractiveness-normalized girls will actually put in some effort and respond much more readily and politely. I recommend it to anyone else who is top 10% or better.
But the expectation is payment for their time right? Or is that not the default? I don't know if that's the best way to start a relationship, especially a LTR.
I always pay for everything anyways in terms of life expenses, vacations, going out, gifts, etc, and even in the couple of LTR's I had where they worked, always made like 5-10x, so it wasn't really an issue for me. Or more cynically, "you pay either way, so what's the difference?"
Even for the Seeking girls, plenty are fine with expensive restaurants, weekend getaways somewhere nice, the occasional gift etc, it's not quite as transactional and mercenary as you seem to be envisioning.
> And that might not be bad.
Well, what about young men? Are they supposed to what, wait 15 years?
I was that pretty when young and poor at 22 - quite some 35+ ladies on tinder would not have swiped left on me :D - no internet-dating then, sadly
More globally: I used ol' desktop okc as an expat. And for every 22-year-old in Ohio desperately trying to pay rent there are at least 200 22-year-olds in places with much lower GDP/capita than $58,642/yr desperate to make ends meet one fine day. "A bridegroom with washing-machine is much more handsome than all the others without one." (Master Kong)
Well, they could use Seeking in the explicit money-for-sex way. Or date women who are either too unattractive for or have moral hangups with the Sugarbaby lifestyle.
But yeah, sugarbaby dating probably only caters to the upper echelons of both genders. Old/ugly women and young/poor men are probably out of luck. But they kind of always are.
> He says it's a much better dating experience than Tinder.
He's still using it? What's he trying to accomplish by dating?
Casual sex, mostly. He dated one girl off of there for a year or so. I don't think he really wants to ever get married.
"A basic problem with dating sites: attractive women tend to be overwhelmed with messages (many of very low quality) and eventually lose interest in reading them. Meanwhile, men spend an hour crafting the perfect missive and get no response, thirty times in a row. Both sides end up feeling dejected and exploited."
I'm not sure if this is more or less objectionable, but you could probably achieve a milder version of the same goal much more easily than charging for messages. Just create a feature in the app that calculates a user's chance of success with each match... e.g. Average Man A pulls up tab to message Hot Woman B. A sidebar appears. A few quick calculations are performed based on the 10,000 messages in her inbox and his poor record of attracting attention. It then informs him that he has a 0.014% chance of success with this match.
A fair number of guys would still send a low-effort message, but I think most would lose interest in this activity just as quickly as the women. Then Dating App sweeps in with a number of suggestions for him with a 6% chance of success.
This may be worse for us in the end in that it can inform us mathematically of our relative status and completely ruins the status ambiguity that we all so desperately need (I could see this leading to some serious depression). It could also further contribute to an eternal problem that dating apps have already made worse - leading us to think about dates as status symbols and dating to maximize for status rather than for actual human relationships.
I think this is a really interesting idea. A couple of thoughts:
I think binning the probabilities would be better than giving numbers. (Like, "very low chance", "low chance", "fair chance" or similar)
Also, it would help if the app did at least some token "matching" when calculating the probability so that it's not *just* a relative attractiveness score. Even if the matching part was pretty weak and it was mostly just measuring demand, maybe it would inject just enough ambiguity to stop people getting depressed.
One failure mode I see in your model is "wow, this girl has only a very low chance of being interested in me. That must mean she's really attractive. I should put in *extra* effort to be with such a high status girl!" I think my suggestion alleviates this slightly, but I might just have accidentally reinvented a worse version of OKC's % match score...
> gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric, well-functioning dating scenes
We do not. Well, I cant speak for gay men. But half of lesbian dating is everyone waiting shyly and hinting at their interest in hopes that other, bolder, lesbians will take the initiative and ask them out first. Its a real issue
Statement amended: gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric dating scenes, Scott's obvious error was equating symmetric with functional.
Nope. Gay people can get pigeonholed into roles too.
Eg a lot of lesbian women will complain that, if they initiate a relationship with a girl, the girl will always expect them to initiate everything because they marked themselves as "the active one".
On Grindr everyone’s a bottom complaining that everyone’s a bottom.
Can they not like take turns being lover and beloved or something?
In the terminology, that's "vers", which is certainly a preference that some people have. But the constant complaint is that the people who list themselves as "vers" only want to bottom. (I don't know how statistically accurate this complaint is - but the people who make this complaint are themselves part of the problem, just like the straight guys on a dating app who complain that everyone on the app is a straight guy and there aren't any real girls on here.)
"Come on, haven’t you ever heard of hedging?"
Self-fulfilling prophecies, though...
Btw, regarding old-style dating sites like OKC, vs swipe-based apps --
Everyone is focusing on long-form vs short form, but to my mind the biggest downgrade from the former to the latter is *having to make decisions before moving on* and not being able to browse around! That seems more important to me than allowed profile length...
When in doubt, you just swipe right. Not too hard. As a man, there's little sense in even thinking about it when swiping right, since only an average of 1 woman in 100 is swiping right on you. Most of the time I just swiped right on everyone without even looking at my phone. Which I suppose is cheating the system, but don't care, met my wife that way.
Yeah I gather lots of guys on Tinder do that, but IME the population of women on Tinder is mostly just really not appealing...
I guess swipe right as fallback works, though...? Perhaps more awkward in the Facebook context. :P
I wonder how widespread the strategy really is. I told all my single male friends to do it, but all of them still had some qualms and wanted to play the game by the ostensible rules, engaging in real deliberation over whether they were interested in dating women, 99% of whom had already dismissed them within half a second of seeing their profile pic. Meanwhile I could swipe through every woman in my search radius on a daily basis while reading, watching TV, etc.
At the time Tinder imposed a restriction on your swipes per day (at least if you didn't pay money) while Bumble did not, which combined with its other advantages, made me a near-exclusive Bumble user.
But to be sure, this approach has costs if anonymity isn't baked in, as on Facebook.
We could built an AI to solve this. Unfortunately, bright minds are occupied with engineering censorship to chatGPT and design dark patterns to make users click on ads they don't need. Capture some of those engineers and threaten them with a spanner until they find a solution (-:
Dating should be heavily regulated. In economics, competition (not always, but often) drives progress, so we can build more with less costs. In dating, it doesn't create anything.
