The stable marriage problem and modern dating • Hacker News Board

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#151

Post by war1025 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

grugagag wrote: post #116

I'll chime in with my experience. I married a partner who gave me a strong sense of trust and we now have a child together and are a happy family. We are not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and personalities but share values. We both agreed that rather than trying to change each other we should strive to complete each other instead. It is hard work, but I have the sense that marriage is n…

> We are not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and personalities but share values.

The way I've heard this phrased is that you don't want to marry someone with the same strengths as you, you want to marry someone who has the strengths you are lacking. You want someone who will complement you.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#152

Post by RHSeeger » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #68

Schopenhauer believed that we can't control who we are attracted to, nature does, and further that the mates nature predisposes us to aren't the one most likely to make us happy, it's the ones most likely to produce genetically compatible offspring. "Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so mu…

There are a LOT of people out there who are repeatedly attracted to people who are completely toxic to them.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#153

Post by wolfram74 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

arvarik wrote: post #5

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.”

Right, I should have made that a bit clearer. Modern dating is harder because the pursuit of a stable marriage is harder. Although this is all assuming people date to get married.

There's one simulation I'd have very much liked to have seen the results of, and that would be the female preference advantage under the paretto-normal asymmetry. When you have a normal-normal preference, you'd assume the advantage to be equivalent for whoever was reaching, but that assumption isn't as well grounded when the distributions aren't equivalent.

TLDR: do the women have a similar advantage if they are the reachers?

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#154

Post by bluntfang » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #97

warent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of this is perception vs. reality. Many women trip over themselves around me, but I'm monogamous and have only chosen to be in a couple of relationships because finding a match is really hard. Just because someone gets a lot of attention, that doesn't mean they're going around having endless casual sex or unlimited girlfriends.

This. When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you. The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.

This is operating on the assumption that sex requires caring about other people at a high capacity. I'd suggest a read of The Ethical Slut if you're actually interested in a world where sex and romantic intimacy aren't the same thing.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#155

Post by klyrs » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

likelybear wrote: post #128

klyrs wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're referring to the "stable marriage problem" where every person is gonna get married come hell or high water, no takebacks. That problem cannot be solved in general if individuals can give a hard no.

Hard no's are fine in the classic stable marriage problem. "Remain single" gets added as an option to each person's preference list, then you can run Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance more-or-less as normal with each person on the accepting side starting with "remain single".

The original formulation of the problem is looking for a bijection / perfect matching. That isn't always possible if "remain single" is an option. I agree with you and your sibling that modifying the problem is possible, but it won't always produce a perfect matching which is what I meant by unsolvable.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#156

Post by skinkestek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:35 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #44

occamrazor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the chart actually looks very close to linear

Everything is linear on a log enough scale ;)

Nice pun. Possibly also gets points for being a reference to number 6 in this classic list:

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#157

Post by tuesdayrain » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:37 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…

> 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.

I don't see how this suggests compatibility is an illusion. You just described another way of finding someone who is compatible. Personally I already had a mental checklist of everything I wanted out of a relationship, no dating around was necessary to know those things. Just basic introspection. I ended up marrying my second girlfriend and I would say the relationship is 100% perfect.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#158

Post by gowld » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #123

dilippkumar wrote: post #112

I am interested in how dating apps are changing humanity. Starting with three assumptions: 1. Over several generations of successful partnering, Human cognition has become really good at estimating someone's "rank" as a potential mate (in the stable marriage problem sense). 2. Language, modern UX design schemes and dating apps do not have sufficient bandwidth to communicate all the signals needed to "rank" a potentia…

A contest is only an evolutionary advantage if the winners reproduce more, or more successfully, than the losers. So assuming you're not having babies with everyone you match with on tinder, having a large number of matches isn't actually an increase in fitness. I haven't seen any evidence that people who don't do well on dating apps don't actually end up reproducing... in fact it's possible less success in that real…

Evolutionary success isn't about stronger relationships, it's about having more sex with less birth control and a basically safe environment for childhood survival.

A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship, as can (to a lesser exteny) a woman who is so unstable that her children are adopted.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#159

Post by k__ » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

bluntfang wrote: post #154

k__ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you. The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.

This is operating on the assumption that sex requires caring about other people at a high capacity. I'd suggest a read of The Ethical Slut if you're actually interested in a world where sex and romantic intimacy aren't the same thing.

Didn't like that book, but thanks.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#160

Post by gowld » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #138

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Generally, women prefer physical attractiveness for sexual partners (genetic value), and high financial/social statue attractiveness for relationship partners (they are less likely to abandon her with nothing).