13 ms·

The stable marriage problem and modern dating

249 points by arvarik 6y ago

zwkrt 6y ago
This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1]. [1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180818_FBC543.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...
- EGreg 6y ago
  Also Jewish dating and so on.
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      No solution to what
      - klyrs 6y ago
        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.
        likelybear 6y ago
        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".
        klyrs 6y ago
        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.
        likelybear 6y ago
        Given this appears in Gale and Shapley 1962, I'd say it is part of the original formulation (though they do it by saying people are simply not allowed to apply to colleges where they'd be a hard no rather than apply and be rejected). They're looking at stable matchings for college admissions, not perfect matchings.
        klyrs 6y ago
        Fair enough :)
        jeremysalwen 6y ago
        Are you sure? What if you inventing a "phantom partner" for each person, who represents "not getting married". The preferences for that phantom partner would be 1. The person they are phantoming 2-N+1. All other phantom partners N+1-2N+1. All other people. If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I've seen numbers between 1% and 10%, but there's a lot of noise about it, is there a good source? In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.
  - zwkrt 6y ago
    Re: percentages. I just picked 5% for a talking point. It is definitely more than 1%, but it really depends on how you define 'homosexual'. Some surveys might count someone who has had a same-sex partner in the past but now does not, or people who are open to the idea but have not acted on it. Then there's trans people, who generally are attracted to the opposite gender but might get counted because they are 'not really straight' :(.
- automatoney 6y ago
  What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion of same-sex attraction is "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women" NOT "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight women tend to be attracted to men." But I'm super interested in seeing how that plays out, especially given other confounding variables of being gay. And I have no idea what the lesbian curve would look like - I suppose I would predict it looks like the pareto distribution, but I have no idea. Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says - they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first move.
  - abnercoimbre 6y ago
    Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple. > I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..
    - Enginerrrd 6y ago
      >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?
      - zwkrt 6y ago
        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 (i.e., 'dead bedroom') Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.
- mc32 6y ago
  I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”). Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate. In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.
  - automatoney 6y ago
    People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at least the divorced seniors can identify the seniors in a room.
    - mc32 6y ago
      I understand that and I will acknowledge it reduces the pool compared to larger populations but it’s not 1/20 because the hobbies and friends and places one might frequent are often but not always obviously the places with like-people.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I am dying to hear some stories from that 5% who were meeting at church. And I wonder if the declining college number has to do with people waiting longer, or the fact that more people are coming out and so the age range of the survey is broader. Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?) I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on. If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.
EGreg 6y ago
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.”
- arvarik 6y ago
  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.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > Although this is all assuming people date to get married. Tongue firmly in cheek, I bet a not insignificant number of people get married to stop dating.
  - wolfram74 6y ago
    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?
    - arvarik 6y ago
      So there's two reasons why there is a male preference advantage here: 1) I ran the algorithm assuming the men make the first move and 2) Male/female normal/pareto correlation in attractiveness Do you mean what would happen if the distributions were switched but men still make the first move? I could change up the script and run it again if that's what you mean!
      - wolfram74 6y ago
euix 6y ago
Some interesting stuff there. I think you could also frame it as a explore vs exploit problem. If we assume there is a successive series of partners you could meet but only in sequence and you choose whether to "attempt to exploit, i.e. form a relationship" or pass and continue to explore. At which point should you commit such that it maximizes the expected gain (marginalizing over your lifespan)? It's like RL game except you only get to play once. In addition, the time gap between successive prospects is unknown and may even be infinite. Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  What you describe is called the "secretary problem", among other names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
  - euix 6y ago
    Yes I just realized that, I never knew the formal name of it.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I was trying to explain this to a friend playing Animal Crossing. I did not get very far. Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need is to believe they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different. If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it). We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked theory of 'ego exhaustion'. You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense. What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge, an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other potential matches went away during that time?
fredowozhere 6y ago
> I created a Python implementation of the classic SMP solution in order to calculate some initial results... > Did I write all of this to justify why I'm single? Despite the demotion of most masculist search results in Google and YouTube, if one skips the first page of results, the answers to the Stable Marriage Problem exist within MRA, Red Pill, MGTOW, and Manoshpere online articles and videos.
anikan_vader 6y ago
>> 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 function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.
- pengaru 6y ago
  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 :)
  - jacobush 6y ago
    These phenomena make me twitch.
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    It seems like people out there are using "this phenomena" to mean "this phenomenon." I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.
    - wwarner 6y ago
      I'm smiling tho.
  - beebmam 6y ago
    On the other end of the spectrum, I like when people tell me "you're making my job exponentially more difficult, with a negative exponent" to let me know I'm doing a good job. Math nerds are the best coworkers
