Tinder “Feedback Loop” Forces Men and Women into Extreme Strategies
technologyreview.com
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I knew an absolute idiot who got a PhD from the Media Lab for putting a motion sensor and servo motor in a toy bear so it waved at you when a coworker wanted to talk to you and coworkers could tell when you were in your office. A fucking PhD.
The MIT underwater robotics team - backed by defense contractors giving them access to all the latest and greatest toys - has lost to high school teams making their robots out of tupperware containers and bilge pumps.
Part of the reason I declined a PhD scholarship back in my university days was that due to this kind of credential inflation, the value of a doctorate is steadily declining and there are far too few academic jobs to go around - most of the graduates I talked to were essentially forced out into industry, and if you're not specialising in something with real-world utility you've essentially wasted several years of your life while making yourself overqualified for lower-level jobs.
Sure, if we falsely regard everyone's goal as "to go on a date with a live person with a pulse, as soon as possible", then women probably have it easier. They are the ones inundated with offers.
At the end of the day, the biggest reason for this disparity is that most women find most men unattractive. That statement begs repeating - statistically, women find the _majority_ of men to be less attractive than what they believe to be the "average" man. Look no further than the oft-cited and since-deleted OkCupid post which dug into this in great detail. [1] More contemporarily, women-centric communities like /r/FemaleDatingStrategy will happily just come out and state this as fact. [2] (warning - if you're a man who struggles with self-esteem I wouldn't recommend clicking that link, you're only going to feel worse)
The real kicker here has and always been the chart which demonstrates that women rated 80% of men as being less than average attractive. Anyone with other single friends in their 20s and 30s can attest to this; it's pretty common to hear a complaint from a woman like "there wasn't a single cute guy at that bar" or "none of my coworkers are people I'd consider dating."
I don't really know what the answer is, you can't tell people what they should or shouldn't like. Telling men to just "be more attractive" doesn't really work, and telling women to "lower your standards" is equally silly.
As I've read elsewhere on HN, the future I envision is one where a good chunk of straight men are largely just removed from the dating market. We're already beginning to see that, with 28% of men in 2018 reporting no sexual activity, with that number only likely to rise. [3]
The only advice I can give to men in that position, especially ones who don't hit the marks which serve well in OLD (tall, white, and fit) is not to beat yourselves up. Your personality probably isn't the problem, you don't "hate women", and you certainly don't just need to "shower and touch grass"; you're playing a game in which the odds are stacked against you. There are certain immutable traits which our society finds incredibly important in hetero attractiveness, and if you're lacking those traits, it's absolutely no fault of your own.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/iu5nu...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
I feel the solution here is the same it’s always been. Dating apps benefit some subset of the population. If you’re not in that subset you should probably find another strategy that is more in your favor. It’s funny you say guys can’t become more attractive because, compared to women, we’ve been pitched a softball: it’s a lot easier to become more confident than to improve your appearance, as a woman might need to do!
I feel I may be moralizing a little here, but in the end, every guy ends up with exactly one girl, and actually studies show that most people are happy in their marriage, so even is it were strictly true that girls find most guys unattractive, it doesn’t seem to matter in the long run.
You're totally right about confidence. I should have been more specific - there are lots and lots of ways for men to improve their _overall_ attractiveness, working on confidence being one of the best. Unfortunately, confidence, humor, sociability, and charm are really hard to translate in dating apps, whereas face shape, stature, and other immutables are front and center. I'm sure we can agree that for the folks frustrated with their luck in OLD, their best bet is to find IRL avenues to meet partners.
I think a lot of men make the mistake of assuming that they're either attractive to women or not, when in fact you can make yourself more attractive with some effort. "Be yourself" is not an excuse to do nothing---be your best self, you'll do all right.
We’re at 39% meeting online up from 2% in 1995. We’re also at 27% meeting through bars/restaurants, similarly superficial. Online is increasingly where the women are.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/20822/way-of-meeting-part...
Half of singles aren’t seeking a relationship and singles have gone up over time, especially among men (Half 18-29 are single) https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...
People have this deep discomfort with the fact that more men are single now. About a quarter of the male population has just given up or just does not care. I’m well into the “don’t care” camp and I’m on meds that reduce libido and a bit of chemical castration is a blessing for me.
I don’t believe people care about dating as much or CAN date as much due to economic concerns. I believe that highly desirable men are now more marketable to women through dating apps, who are now serving the women who only ever wanted a fuckboy and then to get on with their lives. Men have less opportunity to market themselves to this smaller fraction of women in ways that don’t involve looks and men have become more superficially obsessed and this is a totally rational reaction.
Just offering some generic tip like “be confident” is just out of touch. Men know women like confident men, they aren’t stupid.
Confidence in the case of (traditional) women is a strange one. Women are almost universally insecure. Anyone that looks at beauty magazines can see the underlying direct psychological manipulation they represent.
Men value women more on absolutes (appearance) than women do, which is why arbitrary measures such as social graph relations like like "that guy has a lot of women that talk about him, so I find him attractive", they use dress and other indirect indicators to guess social status and wealth more than even if you outright tell them positions or wealth numbers.
What a woman means by a "confident" man is that dating the man makes THEM feel less insecure and more confident. It represents another indirect emotional measure of a man's status and wealth, likely because the group dynamics we evolved in resulted in insecure men actually not being able to provide/defend/protect mates and offspring.
Of course those indicators vary substantially by culture and individual. Of course those individuals don't understand that their personal choices aren't universal (much like men with a distinct type often are mystifying by men being attracted to appearance features they abhor).