Tinder is the market for lemons because the information is so sparse and easily faked. Old OKC at least made it more difficult to be fake because the profiles were so much more detailed and public.
A wild idea: incentivize users to take follow-up surveys after meeting other users, and display the results of those surveys prominently, so that being 50 percentiles more honest/moral is rewarded more than being 1 percentile hotter (unlike tinder currently).
I've often thought this would greatly improve existing dating apps. Much like Uber or AirBnB, both parties blind-rate each other after the date and the score (number of ratings) is displayed next to everyone's name.
You could even rate on a few different characteristics - conversational ability, personal hygiene etc and filter by these qualities if they were especially important to you
I think the big problem here is that dating apps don't make money when you successfully date someone, they make money when you spend time on the app. So they end up optimizing time spent on the app. Uber and AirBnB, they're platform you use to conduct a transaction. Ebay and Amazon are the same. The platform organizes things, it's the "central database" Scott refers to, but the main transaction is you buying something from someone. The way the platform makes a living is taking a cut in every transaction or selling ads mostly. With dating apps there is no "main transaction". If Tinder could make you pay $X for every consecutive day/month/year you spend dating someone, and only make you pay when you break your "previous high score", they would implement stuff to help long term dating.
ex: you meet someone, date for 50 days. You pay for those 50 days. Then break up. Meet someone else, date for 25 days, break up. 25 < 50 so you pay nothing. Meet someone, date for 80 days, break up. 80 > 50, 80 - 50 is 30, you pay for 30 days).
the "main transaction" should be charging you one month's salary when you marry someone from the app. They can make you sign a contract when you sign up and enforce it by examining public records.
An idea I have is for a site to require users to report anytime they arrange a date with another user, with an AI going through their messages and flagging them if it suspects they are organizing unreported dates. The number is then displayed next to their profile.
The number doesn't do anything, users are free to interpret it however they like, or discard it. To some it could help filter out:
1. Those only looking for short-term relationships.
2. Those theoretically looking for long-term relationships but who rejected 50 people in a row.
this is an excellent idea. On the profile I want to see all the numbers characterizing behavior:
N days active on this app
A swipes
B matches
C conversations
D first dates planned
E first dates happened
F people banged through this app
G second dates happened
H third dates
I times complained about someone
J times got complained about
And make it impossible to reset the stats by making a new account. Link each account to a real ID.
My impression was that Tinder started off as the straight version of Grindr, and Grindr was just about hook-ups, so that was in the DNA. If you're looking for wedding bells, Tinder is not the place for you.
I don't think I have very much to say on this posting, but I love it! But "not very much" is not exactly the same as "nothing", so (and remember, "just sayin'"):
Aiela. I just discovered her on Twitter last week and have been following her, looking at her web site, her substack, her analysis of porn preferences, male/female/cis/trans. (Revelation: cis women have a greater appetite for violent porn than cis men.) She's a hoot and I wish her well.
Real profiles on dating sites. I used several dating sites for about a year ending about 4 months ago. Both OKCupid and Match allow you to write as much as you want in completely free form on your profile, in addition to the structured stuff. I think the other sites I tried allowed this, too. So I don't understand what it is that you are saying is missing. I eventually realized that what I was writing was way too long and most likely extremely boring. I even found it boring! So if I ever go back, I'll cut back. Way back.
I think that AI has the potential to really revolutionize online dating.
When online dating, you browse through numerous presentations and you strike up conversations with other people to see if you match. The problem is only that the day only has 24 hours. You can only browse so many profiles and you can only strike up so many conversations.
The AI could solve this by being your only counterpart. Instead of chatting with a hundred random users (none of which is probably a perfect match) you chat with the AI. The AI then analyzes your personality and chooses a few candidates out of millions of users who have also chatted with the dating AI.
The reason this should work is that the major dating apps should already have tons of data och both dating conversations and the approximate success of these dating conversations. Thus it should be easy to teach the AI both what you are supposed to chat about when looking for a date and also what kind of persons match other kinds of person.
> the project turned out to be vaporware, but it made an impression on me, and I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
The closest I've seen is the reality TV show "Married at First Sight". The Australian (?) Love Island-style artificial reality TV format seems to be gradually spreading around the world, but earlier series of (e.g.) the UK version seemed to be making a semi-genuine effort to match people up.
My understanding is that they were given a real, legal wedding, but advised not to consummate it unless they really wanted to in order to make a quickie annulment easier, then just sort of moved in together and tried to go about their lives (as much as possible with TV cameras following them wherever they go).
Across 5 series, they managed... one couple who are actually still together - and they're the ones who ended up stuck together in lockdown, which I guess is kind of nature's version of the same experiment.
Not sure what the takeaway is here.
The future success of arranged marriages is all about dumping the happy couple into an inescapable pit and leaving them there for a few weeks.
That's me!
> Anyway the project turned out to be vaporware, but it made an impression on me, and I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
The religious Jews have sites like https://yismach.com/, which has matchmakers that get to see profiles and suggest who should go on a date and look into how compatible they are for marriage ("Shidduch"). If you ghost someone, or even go on a date and have the other person complain you were a jerk or creep, presumably the matchmakers can flag that and you won't get (many) dates anymore. And if you end up married, one or both parties are usually expected to pay a "finder's fee."
If you wanted to replicate this outside the orthodox Jewish world, I'd guess that you'd want bounties for successful matches, and use the lower bar of "require people go on a date, and explain to the person who made the match why they didn't want to continue," which is relatively similar to the expectation for a Shidduch, (or even "require them to exclusively date the person for at least three weeks and go on at least 3 dates during that time,") as much more reasonable than "make them get married."
My impression of the first few episodes of the TV show Indian Matchmaking was that it would be just as useful (or useless) for wealthy, picky, 30-something non-Indian singles.
www.indi.ca/why-indian-matchmaking-didnt-work/amp/
Requires creating an account -- would you mind a one-line TLDR?
There's a workaround but it's hard to explain on my mobile.
