Hinge and Its Implementation of the Gale–Shapley algorithm
blogs.cornell.edu
blogs.cornell.edu
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
> Your likes also play into it. The more you like certain types of people, the more Hinge learns about your preferences, as founder Justin McLeod told British Vogue: “It gets better and more accurate the more that you reveal your tastes.” It’s kind of like if you look at the past ten people you’ve dated or fancied, you’ll eventually start to see a pattern emerging, so you’ll have more success (in theory) if you start to seek these types of people out. I.e what’s the point in me going for short blondes when I know I’m only really attracted to tall brunettes? The answer is there is no point, and Hinge knows that.
And why wouldn't they be? It seems like an incredibly easy target for aligning visual preferences without having to ask.
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
How?
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
Both cases would be gender-skewed. But to have the bar scenario be as skewed as the app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar. This is not the case in reality.
There are physical limits that prevent skews from being as extreme as in apps.
For most men if they are single and a reasonable attractive woman they have never met before walk up to them on the street and ask if she can sleep with them the man would think of course what is the catch, in the opposite case it would be what a creep.
It’s possible this is all cultural/social factors. But they are real.
If bar scenario had same gender skew as app, one man would go home with all the women in the bar that night.
There are physical limits that prevent this from happening. When a man is paired up with a woman in the bar, the man must ditch potential opportunities from other women in the bar.
The men would be more successful, too if they would care less about the sex or gender of their sex partner. I heard gay bars have a very high rate of success.
Many bars are in fact men clubs where men go to discuss stuff with each other. AT least, here, in Europe.
Also, in my country, I am not aware of "dating bars". Sure there are many bars full of both sexes, sometimes people begin relations or have sex with persons they've met at the bar, but that is not very common because people don't go to a bar with the expectation to have sex or begin a relation, instead they go to a bar to have some time with their friends.
Dancing clubs are a bit different, for people between 18 and 30 as some people go there with the expectation to find sex or a relation.
I am not sure how things are in US.
True and that's an evolutionary trait. Women evolved to find someone help them bring healthy offspring with good genes and help them care for their offspring while men evolved to spread their DNA as much as they can.
The goal is the same in the end, to have successfully spread their DNA, the strategies are different because the biology is different for each of the two sexes.
If you want to argue otherwise, consider the situational awareness of telling your wing(person) where you're going if not heard from in 24h and why people do this.
(Note that even that doesn't work... I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".)
Also - doesn't that seem shallow?
and yes, it’s incredibly shallow - it’s online dating after all :)
For what it’s worth I filtered on neither of those dimensions - I get few enough matches as-is.
I will say that I got far far more dates from Hinge than every other service combined, primarily (I think) because I could actually flex my “soft skills” by replying to prompts and photos with a bit of wit. My looks alone aren’t going to make me stand out in the deluge of dudes.
Additionally, Hinge is/was much better at dynamically showing me women that were actually likely to be compatible with me.
Everybody has aesthetic preferences, including yourself.
When you have to sift through hundreds of profiles, those are a legit and simple way to narrow it down to something manageable.
One of the big problems with filters is that most filterable things are optional, so a lot of people won't have anything specified for one category or another. Exceptions are height and age, which people must specify for themselves, and so some people lie about those. People can lie about or omit even more important details, like the fact that they are married. Pictures can be very inaccurate as well. And there are scammers. You have to be quite skeptical and cautious on these apps whether you are man or woman.
Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the parter they actually want?
Preferences are unfair - the same will be felt by many transgender people (you might swipe away), disabled people and what have you. Heck, it certainly holds for some of my attributes...
And yet, you simply can't make someone desire you. There are infinitely many ways to draw a short straw in life, this being one of them.
A) if you filter out someone based on race you are potentially throwing lots of opportunities away. I find it hard to believe people who have race preferences aren't attracted to a single member of their non-preferred race.
And B) People will interpret this as racial bias on the part of the app regardless.
