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Comment by arvarik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

Hey there, sorry to comment hijack - I really enjoyed this article. Was not aware of the Stable Marriage Problem and the associated algorithm and real life applications with medical students/roommates. Appreciated the humor and memes as well :) I noticed thought you don't list any email or anything if I had further questions - is there a good way to get in touch? Thank you

Thanks! :) You can connect with me on LinkedIn which is linked at the top of the site!

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?

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!

calling it male/female at this point is kind of arbitrary, when it's the asymmetry in the distributions that I thinks interesting, but yeah, what happens if the pareto-preference population was the first mover rather than the normal-preference population that acted first. It's well documented that the first mover in the stable mariage problem has an advantage, It's why they switched from residency programs to being first movers to med students being first movers about a decade ago for The Match. This is the first I've seen it done with different preference distributions in the population. I'm curious how strong of effect the advantage is for different distributions.

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