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The dating app paradox

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Re: The dating app paradox

#551

Post by Spivak »

throw310822 wrote: post #550
Spivak wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right we prefer our women unhealthy and underweight. Look at this point I don't know what else to tell you. There's clearly an experience gap we can't cross if you're equating disordered eating with watching what you eat. I wish you could see from a woman's perspective how horribly women treat their bodies to be thin -- it's not healthy. By your own measure I'm incredibly successful. I'm not stupid and know how much…

Don't want to add fuel to this debate, but what you say sounds a bit strange to me. I am of thin build- slightly underweight- and never felt this gave me any problem. Granted, it's just how my body works so it's possible that if I had to make an effort to keep this weight this would come with some slight issues. On the other hand it's also not normal for a lot of people to be overweight, this has clearly to do with c…

So I think the dynamic here is that it's really common to consider women who are of a healthy natural weight to be overweight. I'm not out here defending women who are 5'7" and 200 lbs as healthy but what happens is that that 5'7" woman will be viewed overweight at 150, chubby at 140, and "normal" at 130. And may god help you if you're close to 160. Which is fine for folks who's natural resting weight is 130 but for everyone else it sucks, you end up fighting your body 24/7 to keep it that way and having to ignore/suppress your bodies natural signals.

It's no one person or group's fault that this happens but it's where we're at. I'm technically not underweight by the numbers but my body violently disagrees with that, I've learned to accept it. One of the most common experiences for women in late 20's early 30's is to ease off the constant dieting, gain 10-20 lbs because that's where their body always wanted them, and suddenly feel great -- more energy, less brain fog, regular periods, and suddenly it's not work to maintain it.

Re: The dating app paradox

#552

Post by jessriedel »

morbicer wrote: post #402
jessriedel wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already. The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower ov…

I think it's pretty simple - Gen Z are young and have better opportunity to date IRL. They are surrounded by many peers, have more free time and friend circles are still strong. As people grow older, they have more obligations, they sometimes move away from where they were raised thus breaking away from friends, they generally hang out in less homogenous age bracket. I bet Gen Z will get on dating apps in their 30s.

I believe the claim is that Gen Z uses dating apps less when controlling for age than their predecessors. (I don't have the data to tell whether that's true.)

Re: The dating app paradox

#553

Post by jessriedel »

zarzavat wrote: post #389
jessriedel wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already. The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower ov…

When people say Gen Z are they talking about Gen Z in America or Gen Z on Earth? I notice many qualities ascribed to Gen Z seem to be completely alien to Gen Z where I live which makes me suspect that these qualities are simply random variation and correlation hunting, and not inherent to that cohort’s formative experiences (smartphones, covid, etc).

Most of this discussion is about America, I think.

Re: The dating app paradox

#554

Post by exadeci »

icedchai wrote: post #216
sakawa wrote: post #96

I'd like to bring back an article, more analytical on this paratox (the title, Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating, speaks a lot), from the old and now dead OkCupid blog. Funnily, this post was deleted just after the acquisition from the Match Group in 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcup... Latest discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163930

OkCupid really went to pot after the acquisition. You can't even browse/search any more. It's all Tinder-style matching. Is that what people really want? Online dating has gotten progressively worse over the past ~10 years. Even Craigslist personals is gone... Where can one meet a weirdo nowadays?

Feeld

Re: The dating app paradox

#555

Post by ethbr1 »

_heimdall wrote: post #546
shiroiushi wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, why? Why should someone be paid to stay at home with their kids? Homeschooling has no quality control whatsoever--parents can just teach whatever the hell they want, which usually involves a lot of religious BS and skipping over all the science stuff. On top of that, they only teach their own kids. One of the reasons kids go to school is because one teacher can handle a class of 15-30 kids. If we all paid for one…

I ask because, to me, the idea that we should be heavily subsidizing the removal of parents from a child's life while considering parents being more involved a luxury feels very backwards. You seem to have a base assumption that most people are bad parents and kids would be better off being raised by professionals. You also seem to have an assumption that both you and the state have the right to decide what is best f…

Respectfully, I think the line of questioning is a bit off.

There are two components of this problem: (1) allocation & (2) efficiency

Substituting others (or parents) for child care services is a reallocation. E.g. 1 hour of parent time instead of 1 hour of day care worker time.

Efficiency is instead looking at the "How many person-hours does it take to support 1 child in this way?" metric.

Blending them together muddies the solution, because both need to be improved.

We need to make sure that the most valuable allocation is being used. Whether that's parents receiving subsidized child care, so they can do more valuable work. Or whether it's making stay-at-home parenting financially tenable. Or offering both options!

But it's also using technology to push the scaling factor. I.e. it'd be great if every child received a 1 teacher:3 children ratio, but that would bankrupt every public school system in the country. So we've settled on our current ratio. But could we improve upon that...? (IMHO, tech to replace people for early childhood is dubious, but for late-primary there begin to be some options that aren't currently widely deployed)

And if we improved the scaling factor, we'd decrease costs (personal or government), which would open up reinvestment of those savings in incentive programs.

