A Rationalist Guide to OkCupid

"Why are people seduced by the pernicious meme that finding love requires no deliberate effort?"

Possibly because relaxing about their dating prospects makes them more attractive. For people whose effort looks like desperation, they may have better results if they stop trying so hard.

EDIT: I think I just did the thing that has been annoying people. I searched for the contrarian statement I could make, rather than any other type of commentary or response. I'm sorry.

I'd love to see the results of a large survey on how successfuly married people found their partner. Is the "love finds you" meme based in anything real? The most common anecdote that I've heard is of the form "I really wanted this person and I pursued them persistently until they settled for me".

I decided to learn from and apply okcupid and related insights and had some minor success but there are confounders and it is still not on first position in my priorities list (which obviously is a serious impediment).

Does anyone know who curates the "Latest on rationality blogs" toolbar? What are the requirements to be included?

I suggest adding "customizable blogroll" to a suitable comment on the recent http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n9b/upcoming_lw_changes/

I've enjoyed the article, and I look forward for the parts, though it required me three/fourth re-reads to dig out the actual tips, they are scattered and sort-of buried amidst jokes and story.

I'm not in the market for a date, but your post was interesting enough to get me to subscribe to your RSS feed, so kudos to you!

Two Questions:

• I. One of the options on OKCupid is to message a person whose inbox is already full by paying $1. Have you used this option and what were the overall results?

On one hand I have a knee-jerk reaction to paying extra money to message someone specific who may not message me back. Also, any person who has their inbox full has had a lot of attention and already hasn't found someone. There are easily a handful of explanations for why that may not have happened (guys message too often, she's very approachable, she had a long conversation with one or two people who didn't work out, she's very picky, she has had the profile a long time and left the site but doesn't update her relationship status on there, or some other option)

On the other hand, any person who has their inbox full is unlikely to be recieving a lot of messages in the recent past. That distinguishes the person who pays the extra $1 to message them since the person being messaged will be in a situation that resembles being in low demand (recieving messages rarely). This places you in a smaller pool of competition than normal.

• II. What are your thoughts on the usefulness of paying for the site's subscription service?

I can see the draw of joining a dating service that requires you to pay for access to it since a paywall instantly filters for a lot of things (though OKCupid seems like it might be good enough for the task). However, I'm on the fence about the benefits of the A-List subscription service for OKCupid. Have you tried it out at all?

I certainly don't write well enough to be considered "porn" :)

It's true that my blog doesn't have a terminal value outside itself, although I will occasionally write about Effective Altruism topics.My goal is to have a popular blog with a lively discussion, my blog will be popular if people enjoy my writing. That's the goal in itself, I am not planning to turn it into a source of income or anything like that.

Different people enjoy vastly different things: I am getting overwhelmingly positive response on LessWrong, and overwhelmingly negative response on Reddit. That's a good thing: like a dating profile my goal is to find my specific audience and not write universal clickbait, and LW is definitely the audience I aspire to have.

To apply to a LW audience, I'm trying to:

• Come up with genuine insights based on analysis rather than repeat common wisdom that's based on sounding plausible.

• Be always willing to learn and be corrected, including offering a reward for people finding major errors in my posts. One person has deserved it so far for pointing out a serious factual mistake that I fell for because of confirmation bias.

• Show my math. If you don't want to see me calculate the influence of outliers on a regression slope, the blog isn't for you ;) If I can't do the math myself, I won't take someone else's word for it.

• Puns.

The above list is very different from what would apply to 90% of my Facebook friends, for example, and I'm OK with it. If I wanted 100,000 shares, I would write "27 ways how Bernie is actually a lot like Batman and Trump is like Lex Luthor".

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read

Pliny the Elder (via Civilization IV)

"There are 729,500 single women my age in New York City. My picture and profile successfully filtered out 729,499 of them and left me with the one I was looking for."

I know this is sort of meant as a joke, but I feel like one of the more interesting questions that could be addressed in an analysis like this is what percentage of the women in the dating pool could you actually have had a successful relationship with. How strong is your filter and how strong does it need to be? There's a tension between trying to find/obtain the best of many possible good options, and trying to find the one of a handful of good options in a haystack of bad ones.

I'm somewhat amazed that you looked at 300 profiles, read 60 of them, and liked 20 of them enough to send them messages. Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote, and that's not even taking into account the difference in difficulty between reading a profile and composing a message.

You make a big deal about the number of people available online, but in your previous article on soccer players you implied that the average had a much larger effect on the tails than the average did. If you're really looking for mates in the tails of the distribution, and 1 in 729,500 is about 4.5 sigma event, then being involved in organizations whose members are much more like your ideal mate on average may be a better strategy than online dating.

If y'all missed it, part 1.5 is up!

I started making use of the suggestions to make things slightly silly on my profile and to message people about the stranger things that we had in common (especially odd movies and non-mainstream authors). I sent out around 20 messages on Monday and got back 5 responses. One of those is going to be a date next Tuesday.

For the time being, I primarily attribute this to slightly increased desperation around Valentine's Day and fixing flaws in my profile that were likely too bland before. However, it's a substantial improvement over how I was doing when I attempted actions on OKCupid several months back and had a less friendly profile and overly serious picture. My rate back then was about 1 in 10.

If you are in a relationship lasting greater than 2 years that you consider successful, how did you meet your SO? [pollid:1100]

Effective Altruists guide to choosing between sperm donation, adoption, intercountry adoption and having kids, please!

"Find something in the profile to comment on" sounds like it's trival to say, but I'm not sure how to write good messages that way. Could you go into more detail (examples would also be good)?

Lots of good information. The part I liked the most though were the ideas related to the Stable Marriage Problem. OKCupid looks like it could provide a much better environment for finding the best match for yourself rather than just finding a decent or acceptable match. This is an area I haven't seen properly breached often enough.

Additionally, were there any specific resources you used to get better information on the basics of OKCupid culture and presentation when you started?

If you are in a relationship lasting greater than 2 years that you consider successful, how did you meet your SO? [pollid:1099]

What would you say about facebook? I have an inactive account I always wanted to rejuvenate but didn't know how to. To me it's mainly a list of (freaky at your pleasure) "girls I always wanted but never got to know in HS" and being the stereotypical unpopular guy that's quite a bit of girls. (Strangely enough, I thought none of them except maybe the ones in the same grade would remember me. Last week I've approached a girl I didn't remember and she said she remembered me, and the only time we saw each other is when passing by on school breaks)