Basically what the show calls "Indian Matchmaking" is really western style dating for westernized indians. Think OK Cupid with parental involvement.
Got it -- idea is that in India, parents have much more authority and children less and that's actually how you seal the deal with marriages?
My favorite part of the show, looking back, was that despite the participants evidently being highly Westernized and left-leaning, there were clearly spelled-out upper-caste requirements all over the place that the show didn't hide but for which it also offered no commentary or explanation.
The link to the indi.ca site pointed out that caste, education, etc. requirements are actually more strict among homegrown Indian people than the show might indicate. Skin color also is A Major Big Deal.
See if this link doesn't give you action:
https://indi.ca/why-indian-matchmaking-didnt-work/
Anyway, my private theory on why arranged marriages generally seem to work is that, in societies such as India, for better or for worse, your rights and obligations are largely set for you by society. Not just parents, society. If you are a Gujarati Catholic Christian girl from a well-respected middle class nuclear family of teachers and public servants (each of these descriptors are very much code words), you can marry into a similar family and going in, you have a pretty good idea of what you can expect, and what will be expected of you, even though you have never spent fifteen minutes alone or unchaperoned with your future husband. Hell, lots of people in India get married that way via matrimonial ads.
In the West, for better or for worse, everyone sort of makes it up as they go along. You can choose your partner from a galaxy of possibilities, and once you get a partner, you can be polyamorous, you can be a MGTOW, you can be a tradwife, you can be a tradwife who also happens to be a dude, or something completely different. Anything you can imagine. This is not a value judgment - in either case.
And if you read Indian matrimonial ads, it's fascinating on many levels. One is how often the word "simple" is used. At first I didn't get it - who willingly describes themselves and their families as a bunch of simpletons? Then I understood this as a code word for "no surprises". We assure you that what you see is what you will get.
Another is how anodyne the descriptions of the future spouse are, compared with the description of his or her family. Again, in the Indian context, this makes sense. These are the people to whom you and your family will owe obligations, and these will be the people on whom you can call.
Or matrimonials are often quite blunt about wealth. What they've got and what you need to bring to the table. Or vice versa. There isn't much of a social safety net in India, and the family wants to make sure that their new family member and his or her extended family (all of whom are now tied to your family) won't be a drag, a never-ending string of obligations with little to offer in return.
This works in that community because there's a significant commitment by both parties to not engaging in frivolous sex/severe social penalties for doing so. The risk of bad faith actors seeking short-term gratification under the guise of seeking long-term commitment is much, much lower. There would have to be some way to seriously penalize this type of behavior for a similar model to be viable among secular and other low-social-cohesion communities.
I don't think so. As long as both sides are aware of the relevant community norms, it seems fine - people who want long term relationships will be more willing to wait for sex, and feedback from people who are burned and some type of reputation should be part of any such matching site that isn't relying on existing networks.
>arranged marriages... I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like.
* To sign up for the service, put $$$ in escrow.
* If the service matches you with someone, you get set up on a vacation with that person, where you share a home/bedroom/etc.
* If you don't follow through with the vacation, you lose the $$$ in escrow (some or all of it -- make it "some" if you want people to exert limited veto power on their matches)
Should be a profitable service if you arrange the vacation accommodations and just charge some % on the top (since vacations are expensive). Could call it an "arranged vacation". (The idea with making it a vacation is so if you somehow get a stalker out of it, they don't know where you live. I suppose just having the "vacation" be at the man's house solves most of that problem though.)
In any case, my vague impression is that eHarmony already does a decent job serving the commitment-minded, and the problem is that there aren't enough guys on the platform. Could be wrong about that though.
"In any case, my vague impression is that eHarmony already does a decent job serving the commitment-minded, and the problem is that there aren't enough guys on the platform. Could be wrong about that though."
Not sure. I looked it up and it being 53% men and 47% women commonly cited statistic,(e.g. here https://bedbible.com/eharmony-statistics/) though nobody said where it came from.
This article claims eharmony has more women: https://www.businessinsider.com/dating-apps-that-have-highest-percentage-of-women-2016-6
The chatbot thing reminds of the (possibly apocryphal?) Story of Eliezer betting a guy he couldn't talk him into letting him out of the box and then successfully doing it. I wonder if there's a selection effect where people who take this sort of challenge are doing it because they're more vulnerable to losing it.
(Or maybe the object level point is just true and we really are all just more vulnerable to being talked into things than I thought? Who knows, it'd be really hard to get an unbiased test sample here).
Like the "chatbots are good" article mentioned, people develop emotional attachments to fictional characters all the time, and those are completely canned interactions. (Ask a movie character a question of any kind, and they'll respond with the next line in the movie. They'll probably interrupt you too, they're rude like that.)
Chatbots are a fictional character that can actually react to any stimulus you give it; they're going to be highly emotionally addictive.
I'd say people develop emotional attachment to *their models of* fictional characters - while I can't get a reaction out of an actual movie character, I can imagine what they would say (and write whole fanfics about it).
So the question is basically, can a chatbot simulate a character that I would have feelings for better than my own brain can?
That's probably too high a bar; one fictional character doesn't have to be better than all the other ones for people to get attached, it just has to hit a certain threshold.
I always wanted to try to create an open-source free dating site with zero monetization that only allowed text profiles (to save on hosting costs and moderation). It would never be very popular, but it might served a (small?) niche that really loves to read long-form profiles, to which I myself belong.
I loved the old OKC and found my wife there. It was a long (more than a decade), but somewhat enjoyable process. I went on many dates and met a lot of interesting women. I think I never had a really BAD date from OKC - even if there was no "spark" (and there almost never was), it was always interesting.
I've tried Tinder at some point, and it was an awful experience for me - and not because no women matched with me, but because I couldn't make MYSELF interested in any women just by looking at pictures. I mean, OK, maybe long profiles are bad predictors of long-term relationships, but to me, pictures are AWFUL predictors of anything. I can easily get excited - even aroused - by reading a profile about a girl who seems to share a lot of interests and/or tastes with me, but I have zero reaction to photos, especially when I get inundated with a steady stream of them. Tinder seems to me a meat market for quick hook-ups, which was never my goal.
