9 ms·

Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Attraction

118 points by kolbe 9y ago

luckyt 9y ago
> Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating event for a 4-min speed date I wonder if the results would be different if the participants got to know each other better. In 4 minutes you're not going to know your partner very well, and any judgment would probably be based entirely on physical attraction.
- colmvp 9y ago
  I've done speed dating twice. Within a few minutes you can usually tell whether or not you'd even want to go on a first date because while physical attraction is one thing, so is having a conversation. I've certainly struggled to talk to a few women who quite frankly have very little in common with me or who could barely muster a few words throughout the conversation. That was enough to basically not want to ever go on a first date with them.
  - welkeikd 9y ago
    It's a tricky issue. There's lots of studies showing that people form pretty meaningful impressions quickly, as you're saying, and I think speed dating captures some of that. On the other hand, there's lots of evidence suggesting that the things they were measuring are important for things like long-term relationship survival, etc. There's also studies showing that these "thin slices", while accurate, are not as accurate as what you'd get from intimate long-term knowledge of someone. This isn't anything astonishing, but I have difficulty interpreting this as much more than "things like personality and attitudes are not very predictive of your superficial attractions to potential partners." I don't mean "superficial" dismissively, I just mean it in the sense of "not based on very much information." Another way of looking at it is: how could you predict attraction in that time frame based on longer-term, deeper-seated attributes, when that kind of timeframe doesn't allow for assessment of those sorts of things? It's one prediction, but I doubt if you stepped back and came at it without knowledge of this study, that you'd make that prediction. I certainly wouldn't (I'm trying to imagine me predicting my relationships from the first 4 minutes--sure, I'd be able to guess pretty well who I definitely wasn't attracted to, and maybe who I was definitely was attracted to, but beyond that? pbfbfbtttt...) I wasn't able to predict my most meaningful relationships from a month or so of being around them, sometimes on daily bases. Looking back at them, I might have had some kind of subconscious reaction I wasn't able to process, but I wasn't aware of what it meant at the time, which renders it useless.
    - visarga 9y ago
      What looks amazing from the outside might be quite stressful from the inside, and vice-versa. I think we aren't able to predict a relationship before we experience it because each person adapts to the other, and the result is undetermined before the process starts. A person becomes changed in a relation, we can't predict even how we are going to be, let alone the significant other. That has been my experience - I'm rather pessimistic at dating services being able to match people up. It's more of a game of chance.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Astute observations. However, do dating services ever do consistently better than chance (whatever chance means in such situations)? Plenty of Fish IIRC used to publish lots of stats.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    "... could barely muster a few words throughout the conversation" could easily be "shy and embarrassed", though. In a less weird setting than speed dating, they might have more to say. Of course, a first date is also a pretty weird setting. The advantage is, it lasts long enough that there's a chance the "shy and embarrassed" can wear off, and the more normal person can come through.
    - prawn 9y ago
      Is someone shy and embarrassed in that context also likely to be similar when making new friends, negotiating in a business context, etc? The people I know who have been reserved at first, have generally been more reserved in all situations. That might be more attractive to other shy people, I'd guess.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        I'm immensely shy but relatively good at pretending I'm not. I can't imagine finding that characteristic attractive? I suppose some people want a wallflower? Do other shy people look for a partner who is shy?
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    This is problematic for the same reason technical interviews are: some people are just naturally better at them.
NegativeLatency 9y ago
Last sentence of the abstract: > These results suggest that compatibility elements of human mating are challenging to predict before two people meet.
- kolbe 9y ago
  That's a pretty generous definition of "suggest." Could be that they aren't studying the right metrics before meeting.
  - danblick 9y ago
    Exactly. It's possible there are other features that would have more predictive power, they just haven't figured out how to quantify them. The title of the paper could be, "We're still not very good at describing what makes people attractive."
damnfine 9y ago
This is just a log way of saying we are looking at the wrong metrics. Good on them for publishing a 'negative' finding, and not clawing for some trivial clickbait casualty for attention.
- komali2 9y ago
  I mean, I'd start at the very question - romantic desire? I mean, were they testing against likelihood for partners to make out? Go home and sleep together? Go on second dates? Admit mild attraction but not instigate further action? Date a whole lot and eventually break up? Or marry? The things people look for in a partner to go home with for the night are different from the things people find "just generally attractive" (oh he's hot) which are different from the things people find good for long-term dating. I mean, obviously, but my point is the layer of complexity doesn't just start at "different things that cause attraction."
hprotagonist 9y ago
Betteridge's Law: No, romantic desire is not predictable.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Feynman would be happy that negative results like these are published!
  - hprotagonist 9y ago
    that's true. I am, as well. Just remarking that the title _is_ predictable (and a little clickbait-y).
make3 9y ago