Throwing away opportunities is the point.
Ditto gender
There tends to be a bit of a gap between what people 'want' and what they can actually 'get' and I think this is where a lot of online dating falls down as the illusion of endless choice means people keep looking for perfection when in reality that person doesn't exist or if they do, they aren't going to be interested in the other person.
Most people throughout history pretty much had to look in their fairly narrow social circle or village/town etc and pick whoever they could get who would also like them. Most people knew more or less where they stood amongst everyone else and had a general idea of whether you stood a chance or not and didn't bother if you knew you had no chance.
These days you are basically competing with essentially the entire world and it's hard to know who your competition is or where you stand, does this person I swiped right on already have 5000 other matches in their inbox and how do I compare? Even if I'm the best option they will ever have, do they know that or will they keep in swiping in the hope that someone absolutely perfect might come along?
Most dating apps are now optimising entirely for the superficial things like looks, which is one of the least useful metrics of a long term successful relationship and almost everyone now manipulates their photos and is deceptive or outright lies about negative factors (usually height for men and age for women) to the point everyone is basically a catfish now and all you're swiping on is more or less how someone wants to portray themselves, which means you are going to mostly match with those who are best at deception and lies which is probably not ideal in most relationships.
It's easy to optimize for physical features. Other traits would be harder to asses for algorithms.
The word has taken a negative connotation in recent usage, but every association, intimate or otherwise is discrimination. Applying the term "personal preference" is a euphemism. That one prefers one set of traits over another necessitates that one discriminates between the substance and value of those traits.
We are attracted to what we're attracted to - no justification needed.
But is it politically correct to say certain characteristics are more pronounced in a particular ethnicity? Wouldn't you be branded as a nazi?
That's how we identify race to begin with.
I don't see why you shouldn't be able to filter by everything. In real life you do filter, so why not do it online, too?
>I'm not interested in dating trans women or gay men but I see their profiles all the time, because they set their profiles as "women seeking men".
That's nasty.
Says who? you can most definitely filter by race on a lot of apps.
More broadly, though, if you politely request people of certain racial groups not contact you on Tinder/Hinge/Bumble, you will rapidly be reported and then banned by the administrators of the app.
(Last time I tried it, every woman on Tinder in SV was a young extremely poor French au pair.)
That being said things are probably better with the age of the users.
Right, but almost every female-initiated conversation I ever had on Bumble was "hi" or an emoji, and then a wait for the man to drive the conversation. It's a marketing gimmick rather than something that in any way changes the dynamic compared to Tinder, where I also found that I (the man) had to initiate the conversation.
The best thing about Bumble when I last used it was it was a small-enough pool that you could browse everyone, so when you opened it up and started swiping you were interacting with people who'd newly joined (or newly re-opened their account), and were a little less jaded / over the whole thing.
Also women do already do this in a sense on tinder - "Don't swipe if you're under six foot, here are my red flags, guys with hayfever aren't real men" blah blah.
I also think the whole idea of a romantic checklist is very narrow minded. Inferring people's beliefs from their actions would be interesting but just letting people basically only pick and extremely specific type of person seems like a route to nothing good socially.
One of the ways was that OkCupid let anyone add their own multi-choice (plus optional freeform) questions, to the database from which people would answer. You could rate what each answer meant to you, and you could (IIRC) make answering a particular question mandatory before messaging you. Good for litmus tests.
I wonder though if there is room for a. It’s transparent not for profit dating app? It feels like the incentives currently are misaligned with either individuals or societal benefit. All the apps seem to be optimism for engagement and stickyness rather than well considered matches and good conversation. Even the fact that the chat functions in these apps are so bad belies this… it doesn’t really reward them for you to meet and stop using the app!
Let me guess, saying that brexit is good is bad.
Sure, smoking/non-smoking; perhaps dietary preferences; education; location. But I, a veggie, used to cook for a carnivorous family, for example. If I were preparing an application form consisting only of dealbreakers, I doubt it would have more than a couple of questions.