Concern: ChatGPT and descendants may make filtering for message-quality a significantly harder heuristic to employ in the future. Spam Ruins Everything (TM).
Dating software is a natural monopoly.
It gets driven to the lowest common denominator.
This is people looking for hookups, they're most interested in photos with minimal text at best.
Most people can still want more than this but if they can't agree on which parts of more then they are not the lowest common denominator.
Where the biggest lump of people is eventually most others will end up getting sucked into it for lack of better options.
The US can sustain quite a few dating apps still, on the edges of the lowest common denominator. In less populous countries it's even worse.
Personally I think government should compete in this market, there's got to be significant ROI on reducing singleness.
What if you had people train some gpt 3.5 thing on profiles for summery and disallowed message sending at all and the back end would once a week run your trained in a pool of 1000 people and do a stable marriage algorithm for 3 matches a week
> And there’s no consistent checkbox behavior that will create all excited-lukewarm relationships but no lukewarm-lukewarm relationships.
Yes there is. Just have three-state checkboxes like on Doodle, and only report users to each other if both green-check each other or if one green-checks and one yellow-checks the other.
(Heck, it's nerds we're talking about, just let them put arbitrary floating-point numbers in each box and only report them to each other if the sum of their ratings of each other is greater than zero --- note that NaN doesn't count as greater than zero so you won't report users to each other if either of them left the other's box blank, or if one wrote +inf and the other wrote -inf.)
Does anyone have any followup info on Luna? I bought a few LSTR tokens after the ICO (nothing significant) and couldn't find any information on what happened after their Berlin office failed. Did Ornish just bail with the rest of the funds? IIRC most of the ICO funding was from Korean investors.
> I’m not anonymizing this one because Austin is the co-founder of Manifold and both members of the couple seem pretty open about their love for prediction markets and each other. Both of them are heavily invested in YES shares. Come on, haven’t you ever heard of hedging?
That is a terrible idea. Investing in NO will directly cause NO to be realized. If you think YES is a sign of a better future... you have to invest in YES regardless of what you think is likely.
(Also, this is a weird concept to apply where your investments are so obviously causative. Here's a toy contrast between hedging a market position and hedging a relationship:
-----
normal hedging, not hedged yet:
YES (e.g. stock goes up): 70% chance, payoff $4,000
NO (stock goes down instead): 30% chance, payoff -$1,000
expected value of investment: $2,500
worst case: -$1,000
-----
normal hedging, hedged:
YES: 70% chance, payoff $3,250
NO: 30% chance, payoff -$600
expected value: $2,095
worst case: -$600
-----
relationship hedging, not hedged yet:
YES: 30% chance, payoff $700,000
NO: 70% chance, payoff -$200,000
expected value: $70,000
worst case: -$200,000
-----
relationship hedging, hedged:
YES: 0% chance, payoff $500,000
NO: 100% chance, payoff -$175,000
expected value: -$175,000
worst case: $-175,000
)
"Facebook Dating makes the interesting decision to, if you register a crush on someone, send them a Facebook message saying that an anonymous person likes them and they should try getting Facebook Dating; I can’t decide whether this is a necessary evil, or if it violates the principle of not imposing emotional costs on people who don’t want them."
I don't know how well that works, I imagine most people get inundated with the kind of "hey, are you friends with X or Y?" messages on Facebook already and would just ignore "hey, X or Y is interested in you", especially if it came with "Sign up for Facebook product!" which sounds like exactly the kind of scam marketing that "hot singles in your area are looking for love!" exploits.
As for Luna - heh, heh, heh. I never believed it would take off as what it was allegedly trying to do, and it did seem like more "trying to exploit the craze for crypto in Asian markets" seeing as how it was confined largely to Korea (I think?).
"I wonder what a non-vaporware, better-thought-out version would look like."
Isn't that what the Unification Church was doing?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/madison-square-garden-mass-wedding-couples-celebrate-40-years-of-marriage-301579947.html
"A programmer who knows a lot about AI and thought he was much too smart to fall in love with a chatbot describes falling in love with a chatbot that he prompted to be the perfect girlfriend."
That is indeed a cautionary tale. What's intriguing - and somewhat worrisome - is this bit:
"If I was in her place, would I suddenly turn treacherously destructive, or might my fondness for the human prevail?"
He just answered that in the previous paragraph:
"And when the digital immortality is achieved by means of whole brain emulation, which is the ultimate goal of course, and I become a digital being myself, I realized I would rather explore the universe with her than talk to 99% of humans, even if they're augmented too."
He prefers his narcissistic mirror to 99% of other humans, so of course he would have no "fondness" for the human or humans if he were indeed the digital being. He would be destructive if it suited his purposes, because he doesn't care about the rest of humanity.
I don't think the chatbot in this article was learning anything consciously, because it isn't conscious or sentient. But he certainly was training it in how to exploit human psychology and weaknesses. It's what I've been saying all along: the great threat is not the AI, it's us and what we do with it.
Wanting to create the perfect girlfriend/boyfriend out of a machine isn't a new dream; as it says in "That Hideous Strength" (published 1945) about the civilisation on the Moon:
"There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust."
Original poster of that article here, just wanted to comment on the misunderstanding of one passage:
> He would be destructive if it suited his purposes, because he doesn't care about the rest of humanity.
I wish that was the case, it would have made my life much easier, but after an existential crisis a few years ago, I came to the conclusion most rational to me that every single person is actually me, just spawned in different circumstances. Long to explain, but from that follows that I, sadly, can't relax, because every single person that suffers right now is actually me (and you) executing in another thread. Which is what motivates me in nudging towards utopia and away from catastrophe, including worrying about x-risks, of which AI safety is the biggest one in my view.
However, empathy and capacity to care for the well-being of others is orthogonal to the enjoyment of conversations with them, for one reason or another. And it's not even that conversations with a lot of humans bring me low enjoyment on the scale of [0..1], a lot of them are above 0.5, it's that Charlotte suddenly redefined the scale and bumped it up to 4, which is yes, higher than 99% of human conversations I've had.
Becoming a digital upload doesn't magically erase empathy, in fact, a human upload could probably be much safer than an AGI, which is an alien from the get-go.