... They should run convnets on pictures on the subjects, would be much more accurate, I'm sure. Speed dating is a first impressions thing. Physical attractiveness is huge, I'm sure. I don't know if the convnet would have time to learn what attractiveness means, but that's more of a technical (albeit important) detail. Meta learning (including transfer learning) and more data could help a lot with this
- thanatropism 9y ago
  But we don't see in the same way photographic cameras see. We have a very narrow field of vision and compensate for it by constant eye motion. Vision is never static. And vision is only part of the attraction equation -- there's so much we smell without consciously articulating...
  - gt_ 9y ago
    Good point. Maybe this 'scope' could eventually be handled with another layer to predict eye trace. It would require a lot of eye tracking data. I used to be a film editor and I think this might be similar to how composition influences cut techniques. I think this sort of thing is pretictable in context of film editing but that we don't have enough words to describe it. Example: When cutting a scene with a lot of people eyes, you can really push the limits because of the high likelyhood that the audience will have a certain amount of focus on some eyes.
    - thanatropism 9y ago
      You made me remember now. I tried to major in film (it was a program halfway between film studies and technical work), and remember a big technical thing being not producing an "axis break" (I won't know the terms in english) by changing angles too suddenly or even changing lenses too abruptly from wide to long. Unless you were trying to break the rules on purpose. The big exception was "plane/counter-plane" shot sequences where we alternated between seeing two characters who were talking face-to-face directly. This was 15 years ago and not in a country with an actual film industry. Then the reason why this worked was said to be insert long French theoretical evocation you identified with the characters. The lacanian gaze, that kind of thing. So in light of what you just said, the whole "axis break" makes perfect sense: film sequences are trying to show images I might have plausibly apprehended in real life via eye movements. Because I'm always seeing it from someone's point of view. The lacanian gaze.
EGreg 9y ago
Two exact same people can meet in different circumstances and either fall in love or not. If anyone has a subscription to YouTube Red I would recommend watching this episode from many years ago: https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q
- rosser 9y ago
  Episode of...? EDIT: Oh, Voyager. That's also on Netflix, and probably other places. S4E22, "Unforgettable".
- AjithAntony 9y ago
  > YouTube Red FWIW, I have YouTube Red, and this video says I need to buy a $150 season to watch it. If anyone has hulu, here's a link Star Trek: Voyager S4 E22 Unforgettable https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0 https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0
searine 9y ago
This explains tinder's success. Cut the "matching", just use first impressions as the primary filter. Though, this raises all sorts of new problems in the romantic ecosystem.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Exit strategies aren't just for startups.
pavement 9y ago
Judging a book by its cover, maybe... but personality is a huge, huge component of romance, and simple questionnaires, even with free-form, essay-style text responses, are unlikely to reveal enough to predict anything by survey alone. Arranged marriages certainly seem to permit a capacity for arbitrary pairings, but when you consider the hereditary aspects behind an arranged marriage, where parents are choosing for children, the reality is that a parent's approximate attraction to someone they select for their children, even by proxy through that someone's parents, will probably land closer to what their children would intuitively approach on their own, than random chance.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  An arranged marriage is going to be a social and economic positive to at least on party and neutral or positive to the other. A marriage is less likely to fail when it causes enough upsides to be worth the downsides. People don't like the concept of trophy wives, gold diggers and strategic marriages because the pros and cons each side brings to the table are incredibly dissimilar in nature and the perceived value of them is highly subjective so to most people they look like a bad deal for at least one party. On the other hand only two people have to think it's a good deal for it to work out.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    I don't think we can necessarily assume that an arranged marriage is positive-to-neutral for both members of the couple, however. Parents may act in their own best interests or those of other members of the family, even if they tell themselves they are putting their child's interests first. Practices like dowries, and issues of gender inequality and the socio-economic status of families and clans, further cloud the issue. Which is not to say that leaving it up to the kids themselves is always successful...
    - roceasta 9y ago
      So parents pick suitors and daughters have the power of veto. That way parents filter out bad boy thugs (who may damage her face) and those of lower economic/social classes (who may reduce her to penury). Daughter filters out people she finds repulsive. The traditional model as I understand it.
chirau 9y ago
Here is the full paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580
tunesmith 9y ago
It's also so timing-dependent. My wife and I are not sure we would have been attracted to each other if we had met during quite a few other times in our past lives. There have to be some factors about a person that are about timing and emotional state, beyond simply just being single and available. EDIT: "past lives" refers to the past of each of our lives, not reincarnation. :-)
- _RPM 9y ago
  Interesting, you sound very strange.
  - d33 9y ago
    What's strange about what he wrote?
    - smellf 9y ago
      "Met a few other times in our past lives"
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - mlevental 9y ago
        he means in different careers. people use that turn of phrase all the time.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhh__ 9y ago
