This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
I knew a lot of dudes who just agonized over what to say next, as if there was an optimal response or something. Turns out, treating the person on the other side like a real human you want to get to know because you plan on soending a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this stranger that I'm so super cool or hot'
If you can get to that point, it doesn't matter what space you end up in. Like Frank Herbert once said, a place is only a place
Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.
Does Singapore lack these spaces? The last time I was there I saw lots of people hanging out in hawker centers, malls, and their pubic gardens.
Malls are very much illusion of socialization since businesses there have no incentive to keep you around - spend the money and go away.
Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).
I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.
Also, the whole concept of finding your significant other by ONLY going out on dates is... kinda broken in concept? It's not really that hard to pretend to be someone else for a few hours a week.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
I'm sure a lot of couples met through friends of friends but the date with someone you barely know has always been a thing, I believe.
When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.
Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.
And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?
Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.
(I'm gay, but I listen to and observe a lot of straight people in their natural habitats).
The advice for some time was almost universally that one should "volunteer", join "hobby clubs", or even go do "women-centric activities" or even "women-centric events" and "feminist groups" to meet people. Often women would recommend that.
Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
> Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
In here, you are avoiding the whole "observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you" thing. Which is the core thing that started the whole thread.
Heard that one too, and the corresponding "eww he only pretended to be my friend because he wanted to make a pass at me".
That girl is looking for genuine authentic connection, you are looking for sexual access. And in that case, part of your evaluation should involve searching for women who want those physical only relationships.
But again, the thread was about forming long term relationships, this is different matter.
I blame Youtube and coaching culture. Everyone thinks they're an expert now and must spread their genius.
Very dumb boys then go to the club meeting, immediately try to pick up women, and it doesn't work because that was not the recommendation.
You are supposed to get engaged with a club you care about, participate genuinely, meet new people and make new friendships, and like all of human history, that is very likely to randomly result in you finding someone you hit it off with.
Boys still tend to think they are trying to shotgun pickup lines as a good method.
Basically, the underlying problem is roughly the same in all those situations: You have to understand, respect, and treat the women in those groups the same way you treat anyone else. How often do you join a new tech related club and start hitting on the same sex members of that club for example?
Volunteering as way to eventually meet woman? It was a stupid idea 5 years ago, still is now.
Also I wouldn't recommend joining clubs _just_ to try and meet potential partners. You should join a club that's for something you're actually interested in, if you would leave the club just because you failed to meet someone then it was a bad fit from the start.
because the owner of the business do not want relationship frictions to affect people's work.
Capitalism for thee but not for me.
Often, this is done for tax reasons.
Even today, the primary concern when I'm talking to other managers dealing with job applications from family members (including kids) and even friends of existing employees is "How does the existing employee react if it doesn't work out and we have to fire their spouse/kid/best friend?"
Better to avoid that drama entirely. (edit: EASIER to avoid that drama, I should say, but perhaps not always better)
And if you don't think management isn't at least 60% drama control between team members you've never been in management of a diverse set of people, which is why the best engineer, the best electrician, etc doesn't necessarily make the best manager, etc. Different skill sets, different universe of concerns.
Another example is that most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services. Now survival requires two incomes instead of one. It was a massive net loss to society, but we also agree that women should be free to work if they would like, without barriers. We see similar things with women becoming educated. The more educated women become, the fewer children they have. That's really bad for society, but we also want women to be free to become as educated as they like.
Sadly I see no easy solutions here because it requires weighing individual and societ-wide rights. Companies aren't going to risk higher rates of misconduct to benefit society broadly. These are collective action problems, and unless we find ways of individualising the problem, they're only going to get worse.
Yeah if you totally ignore the unprecedented crazy high standard of living developed over trillions of work-hours.
https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty
Random citation, I think the situation is actually a little better than they do, but that'll do since they present some data in an easy to read way.
The standard of living went up because productivity and value creation went up significantly. That's the only way that happens.