Re: The dating app paradox

#556

Post by ethbr1 »

thriftwy wrote: post #540
ethbr1 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>- free childcare > Where exactly are all the workers going to come from to support this one? This extends to most child-cost related issues: childcare, primary-education, activities, secondary-education, tertiary-education. Scaling the child:child-cost-worker ratio up needs to be a huge part of this. Which is going to require some out of the box thinking (e.g. cultural acceptance of MOOCs / online degrees).

You can't put 10 yo children into MOOC on boring subject and expect them to do anything at all.

Indeed. But can you supplement a teacher with a focused MOOC, such that children receive a better education at a cheaper overall cost?

I'm less convinced that's impossible. E.g. better general classroom teacher + MOOC for math focus.

I know Khan videos were better-taught than some of my primary math courses...

Having specialized teachers, all being expected to generate their own lesson plans (based on local standards/templates, if existent), on very similar material, all across the country... doesn't seem like an efficient use of their skills.

Re: The dating app paradox

#557

Post by skrbjc »

renewiltord wrote: post #388
skrbjc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children. It's immensely important for the success of a nation and it's odd that the majority of how people meet now is through data apps and that there is no oversight over these at all. They have every incentive to match you with someone you are more likely to have a short term relationship than match you w…

That's what everyone says but they're just Maginot lining it. There's a new frontier: gametogenesis, embryo sequencing, and paid surrogacy if not artificial gestation. When that frontier opens the storyline changes. That's the real paradigm shift.

It's still very difficult to raise a baby on your own and even with two people. It will still feel like someone's career is harder to manage with a child, and so I don't think these things are really going to make much difference for the average person that will likely not be able to afford these things anyway.

A committed married couple having children at a healthy age, feeding them well, and keeping them safe are going to still perform extraordinarily well against what you've laid out, and will likely also have higher happiness levels.

Re: The dating app paradox

#558

Post by skrbjc »

romwell wrote: post #227
skrbjc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children. It's immensely important for the success of a nation and it's odd that the majority of how people meet now is through data apps and that there is no oversight over these at all. They have every incentive to match you with someone you are more likely to have a short term relationship than match you w…

>I've thought for a while now that it is a matter of national interest that your population couples up and has children Yeah, and many people in the US would be way more eager to do that had we had: - affordable housing - minimum wage that allows a single parent to support themselves - universal healthcare - mandated paid (and then, unpaid) parental leave - free childcare - substancial financial assistance to new par…

Most people in the past and in the current day have none of that and still have children. The most well-developed and stable countries will most of what you laid out have some of the lowest birth rates.

Re: The dating app paradox

#559

Post by throw310822 »

Spivak wrote: post #551
throw310822 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't want to add fuel to this debate, but what you say sounds a bit strange to me. I am of thin build- slightly underweight- and never felt this gave me any problem. Granted, it's just how my body works so it's possible that if I had to make an effort to keep this weight this would come with some slight issues. On the other hand it's also not normal for a lot of people to be overweight, this has clearly to do with c…

So I think the dynamic here is that it's really common to consider women who are of a healthy natural weight to be overweight. I'm not out here defending women who are 5'7" and 200 lbs as healthy but what happens is that that 5'7" woman will be viewed overweight at 150, chubby at 140, and "normal" at 130. And may god help you if you're close to 160. Which is fine for folks who's natural resting weight is 130 but for…

Yes, these numbers make the discussion a bit more concrete. But 5'7'' and 150 is definitely in the healthy weight range- girls can strive to be thinner than that but it's to fit some arbitrary idea of beauty rather than to, as you say, "be treated better in each aspect of life" (yes of course, attractive people in general are treated better- but it should be a negligible effect for the ranges we're talking about). In other words, I assumed that the user you were talking to was talking about much higher BMI indexes than these. Personally, as a male, I don't find the 5'7''/ 150 unattractive at all- though it also depends on how fit someone is.

Re: The dating app paradox

#560

Post by Terretta »

user_7832 wrote: post #250
Terretta wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, 50/50 of a billion dollars, or having to financially engineer to operate within $1000 a day* cash flow? You're right, there's only one rational bet. * More if you set up with a bank with intraday transfers.

Not a revenue of $1000, but always being $1000 away from being in debt. ...yeah I get "what if I spent $900 on a purchase and got the money back the next day" is a valid criticism, but I mean, just above poverty. By the way the P(expected) = (1 billion * 0.5) + ((almost) zero * 0.5) = a very respectable 500 million, which even at $1000 a day would take 500,000 days or over a thousand years.

> Not a revenue of $1000, but always being $1000 away from being in debt.

On the contrary, the bet posed was "Here's a mathematical question: if you could flip a coin, with a 50% chance of getting a billion dollars, and a 50% chance of never having more than $1000 in your bank, would you flip the coin?"

It's a cash cap, not a risk statement.

So by the terms, you do just need to set up a way to ensure a cash flow to you while you continue to build up more illiquid safety net and ensure fewer and fewer things cost you money even if you don't own them.

Even if you want to reframe as always being $1000 away from being in debt, that's easy, there are financial arrangements that can let you structure extraordinary assurance that $1000 would never dip below zero, even if you accept it as a narrow lane between the cap and bankruptcy.

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