    Interesting, you sound very strange.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    But are you attracted to him? ;)
trapperkeeper74 9y ago
If they find anything, they oughta not publish and start a science-based dating site. ;)
zxcvvcxz 9y ago
Alright, who's ready to learn some uncomfortable truths? Background: for fun I used to help friends improve their standing in dating, and now I am turning this into a side business focused on increasing men's success rates for online dating. To great effect btw. > Matchmaking companies and theoretical perspectives on close relationships suggest that initial attraction is, to some extent, a product of two people's self-reported traits and preferences. Right from the first sentence, I can tell the results are going to be awful. Here's the truth: appearance is significantly more important than anything else. I mean the face, the headshot from the chest and up, the body. But mostly the face. This is for both male and female attractiveness. The rest of one's "profile", their traits and preferences, just make for conversation topics unless there's something so polar opposite that it becomes a deal-breaker. I.e. in my research these are "threshold factors" not continuous variables for correlation. > Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating event for a 4-min speed date. Random forests models predicted 4% to 18% of actor variance and 7% to 27% of partner variance; crucially, however, they were unable to predict relationship variance using any combination of traits and preferences reported before the dates. And there are the poor results, as I expected. We are shallow. Or so it seems. But we are actually incredibly complex processing machines. I can tell your levels of strength, aggression, trustworthiness, and intelligence fairly decently from looking at your face. I can also tell what your diet is like, how healthy you are. Maybe not explicitly, but subconsciously. And women are amazing at this (we're better at looking at breasts and hip-to-waist ratios). Here's an interesting video getting into some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc So how do I literally 10x a man's results in terms of his OkCupid profile? In terms of measured message responses received, and dates achieved? I get them in shape. I fix their diet. I cut them to <12% bodyfat while adding pounds of lean muscle. I increase their testosterone levels as much as naturally possible over a 90 day period to start (that's my basic service). And then I take proper photos -- men, don't ever use a smartphone for a headshot. Smartphones have terrible focal lengths, lengthening your faces and making you look more feminine. Since it slims the face, I suspect a lot of social media heavy women are letting themselves gain weight because in their selfie photos (taken from a slightly inclined angle, no less) they look significantly slimmer. I don't change shit in what they write on their profiles. Because that pretty much doesn't matter. Believe me, I've experimented. But the hardcore truth is that you need to look more masculine, unless you can show through photos that you're a multimillionaire. And even that I wouldn't recommend as being your main attraction asset (but it does work). Maybe I should release some independent studies sometime, I have some great datasets :) Edit - nice downvotes but no rebuttals. Happy to have a discussion, these kind of things bothered me to no end as someone who wanted to bank on being a software engineer with a good personality in order to get dates.
otakucode 9y ago
Yes it is predictable. Based upon the immunohistological complex of the participants. You won't find anything but red herrings otherwise.
breischl 9y ago
Sarcastic tl;dr... Nerds try to use computers to get a date. Surprisingly, it doesn't work.
Zardoz84 9y ago
So, then the aromantics ?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
stillhere 9y ago
I think it is hilarious when people study something like this. Hopefully this has some scientific or business applications but at the end of the day we underestimate how extremely SHALLOW we all are. Improve your physical attractiveness, improve your odds. People love shortcuts but there aren't any.
musashizak 9y ago
We live in strange days! Really we can think that desire is predictable and measurable? The right question shoud be how much we dont know of the human nature?
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Really we can think that desire is predictable and measurable? We don't have to think of it philosophically. If researchers can train some ML algorithm to predict it, then it is predictable, end of story. If not, it's open (it could still be predictable and they couldn't come with the right algorithm, or it could just be too fuzzy, or even impossible to measure). That said, if we drop it from "love" to simple "desire", then most of it should be fairly predictable and measurable with very small margin of error. Humans are not that much of unique snowflakes as they say. In a given culture, the majority of the population will converge a lot in what they find attractive and what they don't -- this has been studied before.
- visarga 9y ago
  Trying to predict desire might be easy, but predicting happiness in a relationship hard. It's like a weather simulation after the first 10 days - becomes too hard to compute. Besides attraction, other things might come into play in predicting relation happiness - such as dialogue style, extraversion/introversion, specific needs of one in relation to the strengths of the other and specific situations in life the couple has to deal with. Some of these things might emerge from a psychological interview, others happen dynamically and are impossible to predict. And most people are very time sensitive - the same person might be available now that was not a week ago. The availability for dating of some people measures in just months between long term relationships, so they are like 99% of the time unavailable even if they are compatible. Searching for a mate is hard because most compatible people are presently attached and you got to get them at the right time. That might be mitigated by going on a dating site, but unfortunately dating sites are full of people who are there for other reasons than serious relationships.
t8ge55geu8ygt 9y ago
Can anyone tell what the sample size is? What's the power here?