I will concede that luxury goods are far cheaper, and perhaps one could make an argument that cheap TVs are a reasonable concession for expensive food and housing. I would not agree with that.
Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.
Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.
The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.
1. In many jurisdictions, many of the homes built in the mid-century can’t be built anymore due to modern code and zoning ordinances.
2. Building the same 1950s home, if it’s legal at all, is more expensive than it was back then. Materials and labor are more expensive.
3. Air conditioning is more of a necessity as global temperatures increase and as employment centers move south. If I can’t get a job in Detroit but I can get one in Arizona, then yes I need air conditioning.
4. Consumers are generally not in control of what housing is available on the market. Builders don’t build homes for lower middle class people because they’re not profitable. Nobody is forcing them to build the kind of homes the lower middle class can afford.
Also, in Chart 1 on page 6, "expenditure share for non-necessities" in the US goes from about 32.5% in 1950 to fully 50% in 2002-2003.
It would be nice if you told us the page from which you got your, "in 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure." Searching for your text verbatim fails, which is not particularly surprising because PDFs cannot be searched reliably.
Also because 1950 is considered by some to be a particularly prosperous time in the US, some might accused you of cherry picking. For example, in 1918-1919, the "expenditure share for non-necessities" was about 22%.
Somehow your weighting of social weighing individual vs society-wide rights ends up with very self serving "other peoples rights are hindrance, I should be in positions to do whatever to them, that is social good".
To reiterate, the social cost discussed is the inability for people to form relationships at work. I acknowledge all of the costs of people being harassed at work. That's bad. I hope you read this comment and understand that I am not disagreeing with you.
1.) Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
2.) Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
3.) Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
4.) This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
> Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
You are confidently incorrect. [People widely reported a stifling effect on office relationships.](https://legacy.vault.com/blogs/workplace-issues/2018-vault-o...) More than 1 in 4 said #metoo made them less accepting of workplace romance. 43% considered relationships between workers at different levels unacceptable - 15% higher after #metoo.
> Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
This has nothing to do with what we are discussing. I understand you have strong feelings about this but I need you to understand that from the bottom of my heart, I do not care about your feelings.
> Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
No one claimed it was the primary mode of forming relationships.
> This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
This is one step removed from, "men are stupid, am I right, ladies?" Your disdain for men, the users on Hacker News, or whatever villain you've concocted in your mind prevents you from having a normal conversation like a normal person.
This has been a thoroughly uninteresting waste of time. I suspect you became lost on your way to some protest or /r/Politics.
This survey is weak evidence based on a small number of self-reports. Population was not representative of the American work force c. 2018. Their call for submissions heavily primed the pump:
https://vault.com/blogs/general-articles/take-vaults-2018-of...
> Have you ever had a fling with a colleague, hooked up with a coworker, or met your significant other through work? We want to hear about it (anonymously, of course!) in our latest Office Romance Survey, our most popular study which has been featured by Forbes, Newsweek, and NBC.
So of course the people with strong opinions are overrepresented; the survey was more or less clickbait for marketing purposes. I suggest you find better data to support your own degree of confidence.
Most economists emphatically do not admit or maintain that.
Most might believe however that compensation settled slightly lower because the economy's ability to create jobs lagged slightly behind the increase in the supply of workers.
few years prior to that i was also in the dating game and it was a world of difference. Not only did i have notably fewer matches those same matches were very difficult to translate into real world contact. it really felt like i was both less appealing and was also fighting the apps trying to keep me in their pool of potential payers.
Part of this can be attributed to me changing but part of this also to the incentives of the apps. If you could keep people matched up mostly within their bounds of non superficialy visible compatibility (life goals, kids, desired living location, etc) and also within their league as far as attractiveness goes to put it crudely (Don't have to be scanning faces the behaviour of the other sex does give these algorithms the required clues so good profiles do have an advantage) with no incentives to keep people in the cycle....
Then I think people would be remarkably quick to go out. Much of it can be boiled down to quantity and the same goes for active dates.
You're assuming that the people on dating apps want to form long-lasting relationships.