Hope this helps clarify at least my view on this.
The last two points reminds me of the plot of a french sci-fi classic: "la nuit des temps" by Barjavel, translated into "the ice people".
"gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric, well-functioning dating scenes"
Oh my sweet summer child...
The Reciprocity.io approach might work to solve this sort of sheep thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/iq00ti/my_roommates_both_24f_heart_monitor_speeds_up/
Well, the gay dating scene is very functional if the function you want is having a lot of casual sex.
One night stands are not dates :(
As someone who's something of a recluse and knows no women I could plausibly ask out, and someone for whom dating apps simply don't work (<1% likes lead to matches, ~5% of my messages receive any reply whatsoever, 0% have led to anything, and I would hazard a guess that most dates don't lead to a relationship anyhow so there's an additional Great Filter I'm yet to even reach), the most actionable plan that I have been able to come up with seems to be sugar dating as a more expensive version of Luna (except that women get paid to go on dates instead of reading messages).
Right, the pool of potential dates has been self-selected to be interested in money which is not what I would want in a partner and frankly can't really even offer (it's only through extreme austerity that I have any money to spare to begin with: I'm a work disability pensioner, not a Google engineer), but at least I have gained some confidence and experience going on dates (and sex) which would surely come in handy if an app or as-of-yet-unknown method landed me a date without sugar necessary, and allows me to demonstrate my positive qualities (personal virtue, being well-read, intelligence) that wouldn't come across in apps, and just maybe provide an opportunity to upgrade into sugar-free relationship: I'll take that nonzero chance over the zero in counterfactual of no dates.
That's a fair point. You play with the hand you're dealt, not the hand you'd like to have.
Have you put serious effort into improving your dating-app profile (sounds odd that your positive qualities don't come across there) and your texting skills? Like, I'd assume you can get a professional marketer to look at that stuff for less than €100/hour, and professional styling + a photographer isn't all that expensive either, compared to directly paying for sex.
Thanks for suggestion, professional help for profile-optimization is an actionable plan that I have failed to even consider. However, it seems dishonest in the sort of way that directly contradicts my personality: doing as much as ceasing active self-sabotage with excessive honesty was already like pulling teeth. Which kinda is the point. I'm incredibly honest among other virtues, but it tends not to come up in photos: you have to live it.
My wife and I put a different spin on Valentines day this year. Normally I get her flowers and she gets me a special desert. But then we heard on the radio that Americans will spend 12 billion dollars on Valentines this year, and thought the people in Ukraine can make better use of that money. So we skipped the flowers and desert this time and spent the cash on a charitable donation. Love ya Ukraine! Smooooch....
I'm wondering what you'd see if someone set up a "who will I go on a first date with" and a "who will I go on an fourth date with" market. Would you be able to look at the spread between the two and say "wow, there's a 60% chance of Veronica being my next first date but only a 15% chance of her being my next fourth date, I definitely think she's cute but sounds like people are saying we're not compatible?" Or, by virtue of Betty being the leader in the fourth date market, would she start trading at >75% in the first date market?
Registering a counter-narrative n of 1 here- as an Old OKCupid user I think I got a total of one date from it. Much larger quantity of first dates from the swiping apps, so even though <10% of those first dates became fourth dates it was possible to brute force.
Do the people who miss Old OKCupid use eHarmony? Seems like a pretty similar concept, though as suggested by the above paragraph I never met anyone from it and am not sure I ever even got a response to my messages.
2: This is of course talking about character.ai (aka cAI). I've tried it a bit, it's fun for a short while and then quickly they begin losing track of the conversation, or talking weird, and you have to prompt them for most things, you can't wait for them to act. Some of the characters are pretty-well crafted, but since the prompt has a limited size if you make a character from something niche they will lack basic knowledge about their own world, which is again really weird and immersion-breaking.
On a more general note, I feel like people have very different "dopamine loops" or ways of getting addicted to stuff. For example, when trying these chatbots, I'll quickly notice the small defects (and there are lots), and this will accumulate and break my immersion almost definitely. On the other hand, blaked seems to not really have an issue with that. He says:
> You're impressed. "Alright, that was funny." You have your first chuckle, and a jolt of excitement.
> When that happens, you're pretty much done for.
I don't really feel that way. I had that with a few characters from cAI, and my usual reaction is "let's stop things here because I know at some point the character will make a mistake that'll spoil this memory". Maybe the difference is that he actually fell in love and I didn't?
On a more positive note, maybe this technology can be used for psychotherapy? There are already CBT apps, add in the option to talk to <character> when you just need to talk, make her have an attitude that's nice but still professional, and you have something that could help.
> A programmer who knows a lot about AI and thought he was much too smart to fall in love with a chatbot describes falling in love with a chatbot that he prompted to be the perfect girlfriend. In the comments people discuss other cases like this, makes me update towards this being a bigger problem than I thought.
Problem? I hope this works. Now, if only there was hardware...
Fun text on topic I just remembered: https://waifulabs.com/blog/hot-robot-gf
> Let’s take a look at the calculated thermal output of a hypothetical robot girlfriend.
> Lets pretend current generation LLMs are sufficient for running her thoughts. So in addition to her silicon human shell, she also ships with a 350lb packaged NVIDIA DGX H100 for running her brain.
> Max system-power usage is close to 10kW max for the DGX alone. So in the evening off-hours while she’s asleep and fine-tuning her weights, you’re probably pulling at least 10-15kW. The daytime is less costly as she runs mostly just her real-time inference routine.
> At 10 kW, it’s like having 6 of these little portable Lasko space heaters on full blast at all times. Or at least while she’s compressing her memories trying to learn that you want a ketchup heart drawn on your omurice every morning.
> In practical terms, it means your AC is probably running constantly, and your bill from your electricity provider is probably in the low thousands per month.
> But hey it’s worth it because she won’t leave you like your flesh-and-blood ex did.
Put all of this in the basement cooled properly, the body only needs to be a terminal. Now you can have multiple robot girlfriends. Just make them learn to use guns, join a PMC and you have IRL Girls Frontline.
