The stable marriage problem and modern dating • Hacker News Board

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#131

Post by ksdale » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #117

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me. What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married. Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a…

I think the primary requirement for making a relationship work is that both parties are committed to making it work. The problem is: we're not, because we've been fed fairy tales about True Love and we keep looking for a Mr/Mrs Perfect that doesn't exist. Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out.…

My wife and I talk about this occasionally. There's also a sort of prisoner's dilemma that disappears when you have both credibly committed to making it work. Suddenly each disagreement is... lower stakes(?) because you know that the other person is acting in good faith to solve it as well. Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#132

Post by chasd00 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:08 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 :)

i literally feel the same way about the current usage of the word "literally" and i mean that in the literal way. :)

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#133

Post by tromp » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

greenshackle2 wrote: post #114

Laakeri wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exponentials

Uh? log(2^x) == xlog(2) which is linear?

if y = 2^x then taking logs of both x and y we have log y = 2 ^ log x, still an exponential relation.

so it depends on whether "log enough scale" applies to both axes...

Then there's functions like n -> 2^2^...^2 with an exponential tower of height n. That's doesn't become linear with any finite number of logs...

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#134

Post by kazinator » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

zwkrt wrote: post #130

Enginerrrd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us.. That sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate at all with any examples?

GP of the thread here. Things that straight people stereotypically do that gay men stereotypically do not understand: - Treating every person you date like a potential spouse instead of a potential friend - Getting upset when your partner finds someone else attractive - Caring about how many sexual partners someone has had in the past - Remaining sexually monogamous in a relationship that has lost its sexual energy (…

> Things that straight people stereotypically do that gay men stereotypically do not understand:

- Bog down with mortgages and children instead of hopping around the world, partying.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#135

Post by ascorbic » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

ardy42 wrote: post #105

davidcollantes wrote: post #77

Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.

>> The 2010’s showed a monumental rise in online dating, and the number of people who have met their significant other online is only going to continue to grow. > Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010. Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably…

I met my now wife on OkCupid in 2005, and while not necessarily holding a stigma it would certainly raise comment. By 2010 it was no longer weird, and by 2015 not even worth mentioning.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#136

Post by mobilejdral » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:16 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...

When men swipe right on almost every single woman no matter their interest it results in the women having tons of matches to pick from. There is no incentive to not pick from the top of the list.

Even after reading through the profiles and discarding many of the men with a big enough pile there is only so much time in the day to talk with the guys so why not start with the more attractive ones?

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#137

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #88

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me. What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married. Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a…

The parent poster is being a bit overly specific, but the gist is correct: compatibility is mostly about finding someone who clears a list of minimum criteria (in contrast to the classically romantic notion of dating alluded to in the OP, which is more akin to finding a global maximum ). Plenty of people may have relatively few criteria (are we roughly the same age? do we live in the same place? can we have children?…

Lol, Saturday Night Live did a skit on exactly this for a dating app called Settl:

https://youtu.be/zDn3zmumb8o?t=10

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#138

Post by mywittyname » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #54

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #37

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…

I'm always surprised that while men apparently rate women's attractiveness on a bell curve, women seem to rate men on a Pareto distribution. Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards. If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be impr…

It helps that women seem to weight attractiveness pretty low when it comes to partners. The stereotype of the funny fat guy with the hot partner exists for a reason.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#139

Post by btilly » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #65

watwut wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because long term marriage is a lot about your tendency to create long term emotional ties to people. It is also about your willingness to think about relationship itself and put work on it. It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person. And those abilities form a lot in c…

Those abilities are trainable, especially with therapy.

I believe that therapists are better at convincing patients that therapy helped than they are at generating improved outcomes. Furthermore most therapists are not using treatments that there is much evidence for.

This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.

This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."

But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.

That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#140

Post by CerealFounder » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

poorman wrote: post #40

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, th…

Wild plot twist