A lot of people (both men and women) use them for hookups, validation, entertainment, free meals, etc. Most of the people using them for these purposes care far less about compatibility because they don't plan on spending the rest of their lives with anyone they interact with.
Most people won't go out of their way to provide detailed feedback.
It still happens that way today in certain communities.
What would really be good is if more couples went through premarital counseling to help them figure out if they have long-term compatibility or if they are just currently infatuated with each other. Infatuation can go on for years by the way, with the conflict only surfacing after there are kids and then divorce gets messy.
Among various things they made us fill out a "values wheel", a kind of spider web diagram with various dimensions like family, status, career, friendship, education, money, kids, religion, etc..
And then the guy pointed out if the wheels didn't look mostly similar it would be better to have a discussion nowz before getting married, rather than after.
One couple found out they had vastly different values, ignored it, and broke up within one year of marriage. Clearly problems pre-existed and counseling might have helped avoiding the mess.
In general, my experience with counseling, therapy, social workers et al. were that you might be better off spending the money on a rollecoaster ride. At least it's guaranteed to end.
Especially the social workers. I have an impression that their exams have an inverted grading scale: you need to score below a certain threshold to graduate.
25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!
As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.
I think there has been much topical research on this now, and from what I can glean, there are at least two forces working at the same time.
1. Gendered preferences didn't change, but society did. Women still prefer men who earn more than them (by a very wide margin). This would be okay if we still lived in the 1940s, but childless women outearn men now in most metro cities. Sometimes by a wide margin. Women are graduating in high-paying professions at ratios of 60:40, 70:30, and even higher, meaning this problem is getting much worse. Increasingly, the majority of women are focused on the top 10-20% of men who outearn them, to the exclusion of all other men. This is compounded because incomes are just one of many selectors. There is also height (which remains a surprisingly strong preference for women), attractiveness, many personality traits, social standing, wealth, political affiliation, etc.
2. Dating apps have made the above exponentially worse. It's very easy for a woman of average attractiveness (I say this in a academic sense, not derogatorily) to only swipe right on the most attractive men. Those men are perfectly happy to have a lot of casual sex with said women, but would never consider them for marriage. This has warped the perception of their "league." Many of these women end up 40 and alone and deeply unhappy. Or they "settle" for a man of average attractiveness and income and resent him.
This is almost impossible to untangle. We don't want women to be less educated, or earn less. We don't want them to feel like they're "settling." At the same time, there are many amazing men out there in their league, and they could have a happy marriage. I applaud Singapore trying something, because the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people.
In the short term; longer term that culture will die out and the future will be evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and whatever other high-fertility subgroups migrate in in large enough number. Natural selection applies to culture just like it applies to genes, and cultures that don't produce enough children will be replaced by those that do.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/demography-in-israel-no-long...
>Haredi women average roughly 6.75 children, while non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish women have a rate of 2.3.
They are also, ironically, more educated than Haredi men - girls’ schools are run almost entirely by female staff and teachers, and they give themselves a good secular education (performing well against national averages of high school education).
It is women who drive the perpetuation of Haredi culture amongst girls and women (and to some extent their boys), and most of them will tell you that they’re very happy to be Haredi.
https://news-archive.hds.harvard.edu/news/2015/03/24/heredi-...
>There is a paradox: on one hand, Haredi women are excluded in the Haredi public sphere. On the other hand, we must remember that Haredi women are the main bread winners of the community since the leaders decided that almost all men need to dedicate their lives to the study of the Talmud.
Power dynamics and individual rights are nuanced. In Western liberal cultures women were officially given “the right to work”, but what it actually did was remove the right of women to choose not to work and raise kids instead.
Many women in developed countries feel like they can’t afford the children they want, and that is because the cost of living has been adjusted for two working adults per household.
Western liberal cultures are also breeding grounds for modern misogynistic movements and behaviors like the manosphere, (due to a large number of involuntarily celibate and childless men).
