One time I was arguing with my female friend that women were overly-selective on dating apps. She disagreed and to prove her point handed me her phone with Tinder open. I began swiping on guys on the app, and I was amazed at how bad their profiles were. A lot of the guys might have actually been attractive in real life, but their pictures made them look like smelly weirdos. I can't say this experience changed my strategy much, but it was definitely eye-opening.
The stable marriage problem and modern dating
181–190 of 224 posts
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#182Having 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…
People who are in stable relationships are people who want to be in stable relationships. This is readily apparent when most find their spouse, significant other, love of their life or other half of the walnut in their small town, neighborhood, school, or place of work. People like me, who have been dating forever, fool themselves when they think the issue is compatibility, not having found the right person, or other…
I've subconsciously burnt a number of opportunities to end up in a relationship with perfectly good women over the last few years. I work full time, I'm a single father and I'm studying. I get time to date between uni semesters but deep down I think I realise I don't have time for a stable relationship. At the same time I'm a human who has needs to develop connections with others, develop intimacy, etc. I don't see why dating-forever is seen as such a bad thing if you actually like dating.
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at divorce statistics you find that pattern doesn’t really hold up. There are spikes around various life transitions like retirement which still occur even with long term emotional bonds. Long term relationships are a continuous negotiation as people’s want’s and needs change. Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multi…
You are not offering evidence against the hypothesis. Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness. Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to sur…
Divorce after 25 years is statistically below average for a first marriage in the US. Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce. Overall, most relationships don’t involve marriage and many people never get married, so it’s really a question of what you consider below average.
I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.
So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Including a doctor who uses his own sperm at a sperm bank, which happens from time to time.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertility-...
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I'd say if the graph isn't linear, one of the axes aren't log enough...
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#186At work, we had a problem that's similar to the stable marriage problem. We ended up finding another combinatorial optimization problem called the "assignment problem" [0] that fit more closely with our problem. Here's a brief summary of the assignment problem: Suppose you had people in two groups A and B where each individual in group A wants to pair up with an individual in group B and visa versa. If you can assign…
This isn't how it works in the real world at all, though. People want to optimize for their own pair, with no regard for "maximizing the sum of all compatibility scores." In other words, I don't care about anyone else's marriage, I only want me and my partner to be as happy as possible.
Absolutely! I agree. To be clear, I brought up the linear sum assignment problem because it’s relevant, I liked reading about it, and perhaps someone else here would like to read about it too. At work, we applied the linear sum assignment problem when comparing results from a tracking algorithm to the truth data.
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not offering evidence against the hypothesis. Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness. Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to sur…
Divorce after 25 years is statistically below average for a first marriage in the US. Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce. Overall, most relationships don’t involve marriage and many people never get married, so it’s really a question of what you consider below average. I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, fina…
Well, I'm sure that I could have done better than to marry someone with manic depression.
I'm biased. But given her dating history since, I don't know that she would have done better than me.
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#188I used to work at a dating service pre-IntarWebz. Still had a matching algo. I started privately running some analyses looking to confirm or disprove my hunches. I will say this: it's still brutal out there.
A thing I think is interesting is that comparing my single friends to my married friends, there isn't really an obvious advantage the married friends have in terms of skills / attractiveness / etc. other than they decided they wanted to be married. Someone with a mind to settle down can find someone to settle down with pretty quickly it seems. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but I'm not sure what.
I dunno. The place where I worked had some folks pretty desperate to get married who couldn't seem to make it happen. But almost every trend pointed out in this blog entry was something I saw from constantly entering data. It was very, uh, eye-opening at the same time it was quite a bummer.
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#189I 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…
The rules of the game will remain the same (or even get worse for males): almost all females will reproduce (if they decide to do so) while a relevant chunk of males will not manage to do it. As an extreme example remember how reproduction works in an animal farm.
Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who are in stable relationships are people who want to be in stable relationships. This is readily apparent when most find their spouse, significant other, love of their life or other half of the walnut in their small town, neighborhood, school, or place of work. People like me, who have been dating forever, fool themselves when they think the issue is compatibility, not having found the right person, or other…
I've subconsciously burnt a number of opportunities to end up in a relationship with perfectly good women over the last few years. I work full time, I'm a single father and I'm studying. I get time to date between uni semesters but deep down I think I realise I don't have time for a stable relationship. At the same time I'm a human who has needs to develop connections with others, develop intimacy, etc. I don't see w…
Most of the norms of behavior and goals we find — at first – desirable are often nothing more than what novelist and people of imagination have repeatedly written or spoken about. But life is not a romance novel, there are rarely happy endings, and according to most people who got married, their spouse sounded more interesting a few years back. Why someone should be "the one"? How is it possible, if not by chance, that someone you find desirable in your 20s is still as desirable 30 years later? Then, when I hear that relationship need work to work, I want to run away as fast as Général du Pommeau. Next.
As it is often the case, it boils down to personality, character traits, and culture; if you are someone who is intrinsically and culturally driven to long-term, if not forever, relationships, fine. But if you are not, live your life and respectfully forget about what novelist and imaginative people have written about. I traveled the world on my own, dated everywhere, and fulfilled my childhood dreams of desire and be desired. I had a few multi-year relationships, but don't make me think about them or you'd ruin my day.
Had I listened to the spirit of the times or of the place, I would have ended up miserable, sad, and probably out of shape. Instead, when I am in bed and close to fall asleep, I often think about the exciting life I had, the amazing people I intimately knew, and the dreams I have for tomorrow. To each their own, always. And life has different phases and new desires will knock on my door, maybe a kid, maybe a long-term relationship, but always (I hope...) my choice.