The stable marriage problem and modern dating • Hacker News Board

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#31

Post by albntomat0 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:39 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…

> 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.)

Is this based on the OkCupid blog? My speculation is what men on average look for (appearance) is easily communicated via online dating, but this is less so than women. I'd be interested to see what the same chart would look for people known in person, rather than just online.

> I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.

There's data showing that women care more about "dating up" in education/social class, which has negatively impacts college educated women and men without a college education. This is due to the widening gap in college degree attainment in the US between men and women[0]. The book "It's Not You, It's Biology" does a good job of going into this.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#32

Post by PeterW2 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

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...

This is to be expected because, due to biological differences, male and female mammals have different mating strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#33

Post by EGreg » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:40 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 think that men do in fact filter just as heavily as women.

They just use looks as a massive first filter.

And people from certain backgrounds also use that background as a major filter.

Anyway, what happens is that women are invested less in the beginning, but as the relationship progresses it switches. The woman gets more attracted than the man, and starts putting up with more than him to keep her investment.

Baumeister and Tice did some daring studies:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2013...

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#34

Post by Causality1 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

I think this overlooks a good many points. For example, the "being the initiator is always better" claim would be more accurately framed "having been the initiator is always better". The data completely ignores the downsides because it only looks at the potential results, not the path to get those results.

Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#35

Post by occamrazor » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

And the chart actually looks very close to linear

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#36

Post by ARandomerDude » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:42 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 :)

It seems like people out there are using "this phenomena" to mean "this phenomenon."

I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#37

Post by YetAnotherMatt » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

One factor that I didn't see addressed in the post which does make a significant impact is that men in general rate women more similarly than women rate men.

See for example:

https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m...

As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if (hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list, and every man has the same woman as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#38

Post by beebmam » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:43 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 :)

On the other end of the spectrum, I like when people tell me "you're making my job exponentially more difficult, with a negative exponent" to let me know I'm doing a good job. Math nerds are the best coworkers

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#39

Post by abnercoimbre » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

automatoney wrote: post #13

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/...

What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion o…

Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple.

> I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women

See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#40

Post by poorman » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong.

People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.

This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.