Men are often perplexed by the confidence vs arrogance angle. I believe this is another fine-tuned evolutionary sense, where arrogance implies lack of faithfulness/devotion to offspring in the long run, and implies that, while they may be able to dominate socially, it is an unstable one. It may also be intuition that they are faking true confidence aka the ability to dominate resources.
In the land of the blind...
I have been on internet dates for almost 25 years now and I could even tell how interest in me would go down when I gained weight and then interest would come back massively after a diet.
Age though has caught up with me that I don't bother with apps much anymore. Just talking to people randomly in person is just so much better. It has really never been easier to show confidence. Just talking does the job now.
There are at least concrete steps you can take to become more physically attractive, like:
- lift weights and run regularly
- cut out the carbs
- drink less
- buy more fashionable clothes
- take care of your skin and hair
But, if a guys spends time getting to know her, the blobs disappeared and he was able to clearly see how attractive she looked.
This is basically how attraction works for many women. Factors other than physical appearance tend to be relatively more important for women than men. So the “total package” of attractiveness is not entirely visible at first. It takes time to get a clear picture. This means that at first, using only physical appearance, yes most guys will look unattractive. There are a lot of metaphorical gray blobs.
Don’t take the wrong lesson from the stats. The lesson is not “most guys don’t have a chance with women.” The lesson is, “seek matches in situations that involve more than physical appearance.” Situations where people can talk and get to know each other.
And if you only have dating apps, and you are photogenic you arent going to get a chance to let your personality shine.
It was stuff like "red flags your date is a rapist: * if he doesn't look you in the eyes when he greets you, * if he does (not) mention his mother". It was stuff from a bizarro parallel dimension.
However recently it has become more moderate which I attribute to luring in real people participating in good faith, that are being influenced in a negative way.
It’s like the women’s equivalent of the incel movement, where each gender finds a way to dehumanize the other (in the case of incels, viewing women as sexual objects).
Then I found the incel community and saw how it is literally like some kind of corrosive parasite destroying the world like in a horror movie, and decided I want to be nothing like that.
Incels claim to be warlike and negative. But all their destruction is built on a fairly passive armchair mental pursuit: blackpill theory.
I never was one for a theory and philosophy guided life. The blackpill is false and outlawed, and there's tons of more important things than hooking up.
That is what I choose to print on my mental propaganda posters to myself. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. That's the beauty of propaganda.
True or false, the message is just as inspiring. This isn't a science project to understand the blackpill. It's a bombing raid to make it untrue.
That's what incels are missing. They care what is real and honest and natural, and reasonable.
They're only willing to fight if they think they can win, not just because that's their personality to keep shooting till your last breath.
If the blackpill is true and natural, better to live a lie than die at the end of a rope with a browser history full of eugenics forums.
These people are pushing the agenda that you should think of your female friends as worthless because you can't fuck them. They discuss "rotting" as their main activity. They are pro rape. They call women toilets.
I don't care what psychology and human nature is. If non-incels are all just brainwashed to reject the blackpill, I will help spread that brainwashing. Incel theory is too foul even to consider.
They cannot win. Or all of our art and music and science is all for nothing when there's nobody left to appreciate. It's literally the zombie virus for the mind.
If we ignore the animal and propagandise it away, we will be left wondering why certain groups behave the way they do and dehumanize them in the process. As much as it may disgust you, incels and every other group that horrifies with its ideas is still an expression of at least a fraction of our humanity.
It's easier to treat the blackpill as neither false nor true, but simply off limits, the same as we treat the closely related eugenics.
A purely academic thing that we dismiss with prejudice for practical use, regardless of how well it works.
Attractiveness is obviously a real thing, and in some cases it makes a really big difference. Particularly if you aren't really interested in anything serious.
I can't change that fact. So I don't think about it. I decide that it is not important, and that it doesn't matter than I'm bald.
Repression might not actually work, or be healthy, but it works way better than wasting time on tinder, sitting and crying, complaining about it, etc.
Of course the other kind of incel has nothing to do with attractiveness and more to do with the fact that they want a woman to basically be property, and how everyone wants nothing to do with that.
I have no first-hand understanding of why guys want that, and no solution or advice aside from just generally convincing everyone to avoid the forums that encourage that mindset to begin with.
Maybe for the ones already in it, it's better if they actually spent some time considering why they want an actual slave and literally say as much.
If lying to ourselves is how we avoid being suicidal, so be it.
The only possible use I can see for the blackpill is to know that you should give up on casual sex, unless you're into BDSM or something(For some reason all my friends that do that seem to not care about looks as much).
Other that that, a lot of things aren't useful. It's a lot easier to declare sex isn't important and that someday I'll be as happy with my career as I was with the girl I lost it to, 13 years ago.
It might not be useful or believable that looks and genetics don't matter on tinder. But we can tell ourselves they don't matter for life in general, and work to make this so by whatever means we have available to us.
No, the real kicker is that these women (who rate 80% of men unattractive) have been screaming about "double standards in beauty" for decades.
In practice there's plenty of evidence Men even now put a higher premium on beauty (preference for youth, indifference to things like income/education) even if their rating scale is less deflated. The way I see it is that women think men are fuck ugly but date them anyways.
Men are also expected to accept that they're a gonk for being 5'9" instead of 6'2". Anything else is entitlement to sex from women.
Or, gender itself is polarized beyond all reason. Men's idea of masculinity is not what women actually want -- men jockey for status among other men, and that isn't actually a recipe for success with women.
Those are biological ratios observed across species.
High value males can deliver sperm to multiple (as in hundreds/thousands) females. That is the economics of mammalian sperm and eggs, the scale of production is different by four to six orders of magnitude.
I didn't know that, interesting. That is a real difference between men and women. Since I assume that is caused by biology, I think it means that procreation is more important for women, and therefore their criteria for a great mate differs from the the criteria men have.