No need for a form. Women subconsciously select a partner for the ability to produce healthy and successful offspring and taking care of them and her.
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
But it is not practical - both men and women should rank their preferences and then an optimal matching can be found. In online dating, I would not expect people to have complete and transitive preferences.
That’s a naive idea that makes it worse for everybody, including yourself.
If you’re genuinely looking for attention from anyone that’ll give it to you, you probably want to do some self-reflection.
More likely, I hope, you actually do know something about yourself and your tastes and can recognize that you’ll only be a good fit with a tiny fraction of the people on there.
If you’re not seeing that tiny fraction on the app or not matching with them, you either need to be patient, figure out ways to improve your profile, or figure out a different way to meet people.
Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
And it’s just makes an already crappy environment even worse.
I don't know if this applies exactly to apps like Tinder and Bumble who use a hidden elo system, but it seems like sending as many messages as possible is (intuitively) a winning strategy. More messages = more opportunities.
EDIT: Sorry this is like the fifth time I've edited this. I think the conclusion from the OkCupid data is that writing thoughtful openers quickly hits diminishing returns. Thoughtful discussion won't ever be a bad thing, though.
The only person who cares how many responses you get from random people is a data scientist.
Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with. You want to optimize for suitability, which has nothing to do with that metric.
(And besides, all of the apps now penalize indiscriminate swiping and other spammy behaviors that are cheap to track)
Is using Tinder a waste of time? Yes, unless your value to the opposite sex can be encapsulated in one photograph (i.e. you spend a lot of time in the gym). There are easier ways to get laid.
> Presumably, you’re there to connect with people you’d have a good time with
It’s a casual sex app. Real dating apps have profiles.
Which are those? Unless you count paying for sex.
What is presented in articles and books is probably a little more complicated than the conclusions that the readers is given.
I do think commercial dating apps need competition from something which isn’t having to optimise for revenue
Not true. The larger you can make the pool the more fish swim in it. And mor sharks. But you get to pick the fish.
>Spamming indiscriminately may get you the a few extra internet points, but it doesn’t get you any good matches that you wouldn’t have gotten from being a genuine human person on there.
You don't really get to know a person from it's profile. Until you get to chat and meet in person there is still a % that you might like that person. Optimizing for outcomes brings the success here.
And they all penalize indiscriminate swiping by giving spammers lower priority.
Sometimes I swear that the advice that men should swipe on everybody is put out there by successful users to trick others into getting hidden and deranked.
Everyone I know (and I met my partner through that) has felt like it's a nicer system.
Make sure the listings are accurate (quality, recent photos). Then repeat daily for each gender interest, location, etc.
I've often wondered if there isn't some clever marketified/gamified version of this, where users can put on their profile "To contact me, you have to wait N days", where N is some variable they can control, and if the viewer clicks "Wait", they are prevented from browsing or messaging (or "Waiting" for) other people through the app for that period of time.
Of course people could still use other apps, which is probably the major flaw, but it would make people more selective about who they expressed an interest in, and in turn make the recipients feel more valued. Some people might set the parameter a little higher than their desirability really warrants, but I'd be intrigued to see how the meta-game around this develops.
Another idea is having a moderator of sorts. The moderator would pick from the "applicants" that make it through to the prospect, and mean that only high-effort options are seen. Removes "hey" and abusive messages from the pool.
Maybe applicants pay a $5 fee which is refunded if they are not picked as one of a handful of dates.
Over time, certain match-makers with a track record for finding good matches would be highly valued, and they could be given a free premium membership (giftable to friends) to reward them. I suppose the downside is that people who do a bad job at screening messages would end up having to pay more as a consequence, and the community might end up relying on a minority of users to do all this extra work.
Why not let the community vote who has sex with who?
If you put it like that, it sounds like a great idea!
> Why not let the community vote who has sex with who?