  - sgillen 6y ago
k__ 6y ago
"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.
- fredowozhere 6y ago
  𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐑𝐀, 𝐑𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥, 𝐌𝐆𝐓𝐎𝐖, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨𝐬
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > "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-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
  - PeterW2 6y ago
    This is to be expected because, due to biological differences, male and female mammals have different mating strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism
    - ducttapecrown 6y ago
      However, humans are markedly different from other mammals, so maybe it isn't to be expected!
      - everdrive 6y ago
        Mating strategies are not exactly uniform within the group known as mammals, either. A number of things come into play, such as the resource differential between sperm and egg, and then general sexual dimorphism.
dvt 6y ago
This is a complicated and very interesting problem; we had some fantastic related discussion here[1][2] earlier this year. I like your angle of population size being the "input" of some n^2 "matching algorithm" -- it's probably a bit too game theoretic in practice, but I think it makes sense. I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed. Fun article! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 [2] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/ https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
polote 6y ago
Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing partner is a liquid market. What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?
- albntomat0 6y ago
  My understanding is the "advantage" men have over women in this article is due to the average man finding the average women more attractive than the average woman finds the average man, at least in the data used. Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.
  - polote 6y ago
    The advantage is amplified by the distribution of preferences, but in the classic simulation the advantage was already of 13%. It is due to the fact that they are the one choosing first
    - viklove 6y ago
      Are they the ones choosing first? I think it's completely the other way around. Consider the common Tinder/OkCupid situation where a man sends out hundreds of messages to only receive a few replies, while a woman has hundreds of messages waiting in her inbox, from which she gets to select her preferred match.
      - arvarik 6y ago
        This is an interesting point. The way Tinder works is a little different than how this problem is normally modeled since both people need to swipe (propose) in order to get a match and therefore proposals are bidirectional. There is still some subtleties because people don't know who swiped right on them (unless they have gold). A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they can choose if they want to match or not. I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes versus women.
Causality1 6y ago
I think this overlooks a good many points. For example, the "being the initiator is always better" claim would be more accurately framed "having been the initiator is always better". The data completely ignores the downsides because it only looks at the potential results, not the path to get those results. Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.
YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
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/men-demographics-and-audiences-9818#:~:text=recent%20research%20from%20Wake%20Forest,what%20makes%20an%20attractive%20man.&text=While%20most%20men%20agreed%20that,to%20agree%20about%20men's%20attractiveness 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 as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  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 improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.
  - minikites 6y ago
    Unrealistic beauty standards are absolutely a problem for both men and women, the difference is that in society, men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women.
    - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
      That's fair but it's not a zero sum game. Making men happier on average doesn't necessarily make women unhappier.
    - zzzzzzzza 6y ago
      men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women very strongly disagree, maybe this is true in some subset of the dating world, or non western countries, but that's it.
poorman 6y ago
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, they settle down. This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.
- toby 6y ago
  >> (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members) Would this be an appropriate place to share that story? Because I'm intrigued
  - poorman 6y ago
    The story has been written up by lots of news outlets. Googling "brewery run by active gang members" should start to paint the picture.
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      https://trucolors.co/ https://trucolors.co/
  - pesfandiar 6y ago
    Looks like it's this one: https://trucolors.co/ https://trucolors.co/ Based on OP's description, it sounded like a company taken over by gangs, but it's really a for-profit social enterprise.
    - rburhum 6y ago
      This is the first time I have seen a hero page with gang signs. Not the best choice to be honest.
tathougies 6y ago
Easy dating app: instead of making profiles and 'matching', just organize a bunch of dances, hikes, etc in a community and charge a nominal fee for membership. This will likely lead to much better matches than some silly algorithm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- parliament32 6y ago
  This exists: https://www.eventsandadventures.com/ https://www.eventsandadventures.com/ The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".
  - dmitrygr 6y ago
    eventsandadventures are scum. please do not even give them clicks. Source (among many): https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possible-scam-c383899 https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possib... some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      If they were upfront about that, I actually think it's a good thing. One of the big conflicts of interests for dating apps is that if they're too effective it's bad for business. They have a vested interest in keeping you on the platform as long as possible, but with this sort of payment process the company isn't punished for you finding a relationship. The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight attendants who live in other cities.
konaraddi 6y ago
At 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 a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible pair between the groups of individuals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem
- viklove 6y ago
  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.
  - konaraddi 6y ago
    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.
dddddaviddddd 6y ago
Original source for the assumptions used in the model (OkCupid blog post from 2009, via the Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcup...
gerbilly 6y ago
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 much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  There are a LOT of people out there who are repeatedly attracted to people who are completely toxic to them.
- danans 6y ago
  > Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends... That's Schopenhauer demonstrating his well attested misogyny.
  - asguy 6y ago
    So what? Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry. There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
    - danans 6y ago
      > Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry. Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that you are abusing to make a false equivalency. And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person. Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves. > seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter). 18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.
tzs 6y ago
The article links to another article [1] at the same site for a description of the stable marriage problem. I don't think the description is right. Here is the description: > Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set. > A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings. > An unstable pairing happens in the following example: > A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2. Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the females. That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it is defined entirely in terms of male preferences. For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female, and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair. A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male preferences and female preferences. It should be something like this: > A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A. [1] https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
the_cat_kittles 6y ago
related: nrmp kidney match (al roth is kind of a guru on this subject) i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding the set of stable matches.
davidcollantes 6y ago
Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.
- k__ 6y ago
  Had my first girlfriend in 2004 and met her online.
- ardy42 6y ago
  >> 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 only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    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.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  The MUD I used to frequent around 2000 boasted something like 4 marriages out of 50-100 players.
BadassFractal 6y ago
COVID is throwing an interesting wrench into dating. No more bars, clubs, large social gatherings, everybody working or studying remotely, most people wearing masks in public, meeting in person carries the risk of contracting the virus. Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > What is this going to lead to? Statistically speaking, higher bandwidth costs for pornhub.com and if things were open some more crazy mass shooters?
willdearden 6y ago
There are a ton of papers on the properties of stable matching under random preferences. The classic paper (Pittel 1989 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=sjdmec https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=s...) calculates the average rank of men and women for their partners under male-proposing Gale Shapley. They find the men's average rank is O(log(n)) and the women's average rank is O(n / log(n)). Depending on how you calculate percent advantage, that roughly matches your simulations.
- likelybear 6y ago
  The difference based on which side proposes turns out to be a knife-edge result for balanced markets! For imbalanced markets, the short side gets average rank `O(log(n))` in every stable matching and the long side gets `O(n / log(n))` Edit: reference is Ashlagi et al (2015). "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition" http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL.pdf http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL...
durnygbur 6y ago
BTW What's up with Tinder granting for free global in discovery settings? I am the only lucky one? Never have I had an opportunity to swipe on so many single mothers 3000km away. I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  huh, that's neat.
- GoToRO 6y ago
  It’s an aknowlegment from Tinder that not enough people are using it in your locality. In order for you to not loose interest, they give you that.
dilippkumar 6y ago
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 potential mate. 3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages). Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they grow older and start seeking partners. How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human experiences?
- kennywinker 6y ago
  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 realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone - since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings. Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.
  - gowld 6y ago
    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.
grugagag 6y ago
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 never easy. Previous to meeting each other I dated a bit more than she did. I did the online dating and it did not work at for my personality. We ended up being introduced by a common friend. Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around this age.
- war1025 6y ago
  > 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.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    This is not something I was specifically looking for when I was dating. I wasn't very sure what I was looking for to be honest, I think I was trying find someone to get along with as well as be attracted physically. When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with the dating culture, only few want to take this step. This is important because it take your life to a different level or completely wreck it if the marriage fails and end up with kids and bills
    - war1025 6y ago
      > When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with the dating culture I can see how someone could easily get stuck in the idea of "dating" as a thing. I got married at 23, so I guess that's a stage of my life I didn't spend much time in.
atlasunshrugged 6y ago
I didn't see it mentioned but I thought I'd call out that one of the best articles I've read on the topic of dating was from the Wait But Why Blog https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html
at_a_remove 6y ago
I 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.
- war1025 6y ago
  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.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    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.
mzakharo1 6y ago
Also, women dont rate 'male attractiveness' to the same degree of importance as the other way around. So the distribution is skewed maybe for a different reason: women are asked to match men they 'rate' to pictures they see on public media, and only 20% make it.
mips_avatar 6y ago
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.
tianlong 6y ago
The reality is that men profiles on online dating apps are terrible! I have tried to check for fun both male and female profiles and there are so many women with attractive pictures while men have really poorly curated profiles.... Are women naturally more attractive than men or culturally, women are "forced" to take care of themselves and show how attractive they are while this pressure does not exist for men (men have other type of pressures, like a good salary)? I do believe is the second one. As woman, I'd love to see handsome men, online and not only.
- tianlong 6y ago
  More handsome attractive men!