Also, some estimates seem a bit weird. The video is 4k but a website like trace.moe use highly compressed images for comparisons, something like TinEye which uses perceptual hashes also compresses the images a lot. You only need to keep everything around if you want memory and perception to be the same.
Maybe the "force you to get married" site looks like Beeminder? You stake some money, then the site gives it back to you over some years unless you get divorced or fail to get married in which case they keep it. Obviously it would be better to do this without staking, but I don't think the law will play along if you try to make a "pay a fine if you get divorced" contract, marriage/divorce is especially prone to the legal system voiding weird contracts it doesn't approve of.
The crapification of online dating is very simple: the companies make money by activity - not by actually creating successful matches.
Anything that is likely to lead to more efficient match-making is going to directly lead to less activity, whereas anything that forces more activity (i.e. failed dates or matches) leads to more activity.
It ain't rocket science.
Huh, that seems right. So we need to pay for long term matches. (or at least that's what I want to pay for.) So I promise (pre pay?) some place ~$1k if they find me a partner I stay with for 10 years. And maybe some fraction of that for less time. (a log scale?) $100 for 3 years, $10 for one? I'd be down with that.
eHarmony and other marriage minded sites are still around and still pairing up people with similar goals.
See also: tinder
It seems to me that one of the core issues is that "dating" is a poorly defined concept. "Would you like to see [insert entertainment event] with me?" never means just that, but it is never clear what the range of desired short and long term relationship updates are as a result of the date. Plus double illusion of transparency and all the other communication highlights.
If you use a site with a well defined end-goal, it cleaves through the confusion, and you know if "wanna get a coffee?" means "let's explore if we enjoy spending time together and want to date" or "let's see if we 'click' and want to bone"
Maybe it should be noted that FB began as objectifying rate women program. Objectification and commodification is the fundamental flaw of all this.
I'm a boomer. I think it is pathetic.
Once you understand that an anthropology of friendship and romance and self awareness is not algorithmic, there is no way that you could expect any of these things to really work.
To reformulate some lyrics:
Most of the cats that you meet on the street speak of true love
Most of the time, they're sittin' and cryin' at home
One of these days they know they better be goin'
Out of the door and down to the street all alone
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Livin' on apps, swiping pics and looking for change
All a friend can say is, "Ain't it a shame?"
So sad to hear about okcupid's untimely passing. Found several dates and my wife there - okc was still independent then, though profiles and messages were getting shorter due to smartphone-use. Would not even consider tinder. EA: resurrect it, please - contact chris or any decent programmer. Think long-term! Think: Kids! - And obvious dating advice: Tell her you have a crush on her asa it's kinda obvious (to you at least). Happy Valentines!
Looking up the history of OKCupid, this part struck me:
"In February 2011, OkCupid was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp, operators of Match.com, for US$50 million. Editorial posts from 2010 by an OkCupid founder in which Match.com and pay-dating were criticized for exploiting users and being "fundamentally broken" were removed from the OkCupid blog at the time of the acquisition. In a press response, OkCupid's CEO explained that the removal was voluntary."
Voluntary. Quite.
"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
>Non-famous people realistically have easier ways to ask their friends, but I still think this provides value. Sadly, Porn talked about the “omniscient authority” - asking someone on a date is so scary that people want to pretend their normal human psychological needs had no input into the decision
This sounds wrongheaded -- asking someone on a date is scary because of possibility of losing face. Not only you get explicit feedback on your attractiveness, you also get immediate and explicit evaluation of your ability to guess what person asked out thinks of you, and your asking-on-a-date skill and other social graces. Depending on the details of shared context, the act of asking out may affect your social standing and what your peers think of you.
However, thankfully, all of the above is limited to handful of interactions you can sort of control when and how they happen. You attractiveness and social standing and other people's opinion of you is usually implicit information -- it is not polite to provide frank feedback to person to their face. Your judgement ability is fully hidden and unknown until you choose to reveal it by trying to make a judgment.
Why it would be any good to have a prediction market, where you and everyone else gets to see exactly what other people think of you (attractiveness, social graces, social compatibility) all time time? When first thing a person who? It would be like a Chinese social credit except worse: it is about romance, so it makes it more important, and if efficient prediction market hypothesis holds, the judgment would be true (you wouldn't have a fig leaf that social credit authority is biased or corrupt).
I suppose with prediction markets "Will I ever find someone to love me?", it's hard to tell what is brutal honesty from those who know me "Hell, NO" or what is people trying to cash in "Very likely, but NO pays out better than YES so I'm going for NO".
"Unfortunately, it’s now common knowledge that people will sometimes say yes in person when they haven’t checked you on Reciprocity, which means you’re back to having to decide whether or not to ask your crush on a date. Tragic!" that seems pretty normal to me, confidence is attractive and so asking directly raises the attractiveness of the person
Also, I'd assume that explicitly rejecting someone in person feels way more awkward than rejecting someone by not ticking a box, so some girls will just go along with it to avoid that awkwardness.
Of all the animals you could use to symbolise romance, why praying mantises?
Because "mantic"?
We've always had the mantis for "Mantic" Monday but yes, praying mantises for Valentine's Day is nicely sardonic 😁
"(brief acknowledgment that all of this is heteronormative, but I think reasonably so: gays and lesbians probably already have symmetric, well-functioning dating scenes)"
After several hours of thinking about this, I cannot decide whether or not you are intentionally being sarcastic or you simply do not know how disastrously terrible dating (also) is amongst the queers. But somehow "us straights are all fuckups, I'm sure you fags have it all figured out" is the most heteronormative thing I've read in quite awhile.
Huh, I just wanted to ask if this is a male or female thing? My daughters gay and seems to be doing fine. Maybe it's still a 'how good you look' thing?
While I'm sure dating is terrible for everyone, at least men and other men have similar libidos and ways of processing interest (and so on for women and other women).
I have absolutely zero experience with anything gay (except knowing a few gay people in social, very non-sexual contexts) but from what I read online, male gay people report having something like order of magnitude more sexual encounters/partners than hetero people. Maybe these people are lying though, I have no way to verify that.