Isn't that how most societies have effectively been run for thousands of years? I'm not saying it's the best we can do, but it in terms of societal outcomes it can't be much worse than the current dating scene.
I haven't experienced online dating and I'm sure it's grim, but I also know people who've perhaps had unrealistic expectations and stayed largely single into their forties.
I've said before, but I think the dating apps are mostly grim for people around 20-25. Anyone after that is more realistic about their prospects and what's worth looking for in a partner.
I do agree the 20+ crowd seems to have the worst of it, but it really doesn't improve all that much. I think the best strategy is to find someone as early in adult life as possible.
That wouldn't be possible unless both the individuals and the community is settling for less. And that is true for anything. In socialist or leftist countries, people are levelled off, most having and average outcome and no individual doing really great or really bad. In other countries, some have really great outcomes and others have really bad outcomes.
Bars do work way better due to 'beer goggles' (or cocktails/vodka). Usually there are other activities available, e.g. dancing/snacks
Bars are great if you want to meet bargoing people. Personally, it seems more like selecting for an alcoholic, although that might say more about me than the people I meet at bars?
I am not sure I would recommend going to bars to find a partner.
That's really stretching it, having any disdain for any alcohol consumption. Having a drink in a bar to decompress after work is hardly being an alcoholic.
I am talking about my opinion, in my country, at my age, at the bars I go to, for my definition of alcoholic.
Men (and women?) in IRL situations must overcome the barrier of: "is this person single or is their bf at home or in the bathroom"? Whereas dating apps provide an explicit context as to why both people are there.
Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms
The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply
Edit: like don’t get me wrong, if we’re going to use such cold analogies the companies definitely care about their supply, they need to be able to sell it
Women on the other hand are often given perks for free to get them to continue to use the app, making them a cost center the app must finance to maintain.
Plus a lot of those matches end up being low-quality even despite trying to be picky, because the apps are so surface level. Plenty of men manage to get great pics and quotes but turn out to be complete douches.
Are you suggesting that females like being alone? In my experience that is not true.
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
I've heard that is true in real life, too. Women have it easier and are more picky.
I'm convinced a lot of people use those apps simply as a convenient source of ego boost.
The book Dataclysm and the OkCupid blog have a lot of analysis about things like this. Both are about a decade old now and were written by one of the guys who founded OkCupid, so it focuses on dating sites instead of apps, but I would assume the trends are the same (or even amplified).
It's been a while since I've read either, so I don't remember exact data, but it's true that women get way more men reaching out to them than the reverse.
Here's a random OkCupid blog post that focuses on it a little bit: https://theblog.okcupid.com/a-womans-advantage-82d5074dde2d. I think the book has more detailed data though.
Yeah it is total garbage. Even when you put in all the work to get matches and arrange dates (which takes a ton of work), it's still basically a blind date, so when you actually meet there's still only a small chance that you will actually match.
And you always get worse matches, as a man, through the apps compared to real life. You will pay a price for that convenience of swiping.
There's an increased risk for women when they let men bypass that filter of being sociable and brave enough to befriend people in real life social situations.
If a woman can already go to a bar and easily pick out a guy, and easily judge the men, why would they use a dating app? It only makes sense if they somehow would get better matches there, so the men will have to lower their standards as a result of that convenience.
I just see online dating, and classified ads in the paper before that, as a way for people who don't fit the social norm to meet. And that's fine. But I don't see any reason for everyone to start doing that, and people who are normally sociable will just have a worse experience.
The chance is small only if you are very picky or don't know how to optimize for the outcomes.
Dating can be seen as anything else in life: a game or a competition. Some people are naturally better, some people can learn to really do it good.
Because, in my experience, I can convert half of those matches in dates. And some of the dates I can convert in other things like relations or sex.
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
Imagine a guy with a very interesting profile, who swipes right all the time. People match with him cuz he has the nice profile. Turns out that he sticks around on the platform for a long time.