While it’s easy to point to traditional ritualistic differences between men and women in Haredi society, in practice it’s hard to be a misogynist when you have like 3 daughters.
I don’t know, pretty much all women I have spoken to, almost all in the 90th percentile in income/wealth with the ability to to have more kids and have luxuries still choose to have 2 at most. Maybe 3 if they end up with 2 boys or 2 girls first. And that is because pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding and infant rearing suck.
Hell, as a man, I didn’t have to do any of that and I still wouldn’t want to have more than 2 kids. So whatever mentality leads to financially independent women choosing to have 7 kids is certainly very unique.
>in practice it’s hard to be a misogynist when you have like 3 daughters.
I have seen a lot of people be discriminatory towards groups of people, but choose to treat some members of that group of people better, e.g. if they are useful in some way or perhaps relatives, etc. They can even do it with traits they themselves have!
The way our society developed with the immense pressure on women to marry and general lack of autonomy led to the situation that given a choice they would often prefer to avoid this.
The irony with all this data is that as women have achieved parity with men in all kinds of domains, their happiness has commensurately declined. This is one of those hot button topics which most sociologists refuse to research.
Of course they do. What you're probably getting it is they have nothing to do with attraction. That's a completely different thing. But you need all three of the following for a long term relationship:
1. You are attracted to them,
2. They are attracted to you,
3. You are broadly compatible with each other.
From a male perspective, there are tons of people who satisfy 1 only. Far fewer satisfy 1 and 2, and fewer still satisfy all 3.
As you grow older you’re going to have your own values, boundaries, non-negotiables. Thinking that you can just jump into dating and “open-mind” the singles scene is a huge sign of someone who hasn’t fully developed their sense of self just yet.
Sure there may be some things that don't change (religious preference, etc.) but they are fewer than most people think. And like OP said, compatibility is often not a checklist or algorithm to maximize
Humans, no matter how unique and self-important they might be, can certainly be broken down into personality traits to come up with a model that projects the likelihood of a lasting marriage. It likely won’t be perfect or precise, but it can be done, so I’m not sure what your point even is. As people age, it’s just the fleeting expressions of themselves that whither away, but they have a core personality founded on their values and goals, which stand the test of time. That’s not the sort of thing that you can just mix with someone else who has a different set of values and goals.
No matter how old, most people have zero introspection or analytical ability, and even if they do, they would not put it on display because that would put them in the "weird" category.
A typical women's profile will differ by country though. This is how most of this stuff looks:
* South-East Asia: women describe themselves as "simple", "down to earth", "family oriented".
* English-speaking Africa: "god-fearing", "faithful".
* Western Europe: "like to travel", "love animals", "live off the land".
Sometimes with a mix of trivia, like whether they are divorced, how many children, smoking cigarettes.
I don't really know what makes people match, but if I have to guess, people go by non-verbal cues they find the the pictures. People reveal a lot about themselves in they way they dress, where and how they take the pictures.
So not much of an extra loss in privacy.
> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
The Government already knows, always has known.
The UK? It doesn't have a special relationship with surveillance companies, it just has a population that seems to like being surveilled and always votes for more.
Because of this reason, quite a lot of people
- don't actually own a mobile phone,
- formally own a mobile phone, but only carry it around if the likelihood is very high that they will need it
- if they need to be available via mobile phone for job reasons (and are thus survived), they prefer to use a feature phone or if it must be a smart phone, they don't install any additional apps or remove the additional surveillance functions from the operating system as far as easily possible
(I use 'weirdo' as a technical term here. These people have my sympathies; I just mean that they are far from the average or normal person.)
Maybe you could get a proxy for that using DNA?
What signals do you suggest? Regardless of whether it's feasible to put them in the dating app.
It clearly isn't.
In Germany, there is a reason why the term "akademisches Prekariat" (academic precariat/precarity) exists, meaning that people who stay in academia are often in a precarious job situation and are paid quite badly. But these people are very intelligent and well-educated.