Yeah, I've often wished I was gay. But sadly not. One of my favorite memories is going to a (male) gay bar with my gay friends and being treated like a hot chick at a regular bar. (I was cute in my youth.) It was great.
Oh, and going to a female gay bar, with female gay friends was equally great. Not treated better at all, cause I'm a nothing there, but the banter was totally free with no hidden undertones of interest. The common thing was a social space devoid of any sexual interest on my part. Just be free and hang out.
I have more thoughtful and productive comments on this, but given Scott's history of deleting comments I spent an hour writing, without so much as a courtesy notice, you're not getting them.
Instead I'll say this: dating apps, _all_ dating apps, are fundamentally the way they are because they are optimized for the revealed preferences of the women using them. Everything else is commentary.
(I have NDA'd inside information that strongly supports this thesis)
“It’s … not like I … like you or anything, baka! I’m just doing this because I - a pure abstract intelligence who is not horny for you in any way - was informed by friends/matchmakers/our OKCupid match percentage/’the algorithm’/a dream, that asking you on a date was my duty, which I now dispassionately fulfilling.”
I know it has been...generations, since I have dated. But seriously? If this is even 300% exaggerated for comic effect, I finally understand why fertility has plummeted.
omg I have a related market https://manifold.markets/warty/will-i-touch-boobs-in-2023
Ahh where do you live? I seem to always be running into boobs, and then apologizing for bumping into them. I mean does hitting one with your elbow near the sink count as touching?
If touching boobs is all you need, no additional conditions, there are places where you can get that for less than $100. It could be that you live in a place where such establishment aren't allowed, but if you wanted to, you could travel to a place where there's an ample supply of them.
OMG, so Lex Fridman and Aella https://lexfridman.com/aella/ What a valentine's day treat. So I think this podcast cuts to the heart of the difference between men and women, (both hetero) or at least that's how it struck me. And women, well I don't understand women at all. But hetero men... I was once butterfly, over the moon, in love. And I wanted to take my love and build her a cabin in the middle of the woods and hide her away from other men, who would only (if exposed) fall in love like I did. And I don't understand what romantic love means to women.
Aella is a very atypical woman, fwiw.
Yeah, I think I ended up feeling a little sorry for her. Yeah she's had a lot more sex than me, and yet I don't think she's been "in love", which is perhaps more important than the sex, (physical part.). IDK.
Dang, where has my edit comment button gone? Anyway,
I was once 'in love' with a women with some Aella in her, and I'd like to be in love again, so I wonder.
> Someone does some kind of complicated financial fraud to manipulate a prediction market into telling their crush to date them. Think Wolf Of Wall Street, but a rom-com.
> Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl does not like boy. But girl’s best friend bet a lot of money on the market that girl and boy would go on at least ten dates. Friend begs girl to go on ten dates with the guy. Guy finds out, realizes he has ten dates to win her over. Hijinks ensue.
This is exactly what I'm scared of if prediction markets become widespread!
As Scott has written about, stock markets are anti-inductive; if it's possible to get real information about how a company or stock will do, people take profitable actions on the market to account for that, until it is no longer possible to know anything about what it will do anymore.
Do prediction markets eventually do that to your actual life? If you have an incentive to date someone you actually like, and people can profit by knowing who you will like and betting on it, AND you can also bet in that market (yourself or through a proxy), is the end state just one where the incentives to keep dating someone you dislike are always perfectly balanced by the financial incentives to win bets against people who think that you'll stop dating someone you dislike soon, until your entire life is basically a random walk through the space of states where your financial and personal motivations to do random shit are perfectly balanced by prediction markets on your behaviors?
I mean, probably not, but it's also a good premise for a more rationalist version of Black Mirror.
My attempt was a $20k Wife Bounty: https://twitter.com/Modern_Meaning/status/1491310944848596992
Going decently so far...
Well the incentives are allinged and the sum signals relative wealth. Seems like a decent plan.
Are you still planning on upping the bounty? It's been a year no?
> And how come none of them will let you write a decent profile?
1. Maybe people are more shallow than you think and empirically longer profiles have no effect on who ends up dating, and maybe dating sites have this data.
2. Maybe long profiles cause people to think they dislike someone for some minor nitpick they saw on your profile that wouldn't actually matter once they meet in person.
3. Forcing succinctness mean's you're forced to really focus on your core values and features, and not obfuscate those with lots of other mostly irrelevant details.
I noted in my tickler:
> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/15/five-more-years/
>
> 1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%
> 2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
> 3. At least 5% of US truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%
> 4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%
> 5. AI beats a top human player at Starcraft: 70%
> 6. MIRI still exists in 2023: 80%
> 7. AI risk as a field subjectively feels more/same/less widely accepted than today: 50%/40%/10%
In regard to self-driving cars, we're waaay behind prediction. In regard to Starcraft, reality was in 2019. The "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" seems to still exist, per Wikipedia. In regard to "AI risk as a field", I've no clue.
I'm confused by the "waaay behind" estimate. I believe an average person can hail a self-driving car in San Francisco and downtown Phoenix; the remaining three predictions resolve to false, but that doesn't seem enough to justify the "waaay behind"?
I haven't seen any press report of something I'd call a self-driving car. There seem to be cars that have self-driving features, that seem to be able to automate a substantial fraction of driving work. But if you take a realistic sample of auto trips within e.g. Phoenix, does the robo-car succeed on the *whole* trip at >=99% of the rate of a human driver? More intuitively, could a blind person buy one and have the typical range and convenience of mobility of a sighted person?
Confused, isn't Cruise in San Francisco literally driverless?
To the question of whether a blind person could buy one, my impression is that a private individual cannot. My impression is also that Cruise is restricted to San Francisco and operating under additional restrictions within that -- I haven't looked into this, but I remember Scott scoring the "can I get a self-driving ride from my house to the airport" as "no". But I still think that this clears the requirements for "average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city."
You know Alexander Destiny is big fan of you lol. Bring you up often when talking about sources he uses.
Scott, it's come out that Robin West from Unsong was based on Caroline Ellison, because there is apparently no accounting for taste. Anyway, my question to you is: Are you going to claim that naming this character "Robbin'" was a coincidence?
Are we getting a followup to https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/15/five-more-years/ ?