118 points by kolbe 9y ago

> Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating event for a 4-min speed date I wonder if the results would be different if the participants got to know each other better. In 4 minutes you're not going to know your partner very well, and any judgment would probably be based entirely on physical attraction.

colmvp 9y ago
I've done speed dating twice. Within a few minutes you can usually tell whether or not you'd even want to go on a first date because while physical attraction is one thing, so is having a conversation. I've certainly struggled to talk to a few women who quite frankly have very little in common with me or who could barely muster a few words throughout the conversation. That was enough to basically not want to ever go on a first date with them.
- welkeikd 9y ago
  It's a tricky issue. There's lots of studies showing that people form pretty meaningful impressions quickly, as you're saying, and I think speed dating captures some of that. On the other hand, there's lots of evidence suggesting that the things they were measuring are important for things like long-term relationship survival, etc. There's also studies showing that these "thin slices", while accurate, are not as accurate as what you'd get from intimate long-term knowledge of someone. This isn't anything astonishing, but I have difficulty interpreting this as much more than "things like personality and attitudes are not very predictive of your superficial attractions to potential partners." I don't mean "superficial" dismissively, I just mean it in the sense of "not based on very much information." Another way of looking at it is: how could you predict attraction in that time frame based on longer-term, deeper-seated attributes, when that kind of timeframe doesn't allow for assessment of those sorts of things? It's one prediction, but I doubt if you stepped back and came at it without knowledge of this study, that you'd make that prediction. I certainly wouldn't (I'm trying to imagine me predicting my relationships from the first 4 minutes--sure, I'd be able to guess pretty well who I definitely wasn't attracted to, and maybe who I was definitely was attracted to, but beyond that? pbfbfbtttt...) I wasn't able to predict my most meaningful relationships from a month or so of being around them, sometimes on daily bases. Looking back at them, I might have had some kind of subconscious reaction I wasn't able to process, but I wasn't aware of what it meant at the time, which renders it useless.
  - visarga 9y ago
    What looks amazing from the outside might be quite stressful from the inside, and vice-versa. I think we aren't able to predict a relationship before we experience it because each person adapts to the other, and the result is undetermined before the process starts. A person becomes changed in a relation, we can't predict even how we are going to be, let alone the significant other. That has been my experience - I'm rather pessimistic at dating services being able to match people up. It's more of a game of chance.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Astute observations. However, do dating services ever do consistently better than chance (whatever chance means in such situations)? Plenty of Fish IIRC used to publish lots of stats.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  "... could barely muster a few words throughout the conversation" could easily be "shy and embarrassed", though. In a less weird setting than speed dating, they might have more to say. Of course, a first date is also a pretty weird setting. The advantage is, it lasts long enough that there's a chance the "shy and embarrassed" can wear off, and the more normal person can come through.
  - prawn 9y ago
    Is someone shy and embarrassed in that context also likely to be similar when making new friends, negotiating in a business context, etc? The people I know who have been reserved at first, have generally been more reserved in all situations. That might be more attractive to other shy people, I'd guess.
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      I'm immensely shy but relatively good at pretending I'm not. I can't imagine finding that characteristic attractive? I suppose some people want a wallflower? Do other shy people look for a partner who is shy?
- WalterSear 9y ago
  This is problematic for the same reason technical interviews are: some people are just naturally better at them.