249 points by arvarik 6y ago

This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1]. [1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180818_FBC543.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

EGreg 6y ago
Also Jewish dating and so on.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    No solution to what
    - klyrs 6y ago
      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.
      - likelybear 6y ago
        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".
        klyrs 6y ago
        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.
        likelybear 6y ago
        Given this appears in Gale and Shapley 1962, I'd say it is part of the original formulation (though they do it by saying people are simply not allowed to apply to colleges where they'd be a hard no rather than apply and be rejected). They're looking at stable matchings for college admissions, not perfect matchings.
        klyrs 6y ago
        Fair enough :)
      - jeremysalwen 6y ago
        Are you sure? What if you inventing a "phantom partner" for each person, who represents "not getting married". The preferences for that phantom partner would be 1. The person they are phantoming 2-N+1. All other phantom partners N+1-2N+1. All other people. If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.
luckylion 6y ago
I've seen numbers between 1% and 10%, but there's a lot of noise about it, is there a good source? In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.
- zwkrt 6y ago
  Re: percentages. I just picked 5% for a talking point. It is definitely more than 1%, but it really depends on how you define 'homosexual'. Some surveys might count someone who has had a same-sex partner in the past but now does not, or people who are open to the idea but have not acted on it. Then there's trans people, who generally are attracted to the opposite gender but might get counted because they are 'not really straight' :(.
automatoney 6y ago
What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion of same-sex attraction is "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women" NOT "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight women tend to be attracted to men." But I'm super interested in seeing how that plays out, especially given other confounding variables of being gay. And I have no idea what the lesbian curve would look like - I suppose I would predict it looks like the pareto distribution, but I have no idea. Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says - they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first move.
- abnercoimbre 6y ago
  Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple. > I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    >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?
    - zwkrt 6y ago
      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 (i.e., 'dead bedroom') Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.
mc32 6y ago
I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”). Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate. In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.
- automatoney 6y ago
  People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at least the divorced seniors can identify the seniors in a room.
  - mc32 6y ago
    I understand that and I will acknowledge it reduces the pool compared to larger populations but it’s not 1/20 because the hobbies and friends and places one might frequent are often but not always obviously the places with like-people.
hinkley 6y ago
I am dying to hear some stories from that 5% who were meeting at church. And I wonder if the declining college number has to do with people waiting longer, or the fact that more people are coming out and so the age range of the survey is broader. Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?) I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on. If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.