Suddenly this one person is responsible for loads of matches. So if you have these long-term users, they can generate disproportionate amount of matches with themselves, biasing the pool.
This could be even more accentuated by Tinder-style algos. Somebody's popular? Of course their profile will show up more often!
If you combine this with people on the other side matching pretty conservatively... then suddenly you can have a handful of men receiving the large majority of the focus.
Paraphrasing some tweet, at least at parties the most popular guy can only talk to so many people at once!
This is where the majority of Tinder's money is coming from, so I doubt this will be ever be curbed.
Say there are 10 women and 30 men on the service, and each woman matches with 3 men. 30 matches total. Assuming equal distribution, the men have 1 match each.
You can also then have a more extreme distribution. 3 of those men could have 10 matches and the other 27 have zero. Median man has zero matches, 80th percentile ("top 20%") has zero matches.
(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.
I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like
Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.
Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.
<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679
Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)
Most of my matches have indicated they like to get more familiar before going out with a stranger. But then again, I live in India, so that probably has a lot to do with my experience.
I think it's obvious that people have preferences, and will seek partners that match those preferences better. But even if that's true, people have different preferences. People don't adhere to some universal rating system.
Why?
What do you think throughout history the men that could not find a match did? They joined wars, became vagabonds, thieves, joined piracy or similar and went to forcefully acquire wealth and/or women (and rape). Needless to say a peaceful nation does not want that. Men are going to fight the rejection tooth and nail (a trait evolved in a similar fashion).
Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.
In addition, the limited number forces both sexes to be selective, rather than just the women.
It is an open secret that dating apps have more men than women.
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
Care to explain? I'd imagine that something along the lines of unionization wouldn't hurt the salaries of tech workers.
> Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space
I find it interesting to refer to labor exchange value as a "privilege", as if it were something arbitrarily bestowed from some higher authority. Wage is the result of adversarial relationships between demand and supply and not one of some arbitrary authority doling out favors left and right with strings attached
Except there are:
- systematic biases in access to the skills needed for this contest - systematic asymmetries of information/social capital/access which skew access to high earning professions - outright discrimination against minority groups and women in payment
All of which means current remuneration is in part (not wholly) a reflection of privilege.
How do you know that demographic differences are significantly linked to wage differences and there aren't other factors at play? For example, a mother may want to spend time with her children and work part time instead of full time. Would you consider this discrimination? Do you think the mother should be paid a full time salary for working only part time? If the husband of the mother works full time and earns more because of it, would you consider this difference in compensation to be a product of privilege? I'd love to hear your thoughts
Funny also how nobody is looking at the expense gap, if women are making the same money as men, then obviously they should share expenses 50/50 as well. How many couples actually do that?
Women are underrepresented in the top level of society, but always turn a blind eye to the fact that they are underrepresented in the bottom of society as well.
Women should get the same share of rewards as men, but not take any of the risks? How does that make any sense?
If women are taking place in the boardrooms, are they also going to increase their share in prisons? Among homeless? Premature death?
And self actualisation is having children anyway, so women are already at endgame. The reason why men work so hard with careers, is because it enables them to have children and start a family, not because it's just fun to play around with money and power.
And the answer to this? Trying to shame men into liking something else instead of being honest and admitting women are sabotaging themselves listening to the "work is life" mantra.
Yeah it's as if it's been decided suddenly that men are attracted to highly educated high earning women, which really doesn't work. Men are attracted to the prospect of having children, which means youth and health, and there are very real practical matters that have limits to their flexibility.
No there isn’t.
Purported wage gaps for women have never been on a peer basis and always about aggregate earnings — which fail to reflect the realities (such as the fact men die 10x as often in the workplace).
You’re spreading myths.
Or maybe there's the idea that some groups of people are more willing to do certain jobs than other groups of people and money isn't the only factor? Take investment banking for example: it's incredibly stressful and also predominantly male. Is it possible that more men than women choose to do investment banking because they value the money more than having low stress? Money isn't the only factor in evaluating inequality.