NegativeLatency 9y ago

Last sentence of the abstract: > These results suggest that compatibility elements of human mating are challenging to predict before two people meet.

kolbe 9y ago
That's a pretty generous definition of "suggest." Could be that they aren't studying the right metrics before meeting.
- danblick 9y ago
  Exactly. It's possible there are other features that would have more predictive power, they just haven't figured out how to quantify them. The title of the paper could be, "We're still not very good at describing what makes people attractive."

damnfine 9y ago

This is just a log way of saying we are looking at the wrong metrics. Good on them for publishing a 'negative' finding, and not clawing for some trivial clickbait casualty for attention.

komali2 9y ago
I mean, I'd start at the very question - romantic desire? I mean, were they testing against likelihood for partners to make out? Go home and sleep together? Go on second dates? Admit mild attraction but not instigate further action? Date a whole lot and eventually break up? Or marry? The things people look for in a partner to go home with for the night are different from the things people find "just generally attractive" (oh he's hot) which are different from the things people find good for long-term dating. I mean, obviously, but my point is the layer of complexity doesn't just start at "different things that cause attraction."

hprotagonist 9y ago

Betteridge's Law: No, romantic desire is not predictable.

EGreg 9y ago
Feynman would be happy that negative results like these are published!
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  that's true. I am, as well. Just remarking that the title _is_ predictable (and a little clickbait-y).

make3 9y ago

... They should run convnets on pictures on the subjects, would be much more accurate, I'm sure. Speed dating is a first impressions thing. Physical attractiveness is huge, I'm sure. I don't know if the convnet would have time to learn what attractiveness means, but that's more of a technical (albeit important) detail. Meta learning (including transfer learning) and more data could help a lot with this

thanatropism 9y ago
But we don't see in the same way photographic cameras see. We have a very narrow field of vision and compensate for it by constant eye motion. Vision is never static. And vision is only part of the attraction equation -- there's so much we smell without consciously articulating...
- gt_ 9y ago
  Good point. Maybe this 'scope' could eventually be handled with another layer to predict eye trace. It would require a lot of eye tracking data. I used to be a film editor and I think this might be similar to how composition influences cut techniques. I think this sort of thing is pretictable in context of film editing but that we don't have enough words to describe it. Example: When cutting a scene with a lot of people eyes, you can really push the limits because of the high likelyhood that the audience will have a certain amount of focus on some eyes.
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    You made me remember now. I tried to major in film (it was a program halfway between film studies and technical work), and remember a big technical thing being not producing an "axis break" (I won't know the terms in english) by changing angles too suddenly or even changing lenses too abruptly from wide to long. Unless you were trying to break the rules on purpose. The big exception was "plane/counter-plane" shot sequences where we alternated between seeing two characters who were talking face-to-face directly. This was 15 years ago and not in a country with an actual film industry. Then the reason why this worked was said to be insert long French theoretical evocation you identified with the characters. The lacanian gaze, that kind of thing. So in light of what you just said, the whole "axis break" makes perfect sense: film sequences are trying to show images I might have plausibly apprehended in real life via eye movements. Because I'm always seeing it from someone's point of view. The lacanian gaze.