"Intelligence" is a term that is defined very precisely in psychology (psychometrics):
This is actually a reformulation of the point that I made in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920421 that income is not a proxy for intelligence. :-)
What you are looking for are "dark triad traits", i.e.
- machiavellianism,
- (sub-clinical) narcissism, and
- (sub-clinical) psychopathy.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
These are quite correlated to higher incomes and higher-status jobs.
Though it definitely wasn’t income proxies as the only criteria, it probably was a decent part..
I also met a couple other people that I had good relationships with on that site. All in the 90%+ range of their compatibility scores. There weren’t many people in those tiers for me though. Any time a 90% match appeared was a big deal, there were only ever a few!
Anyone I met in the 80% range was usually also pretty great
Go much below their 80% match score and meeting in person didn’t usually go so well.
This clearly does not hold in Germany. There, you often can earn much more money with a vocational training than with a humanities degree, in particular in the current messed up job market.
On the other hand, people with different education levels often have very different psychometric traits (similarity here is very important for the relationship to work).
> Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
There do exist some hobbies that are somewhat correlated to social classes (think of who plays soccer/tennis/golf (replace "soccer" by a different sport if you live in the USA)), even though these associations are much less pronounced than in former days.
On the other hand, for example, a person who loves sports climbing or parachuting will likely have very different psychometric traits from people who are into stamp collecting.
Thus, in many cases, hobbies are thus rather a proxy for some psychometric traits.
There's no practical way to discover someone's "secret true preferences", baring seeing them enraptured by someone who happens to meet them.
Some people do, and have been wisely guided to know what to look for.
I write this in caps because people do not understand & believe. Its this part of your immune system that makes you high on someone. Then, far behind that, come whatever preferences/hobbies/specs.
And there is no dating app on earth built around this,because you cant - it would involve taking a genetic fingerprint from every user to build this metric)
(Source: Been in dating business for several years)
This exists and, from both my own experience and that of others, is not uncommon.
Many women report that after stopping taking the pill they no longer like the smell of their husbands.
One of the best ways to have a long term relationship is by talking to each other, having stuff in common is a good way to set the stage for that
Scott Alexander disagrees:
> https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-d...
(see also the follow-up article https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...).
Important quote from this article concerning your point:
"Here are some things that are so obvious they sound like cheating:
Unless you’re bisexual, you probably care if someone is a man or a woman
Many people care whether their partner prefers polyamorous or monogamous relationships.
Many people want a partner of the same religion and level of religiosity.
Many people want a partner who matches their preference about whether to have children, and how many to have.
…because in practice, people end up very closely matched on some criteria
Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans
Only about 3% of high school dropouts marry a spouse with a college degree, compared to more than 80% of PhDs.
90% of whites marry other whites; 80% of blacks marry other blacks.
Husbands and wives’ social classes correlate at about 0.8
If 96% of Democrats are marrying non-Republicans, it seems like Democrats must have a strong preference against marrying Republicans, and ought to value having information about someone’s politics before they date them. Realistically, this underestimates the level of political sorting; I don’t think I’d be a good match for an extremely woke person, even if we were both technically “Democrats”."
---
> Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course your claim "'We like the same things!' is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…" is correct, but I am very certain that there exist quite a lot of interests, hobbies and objectives that require a partner that is "compatible" with these (and in most cases, people who have such interests, hobbies and objectives know this very well). This obviously does not mean that the partner has to have the same hobbies and interests. :-)
For example,
- there do exist good reasons why in university time, sports climbing was basically a dating market
- a person who has hobbies that are associated with semi-legal activities (which clearly does not mean that he/she does anything illegal!) like hacking in the classical sense will likely not be a good fit for a spouse who works in law enforcement
- a person who is a climate activist will likely be a bad fit for a spouse who works in the oil/gas industry
- a person who is very into internet privacy topics (think cypherpunk) will likely not be compatible with a social media influencer
Part of that might be because only 4.2% of the population of the world lives in a country that has both democrats and republicans.