EGreg 6y ago

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.”

arvarik 6y ago
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.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > Although this is all assuming people date to get married. Tongue firmly in cheek, I bet a not insignificant number of people get married to stop dating.
- wolfram74 6y ago
  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?
  - arvarik 6y ago
    So there's two reasons why there is a male preference advantage here: 1) I ran the algorithm assuming the men make the first move and 2) Male/female normal/pareto correlation in attractiveness Do you mean what would happen if the distributions were switched but men still make the first move? I could change up the script and run it again if that's what you mean!
    - wolfram74 6y ago

euix 6y ago

Some interesting stuff there. I think you could also frame it as a explore vs exploit problem. If we assume there is a successive series of partners you could meet but only in sequence and you choose whether to "attempt to exploit, i.e. form a relationship" or pass and continue to explore. At which point should you commit such that it maximizes the expected gain (marginalizing over your lifespan)? It's like RL game except you only get to play once. In addition, the time gap between successive prospects is unknown and may even be infinite. Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.

albntomat0 6y ago
What you describe is called the "secretary problem", among other names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- euix 6y ago
  Yes I just realized that, I never knew the formal name of it.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I was trying to explain this to a friend playing Animal Crossing. I did not get very far. Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need is to believe they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different. If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it). We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked theory of 'ego exhaustion'. You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense. What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge, an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other potential matches went away during that time?

fredowozhere 6y ago

> I created a Python implementation of the classic SMP solution in order to calculate some initial results... > Did I write all of this to justify why I'm single? Despite the demotion of most masculist search results in Google and YouTube, if one skips the first page of results, the answers to the Stable Marriage Problem exist within MRA, Red Pill, MGTOW, and Manoshpere online articles and videos.

anikan_vader 6y ago

>> 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 function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.

pengaru 6y ago
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 :)
- jacobush 6y ago
  These phenomena make me twitch.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  It seems like people out there are using "this phenomena" to mean "this phenomenon." I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.
  - wwarner 6y ago
    I'm smiling tho.
- beebmam 6y ago
  On the other end of the spectrum, I like when people tell me "you're making my job exponentially more difficult, with a negative exponent" to let me know I'm doing a good job. Math nerds are the best coworkers
- sgillen 6y ago

k__ 6y ago

"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.

fredowozhere 6y ago
𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐑𝐀, 𝐑𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥, 𝐌𝐆𝐓𝐎𝐖, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨𝐬
toomuchtodo 6y ago
> "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-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
- PeterW2 6y ago
  This is to be expected because, due to biological differences, male and female mammals have different mating strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism
  - ducttapecrown 6y ago
    However, humans are markedly different from other mammals, so maybe it isn't to be expected!
    - everdrive 6y ago
      Mating strategies are not exactly uniform within the group known as mammals, either. A number of things come into play, such as the resource differential between sperm and egg, and then general sexual dimorphism.

dvt 6y ago

This is a complicated and very interesting problem; we had some fantastic related discussion here[1][2] earlier this year. I like your angle of population size being the "input" of some n^2 "matching algorithm" -- it's probably a bit too game theoretic in practice, but I think it makes sense. I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed. Fun article! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 [2] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/ https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/

polote 6y ago

Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing partner is a liquid market. What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?