EGreg 9y ago

Two exact same people can meet in different circumstances and either fall in love or not. If anyone has a subscription to YouTube Red I would recommend watching this episode from many years ago: https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q

rosser 9y ago
Episode of...? EDIT: Oh, Voyager. That's also on Netflix, and probably other places. S4E22, "Unforgettable".
AjithAntony 9y ago
> YouTube Red FWIW, I have YouTube Red, and this video says I need to buy a $150 season to watch it. If anyone has hulu, here's a link Star Trek: Voyager S4 E22 Unforgettable https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0 https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0

searine 9y ago

This explains tinder's success. Cut the "matching", just use first impressions as the primary filter. Though, this raises all sorts of new problems in the romantic ecosystem.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Exit strategies aren't just for startups.

pavement 9y ago

Judging a book by its cover, maybe... but personality is a huge, huge component of romance, and simple questionnaires, even with free-form, essay-style text responses, are unlikely to reveal enough to predict anything by survey alone. Arranged marriages certainly seem to permit a capacity for arbitrary pairings, but when you consider the hereditary aspects behind an arranged marriage, where parents are choosing for children, the reality is that a parent's approximate attraction to someone they select for their children, even by proxy through that someone's parents, will probably land closer to what their children would intuitively approach on their own, than random chance.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
An arranged marriage is going to be a social and economic positive to at least on party and neutral or positive to the other. A marriage is less likely to fail when it causes enough upsides to be worth the downsides. People don't like the concept of trophy wives, gold diggers and strategic marriages because the pros and cons each side brings to the table are incredibly dissimilar in nature and the perceived value of them is highly subjective so to most people they look like a bad deal for at least one party. On the other hand only two people have to think it's a good deal for it to work out.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I don't think we can necessarily assume that an arranged marriage is positive-to-neutral for both members of the couple, however. Parents may act in their own best interests or those of other members of the family, even if they tell themselves they are putting their child's interests first. Practices like dowries, and issues of gender inequality and the socio-economic status of families and clans, further cloud the issue. Which is not to say that leaving it up to the kids themselves is always successful...
  - roceasta 9y ago
    So parents pick suitors and daughters have the power of veto. That way parents filter out bad boy thugs (who may damage her face) and those of lower economic/social classes (who may reduce her to penury). Daughter filters out people she finds repulsive. The traditional model as I understand it.

chirau 9y ago

Here is the full paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580

tunesmith 9y ago

It's also so timing-dependent. My wife and I are not sure we would have been attracted to each other if we had met during quite a few other times in our past lives. There have to be some factors about a person that are about timing and emotional state, beyond simply just being single and available. EDIT: "past lives" refers to the past of each of our lives, not reincarnation. :-)

_RPM 9y ago
Interesting, you sound very strange.
- d33 9y ago
  What's strange about what he wrote?
  - smellf 9y ago
    "Met a few other times in our past lives"
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mlevental 9y ago
      he means in different careers. people use that turn of phrase all the time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mhh__ 9y ago
  Interesting, you sound very strange.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  But are you attracted to him? ;)

trapperkeeper74 9y ago

If they find anything, they oughta not publish and start a science-based dating site. ;)