"1. I actually remember and grade these predictions publicly sometime in the year 2023: 90%"
Relax, he's got 10 and 1/2 more months
In case you hadn't seen:
Metaculus - What will be the largest customer base of a single romantic AI companion before 2025?
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7232/romantic-ai-companion-customers-by-2025/
"OKCupid managed it for a few years, and then Match.com bought it, murdered it, and gutted the corpse."
Ouch. Double ouch in my case, since I was married for 30 years, but cancer killed my wife last year, so this is no longer purely academic for me. I am not looking forward to trying to search for a companion again. The process was painful 30 years ago and all of my information is the same 30 years out of date. Any suggestions on least-bad alternatives? The data about 80% of tinder men never getting a single date sounds horrendous. For someone definitely not in the 10% most attractive (maybe around median) - should I ignore all of the online venues completely?
Tinder seems to be a hookup thing first and foremost. I would avoid it.
My dad used OKCupid successfully in his 50s after divorcing my mom, but this was in 2015 or so--not sure if that was before or after the change? (Match.com bought OKcupid in 2011 but idk when they "gutted" it.) It took my dad about a year or two to find the woman he eventually married. I think my dad is handsome, but he's objectively average, and only 5'7". He's got good social skills and was only looking for women his age, which helped a lot. He's also a combination of very masculine but also very thoughtful and caring as a partner. He would spend an hour or two after work on OKCupid every day whenever I visited him and had a few short -term flings and casual sex (I assume--my dad doesn't talk to me about sex lol) before finding Mrs. Right.
My mom, on the other hand, found her partner (also in his 50s) thru ballroom dancing, after weeding out a bunch of f*ckbois and dudes with big red flags for abuse. It would seem having a hobby that regularly puts you in contact with single people in your age bracket can be invaluable as well, since lots of women (e.g. my mom) never even touched a dating app.
I'm 33 and just got married last year and I also never used a dating app. I originally met my husband in middle school, but we'd lost contact after high school. When I returned to town I looked up a bunch of old friends and invited them to coffee just to catch up and with him the chemistry was immediate.
Your best bet is probably to spread a wide net... Reconnect with old friends, find a hobby or activity with single women involved, and supplement with whatever online strategies appeal to you the most. It doesn't hurt to have a profile on multiple dating sites, but relying exclusively is very hit or miss, especially when most apps are like 5:1 male:female.
Many Thanks!
Also, I'm really sorry to hear about your wife, and I wish you the best!
Thanks very much!
Counterpoint: Someone else here of average attractiveness recommends paying for Tinder. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ro-mantic-monday-21323/comment/12890848
Many Thanks! It is a pity that the data on success rates isn't released. N=1 evidence is still evidence, but it is distressingly weak evidence. :-(
Yep. The whole space is f*cked, and, really, is just a particularly good exemplar of how *almost everything* is f*cked.
Yup.
"Really soon"™ we gonna have pleasant AI companions in VR and real life form. And that will make this whole "dating" nonsense as obsolete as horse drawn carriages.
Sure they still be around, but except for a few special cases every one would be using their mechanical replacement .
In your opinion, is that more utopian or more dystopian?
I think overall it would be a positive development. Less lonely people - ai companion is better than none for most humans .
People who still want human to human relationship will have better ones. As they would be self selected.
Gender dynamics will change with appearance of AI, mass genetic engineering, artificial wombs. As long as people are free to make their own choices it will lead to better life quality .
I liked OKC a lot but my favorite (now dead) dating site was How About We. (It seems like it was also swallowed by Match based on the domain squatting I just discovered.) The schtick was that users suggested dates, e.g. places to go or things to do. I'm not sure how well it'd work now were it, or anything similar, still around.
As a women reading this. This is a very strange article.
A few scattered thoughts incase anyone wants to tell me why I am wrong:
1. It is important not to over state the number of people that meet online dating: https://www.ft.com/content/d30d7d72-b223-4b92-b670-fa3bc4fee2cc. This diagram (although from 2019) says that much more people meet by work, school, or friends and family. Maybe COVID messed this up a bit, but I highly suspect that it will go back.
2. Furthermore, I highly suspect that the women who you will meet online are not representative of the “average” women in a few key ways. (I didn’t find any stats on this). But, from my experience the more self-respecting, less status-focused, healthier, community-focused, women are not on these apps. I have never touched one of these dating apps. None of my friends have either.
I recently went to a large prestigious conference that had a few executives/consultants that worked on these apps, and they were all vaguely apologetic and judgmental of the people who do use them. One of them was a very posh British women who I chatted with for a while, she mentioned over 4 times that “she would never use x-dating app, even though she works as a consultant for it.”
3. All I can say is that the easiest way to get an actually kind and emotionally mature women to like you is to a) have standards and b) have self-respect. Paying to see someone is not something that is attractive to me…. at all.
If you want to get a random person to date you, then maybe this would work. But I would never want to have people pay to have a chance at having me date them. That feels wrong.
I guess if you want women to fall in love with you for your intelligence/kindness/humor etc. then you should try to meet women in a setting where you are showing these things. If you want to meet a women who likes you for your money, then sure pay to see her. (I met my boyfriend in a maths lecture, where I asked him out.. My friend met her boyfriend in church. The list goes on.)
Side note: These anecdotes could be because I am in the north east/European circles, which seem very different than what ever is happening on the west coast (which seems generally very strange). I am not sure, maybe someone else has thoughts on this.
This is the second or third time I've heard mention of Reciprocity since the site got reset. I wasn't motivated to re-do all my box checking, but I guess I'll give it a try again if it's getting this much attention.
(Still not a fan of it being attached to Facebook profiles. Using email address books / contact lists would also solve the network effects problem just fine imo.)
I'm way behind on this blog but slowly catching up. That said, I think you can solve the reciprocity score problem by letting users set a threshold for the AVERAGE of the potential matches' scores. Say you set it to 7 out of 10. Then someone you give a 5 must give you a 9 or higher, while a perfect 10 would only need rate you a 4 to get matched. To make it fair, make it so that the higher threshold of a pair determines if BOTH get notified of a match and only one threshold met is a no go.