albntomat0 6y ago
My understanding is the "advantage" men have over women in this article is due to the average man finding the average women more attractive than the average woman finds the average man, at least in the data used. Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.
- polote 6y ago
  The advantage is amplified by the distribution of preferences, but in the classic simulation the advantage was already of 13%. It is due to the fact that they are the one choosing first
  - viklove 6y ago
    Are they the ones choosing first? I think it's completely the other way around. Consider the common Tinder/OkCupid situation where a man sends out hundreds of messages to only receive a few replies, while a woman has hundreds of messages waiting in her inbox, from which she gets to select her preferred match.
    - arvarik 6y ago
      This is an interesting point. The way Tinder works is a little different than how this problem is normally modeled since both people need to swipe (propose) in order to get a match and therefore proposals are bidirectional. There is still some subtleties because people don't know who swiped right on them (unless they have gold). A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they can choose if they want to match or not. I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes versus women.

Causality1 6y ago

I think this overlooks a good many points. For example, the "being the initiator is always better" claim would be more accurately framed "having been the initiator is always better". The data completely ignores the downsides because it only looks at the potential results, not the path to get those results. Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.

YetAnotherMatt 6y ago

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/men-demographics-and-audiences-9818#:~:text=recent%20research%20from%20Wake%20Forest,what%20makes%20an%20attractive%20man.&text=While%20most%20men%20agreed%20that,to%20agree%20about%20men's%20attractiveness 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 as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.

CoolGuySteve 6y ago
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 improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.
- minikites 6y ago
  Unrealistic beauty standards are absolutely a problem for both men and women, the difference is that in society, men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women.
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    That's fair but it's not a zero sum game. Making men happier on average doesn't necessarily make women unhappier.
  - zzzzzzzza 6y ago
    men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women very strongly disagree, maybe this is true in some subset of the dating world, or non western countries, but that's it.

poorman 6y ago

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, they settle down. This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.

toby 6y ago
>> (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members) Would this be an appropriate place to share that story? Because I'm intrigued
- poorman 6y ago
  The story has been written up by lots of news outlets. Googling "brewery run by active gang members" should start to paint the picture.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    https://trucolors.co/ https://trucolors.co/
- pesfandiar 6y ago
  Looks like it's this one: https://trucolors.co/ https://trucolors.co/ Based on OP's description, it sounded like a company taken over by gangs, but it's really a for-profit social enterprise.
  - rburhum 6y ago
    This is the first time I have seen a hero page with gang signs. Not the best choice to be honest.

tathougies 6y ago

Easy dating app: instead of making profiles and 'matching', just organize a bunch of dances, hikes, etc in a community and charge a nominal fee for membership. This will likely lead to much better matches than some silly algorithm.

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parliament32 6y ago
This exists: https://www.eventsandadventures.com/ https://www.eventsandadventures.com/ The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  eventsandadventures are scum. please do not even give them clicks. Source (among many): https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possible-scam-c383899 https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possib... some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    If they were upfront about that, I actually think it's a good thing. One of the big conflicts of interests for dating apps is that if they're too effective it's bad for business. They have a vested interest in keeping you on the platform as long as possible, but with this sort of payment process the company isn't punished for you finding a relationship. The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight attendants who live in other cities.

konaraddi 6y ago

At 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 a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible pair between the groups of individuals. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem

viklove 6y ago
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.
- konaraddi 6y ago
  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.

dddddaviddddd 6y ago

Original source for the assumptions used in the model (OkCupid blog post from 2009, via the Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcup...

gerbilly 6y ago

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 much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."