zxcvvcxz 9y ago

Alright, who's ready to learn some uncomfortable truths? Background: for fun I used to help friends improve their standing in dating, and now I am turning this into a side business focused on increasing men's success rates for online dating. To great effect btw. > Matchmaking companies and theoretical perspectives on close relationships suggest that initial attraction is, to some extent, a product of two people's self-reported traits and preferences. Right from the first sentence, I can tell the results are going to be awful. Here's the truth: appearance is significantly more important than anything else. I mean the face, the headshot from the chest and up, the body. But mostly the face. This is for both male and female attractiveness. The rest of one's "profile", their traits and preferences, just make for conversation topics unless there's something so polar opposite that it becomes a deal-breaker. I.e. in my research these are "threshold factors" not continuous variables for correlation. > Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating event for a 4-min speed date. Random forests models predicted 4% to 18% of actor variance and 7% to 27% of partner variance; crucially, however, they were unable to predict relationship variance using any combination of traits and preferences reported before the dates. And there are the poor results, as I expected. We are shallow. Or so it seems. But we are actually incredibly complex processing machines. I can tell your levels of strength, aggression, trustworthiness, and intelligence fairly decently from looking at your face. I can also tell what your diet is like, how healthy you are. Maybe not explicitly, but subconsciously. And women are amazing at this (we're better at looking at breasts and hip-to-waist ratios). Here's an interesting video getting into some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc So how do I literally 10x a man's results in terms of his OkCupid profile? In terms of measured message responses received, and dates achieved? I get them in shape. I fix their diet. I cut them to <12% bodyfat while adding pounds of lean muscle. I increase their testosterone levels as much as naturally possible over a 90 day period to start (that's my basic service). And then I take proper photos -- men, don't ever use a smartphone for a headshot. Smartphones have terrible focal lengths, lengthening your faces and making you look more feminine. Since it slims the face, I suspect a lot of social media heavy women are letting themselves gain weight because in their selfie photos (taken from a slightly inclined angle, no less) they look significantly slimmer. I don't change shit in what they write on their profiles. Because that pretty much doesn't matter. Believe me, I've experimented. But the hardcore truth is that you need to look more masculine, unless you can show through photos that you're a multimillionaire. And even that I wouldn't recommend as being your main attraction asset (but it does work). Maybe I should release some independent studies sometime, I have some great datasets :) Edit - nice downvotes but no rebuttals. Happy to have a discussion, these kind of things bothered me to no end as someone who wanted to bank on being a software engineer with a good personality in order to get dates.

otakucode 9y ago

Yes it is predictable. Based upon the immunohistological complex of the participants. You won't find anything but red herrings otherwise.

breischl 9y ago

Sarcastic tl;dr... Nerds try to use computers to get a date. Surprisingly, it doesn't work.

Zardoz84 9y ago

So, then the aromantics ?

deleted 9y ago
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stillhere 9y ago

I think it is hilarious when people study something like this. Hopefully this has some scientific or business applications but at the end of the day we underestimate how extremely SHALLOW we all are. Improve your physical attractiveness, improve your odds. People love shortcuts but there aren't any.

musashizak 9y ago

We live in strange days! Really we can think that desire is predictable and measurable? The right question shoud be how much we dont know of the human nature?

coldtea 9y ago
>Really we can think that desire is predictable and measurable? We don't have to think of it philosophically. If researchers can train some ML algorithm to predict it, then it is predictable, end of story. If not, it's open (it could still be predictable and they couldn't come with the right algorithm, or it could just be too fuzzy, or even impossible to measure). That said, if we drop it from "love" to simple "desire", then most of it should be fairly predictable and measurable with very small margin of error. Humans are not that much of unique snowflakes as they say. In a given culture, the majority of the population will converge a lot in what they find attractive and what they don't -- this has been studied before.
visarga 9y ago
Trying to predict desire might be easy, but predicting happiness in a relationship hard. It's like a weather simulation after the first 10 days - becomes too hard to compute. Besides attraction, other things might come into play in predicting relation happiness - such as dialogue style, extraversion/introversion, specific needs of one in relation to the strengths of the other and specific situations in life the couple has to deal with. Some of these things might emerge from a psychological interview, others happen dynamically and are impossible to predict. And most people are very time sensitive - the same person might be available now that was not a week ago. The availability for dating of some people measures in just months between long term relationships, so they are like 99% of the time unavailable even if they are compatible. Searching for a mate is hard because most compatible people are presently attached and you got to get them at the right time. That might be mitigated by going on a dating site, but unfortunately dating sites are full of people who are there for other reasons than serious relationships.

t8ge55geu8ygt 9y ago

Can anyone tell what the sample size is? What's the power here?