Your line of reasoning assumes that there are no other factors at play and each person is just a bag of demographic categories and nothing more. Also (more importantly) it assumes that everyone prioritizes money to the same degree, but we both know that this is wrong and certain demographics are more money-obsessed than others. But hey, maybe we can fix things by guilt tripping everyone to worship the dollar in equal quantities, maybe that will fix our ails as a society?
When I say privilege, it is less about the value of the work itself, and more about the overall stability (and of course wealth) that CS jobs have guaranteed over the past 20 years. As you mentioned it, adversarial is a good term here. A lot of HN people have not experienced how adversarial and imbalanced the labour market really is (think people stuck in the poverty trap working retail jobs in the US for instance).
So you have a lot of people here that seem to apply the labour market logic they're accustomed to, to a social relationship setup they ultimately see as a market -- which is a bad thing in my opinion.
Hoping this clarifies my point.
I don't know why it would, but you did also say it was just an idea. I have a hard time believing that an SWE union wouldn't be able to improve compensation and wlb
> So you have a lot of people here that seem to apply the labour market logic they're accustomed to, to a social relationship setup they ultimately see as a market -- which is a bad thing in my opinion.
Yeah I wholeheartedly agree with this because it's essentially the commodification of relationships, which makes me sick to my stomach
> one is not owed this attention, time or privilege
I thought this[0] was a really good piece about this kind of framing
[0] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does...
There is also the possible point that Tinder, for instance, isn't an app to create "meaningful" social relationships, only hook ups.
I get that the "market" framing is not very endearing, for a lot of people, and maybe not very healthy. But I don't think it's wrong. Worrying about your position in the labour market also isn't particularly healthy or endearing, but I don't think it's wrong. How are you supposed to ununderstand what you've understood?
This "worry" as you purport it to be can only exist in a system that makes it so. The worry of >tfw no gf is not comparable to the fear of losing one's job and health insurance, and the utter lack of opportunity to bounce back, meaning a job is a matter of survival. But since a lot of people on HN don't experience this latter situation, it's easy to see dating as a market where goods and services should be easy to get. The market analogy breaks down in more than just this aspect.
So, it's not wrong per se, sure, you can say that, but it's deeply, even inherently, flawed in my book.
I don't understand you ending rhetorical question.
Take a statement like "Not many people want to date Steve, so it's likely Steve will have to work harder to find a partner". Is that incorrect? If it isn't, how would you suggest I go about not believing it?
Edit: I don't agree with your second paragraph's suggestion that relationships aren't important (relationships and jobs, or the lack of them, can both have huge impacts on people's lives), but why does that matter here? There are markets for both important things (eg. jobs) and unimportant things (eg. baseball cards). There are also markets for things that are easy to get and things that are difficult to get. Those considerations aren't what makes something a market / not a market.
Sorry I re-edited the edit quite heavily after writing the first version.
> It's not like people are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen.
People (women) are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen, and I don't blame them, it is important. Sure it's not everything, but love is hardly a mystical force completely detached from economy.
People from all perspectives regularly do this, but it's only considered seedy when it's used to point out a way men are disadvantaged.
No one is owed a partner who contributes equal work in the household; no one is owed a partner who cares about their sexual pleasure; no one is owed a partner who performs certain types of emotional labor. But we consider these things as Important Issues (which they are!) because they disproportionately disadvantage women. But there's nothing wrong with doing the same on the other side of the divide.
Which is why it's so arrogant to say participating is optional. You have to go where people are, unless you're OK with being lonely for a long time.
'Cause I ain't got a car
I can't get a car
'Cause I ain't got a job
I can't get a job
'Cause I ain't got a car
So I'm looking for a girl with a job and a car
Don't you know where you are
Which sucks because smartphones have net negative effects imo.
You're not forced in the same way you're not "technically" forced to get a job - the societal pressures are all 2nd order.