RHSeeger 6y ago
There are a LOT of people out there who are repeatedly attracted to people who are completely toxic to them.
danans 6y ago
> Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends... That's Schopenhauer demonstrating his well attested misogyny.
- asguy 6y ago
  So what? Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry. There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
  - danans 6y ago
    > Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry. Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that you are abusing to make a false equivalency. And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person. Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves. > seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter). 18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.

tzs 6y ago

The article links to another article [1] at the same site for a description of the stable marriage problem. I don't think the description is right. Here is the description: > Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set. > A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings. > An unstable pairing happens in the following example: > A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2. Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the females. That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it is defined entirely in terms of male preferences. For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female, and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair. A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male preferences and female preferences. It should be something like this: > A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A. [1] https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem

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the_cat_kittles 6y ago

related: nrmp kidney match (al roth is kind of a guru on this subject) i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding the set of stable matches.

davidcollantes 6y ago

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

k__ 6y ago
Had my first girlfriend in 2004 and met her online.
ardy42 6y ago
>> 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 only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  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.
saalweachter 6y ago
The MUD I used to frequent around 2000 boasted something like 4 marriages out of 50-100 players.

BadassFractal 6y ago

COVID is throwing an interesting wrench into dating. No more bars, clubs, large social gatherings, everybody working or studying remotely, most people wearing masks in public, meeting in person carries the risk of contracting the virus. Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> What is this going to lead to? Statistically speaking, higher bandwidth costs for pornhub.com and if things were open some more crazy mass shooters?

willdearden 6y ago

There are a ton of papers on the properties of stable matching under random preferences. The classic paper (Pittel 1989 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=sjdmec https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=s...) calculates the average rank of men and women for their partners under male-proposing Gale Shapley. They find the men's average rank is O(log(n)) and the women's average rank is O(n / log(n)). Depending on how you calculate percent advantage, that roughly matches your simulations.

likelybear 6y ago
The difference based on which side proposes turns out to be a knife-edge result for balanced markets! For imbalanced markets, the short side gets average rank `O(log(n))` in every stable matching and the long side gets `O(n / log(n))` Edit: reference is Ashlagi et al (2015). "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition" http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL.pdf http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL...

durnygbur 6y ago

BTW What's up with Tinder granting for free global in discovery settings? I am the only lucky one? Never have I had an opportunity to swipe on so many single mothers 3000km away. I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
huh, that's neat.
GoToRO 6y ago
It’s an aknowlegment from Tinder that not enough people are using it in your locality. In order for you to not loose interest, they give you that.

dilippkumar 6y ago

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 potential mate. 3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages). Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they grow older and start seeking partners. How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human experiences?

kennywinker 6y ago
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 realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone - since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings. Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.
- gowld 6y ago
  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.

grugagag 6y ago

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 never easy. Previous to meeting each other I dated a bit more than she did. I did the online dating and it did not work at for my personality. We ended up being introduced by a common friend. Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around this age.

war1025 6y ago
> 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.
- grugagag 6y ago
  This is not something I was specifically looking for when I was dating. I wasn't very sure what I was looking for to be honest, I think I was trying find someone to get along with as well as be attracted physically. When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with the dating culture, only few want to take this step. This is important because it take your life to a different level or completely wreck it if the marriage fails and end up with kids and bills
  - war1025 6y ago
    > When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with the dating culture I can see how someone could easily get stuck in the idea of "dating" as a thing. I got married at 23, so I guess that's a stage of my life I didn't spend much time in.

atlasunshrugged 6y ago

I didn't see it mentioned but I thought I'd call out that one of the best articles I've read on the topic of dating was from the Wait But Why Blog https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html

at_a_remove 6y ago

I 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.

war1025 6y ago
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.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  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.

mzakharo1 6y ago

Also, women dont rate 'male attractiveness' to the same degree of importance as the other way around. So the distribution is skewed maybe for a different reason: women are asked to match men they 'rate' to pictures they see on public media, and only 20% make it.

mips_avatar 6y ago

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.

tianlong 6y ago

The reality is that men profiles on online dating apps are terrible! I have tried to check for fun both male and female profiles and there are so many women with attractive pictures while men have really poorly curated profiles.... Are women naturally more attractive than men or culturally, women are "forced" to take care of themselves and show how attractive they are while this pressure does not exist for men (men have other type of pressures, like a good salary)? I do believe is the second one. As woman, I'd love to see handsome men, online and not only.

tianlong 6y ago
More handsome attractive men!