The stable marriage problem and modern dating • Hacker News Board

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#21

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #15

"the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of women" - OKCupid stats As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation. Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance even if they aren't a 100% fit. Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.

> "the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of women" - OKCupid stats

Also seems to hold up on Tinder:

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#22

Post by automatoney » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #17

zwkrt wrote: post #2

This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1]. [1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”). Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate. In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.

People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at least the divorced seniors can identify the seniors in a room.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#23

Post by dvt » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

This is a complicated and very interesting problem; we had some fantastic related discussion here[1][2] earlier this year. I like your angle of population size being the "input" of some n^2 "matching algorithm" -- it's probably a bit too game theoretic in practice, but I think it makes sense.

I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed.

Fun article!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583

[2] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#24

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #4

zwkrt wrote: post #2

This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1]. [1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

Also Jewish dating and so on.

If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#25

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #14

EGreg wrote: post #3

Why would having a larger pool make dating harder? I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with the probability of a relationship . What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re only as faithful as your options.”

It's in the article. Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.) I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a comple…

I don't think it's solely a lack of meaningful social connections, although that's a contributing factor. Women have more choices and are more picky versus historically, and men are economically disadvantaged due to globalization and wealth/income inequality.

Here's a comment where I opine on this from a previous thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#26

Post by mc32 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

automatoney wrote: post #22

mc32 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”). Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate. In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.

People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at…

I understand that and I will acknowledge it reduces the pool compared to larger populations but it’s not 1/20 because the hobbies and friends and places one might frequent are often but not always obviously the places with like-people.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#27

Post by EGreg » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

titanomachy wrote: post #24

EGreg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Jewish dating and so on.

If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.

No solution to what

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#28

Post by bluntfang » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #15

"the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of women" - OKCupid stats As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation. Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance even if they aren't a 100% fit. Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.

definitely see this in my scene. the most attractive guys have many partners while the lesser ones don't have that many. more attractive guys are fought over and rifts are created because of it. It's really funny because a lot of them consider themselves anarchists politically...yet the few attractive men seem to dominate.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#29

Post by polote » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing partner is a liquid market.

What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#30

Post by jacobush » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

pengaru wrote: post #16

anikan_vader wrote: post #11

>> The first graph demonstrates the O(n²) complexity of the algorithm. We can see that as the community grows larger, even by a small amount, the amount of iterations it takes to solve the matching problem grows exponentially. This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a…

Whenever I visit family in the midwest this phenomenon makes me twitch. It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more difficult" Edit: fixed typo :)

These phenomena make me twitch.