lsd_throwaway

> Where do you get the 2% number? Just curious.

It's an imperfect number, but it comes from one of the graphs in dataclysm. It was a graph that paired attractiveness vs. amount of incoming messages.

For men messaging women it's mostly linear (more attractive women get more messages, but the high end gets maybe twice as many as the low end).

For women messaging men, it's a flat line at zero until the top 2% of male attractiveness at which it ticks up (a bit, still pretty unusual even then).

This is an imperfect metric because a lot of that skew is around who initiates at all which mostly falls to men, but it's tricky to get perfect data. Swipe data would be better, but dataclysm was written before the move to swiping mutual matching started (and now the sites don't publish anything interesting).

I'd predict the swipe data would match the initial message data similarly, it'd be interesting to see it.

> Maybe they'd widen their net and invest more time with the smaller number of matches they do get.

I'd suspect they'd go to other apps where they have more power (and the men would follow).

I don't think limiting swipes will fix it - the issue is more on the selection side (who women choose to swipe) than on the seeking side.

The reason men swipe a lot is because even with that most get few matches (~0). If you limit their swipes then most will never get matches and they'll stop using the service.

Bumble solves little, many 'initial' messages from women are ".", "hi", or ":)". It's basically equivalent to a match where the men have to initiate contact. The pre-selection winner-take-all issue is still there.

I think you can't fix it via apps - because the issue is upstream sexual selection that's been in place for thousands of years. It's good to have an honest view of it though because it lets people navigate it rather than becoming bitter and miserable.

Even if you had an app where men make profiles and don't swipe at all, one where women just select people and then men get notified - you still end up with only the top 2% of men getting selected and women would have to notify someone they're interested who may not have mutual interest or message them back (a rejection of the type mutual swipe matches are supposed to avoid).

Also, I think at least some women like having hundreds of matches because it's a nice self-confidence ego boost (I think complaining about this is 'high-status' humble bragging). If you took that away I suspect they'd also use the service less. Most women don't want to actually be the pursuers (a lot of men don't want to be either probably, but don't have a choice) - sexual selection doesn't work that way among most other mammals, humans are probably not an exception. If you try to force it with an app I'd doubt it would work.

So this doesn't solve the underlying issue, and economically wouldn't work because men that drive income for dating sites wouldn't have much of a role to play beyond creating an account and waiting (even though functionally this is basically the action they're doing anyway for the most part on the other services).

Men need to play to their strengths - online dating turns you into a commodity competing entirely on looks. If you're not going to win in that arena (and 98% won't), get out.

I think they're fighting an uphill battle because these incentives are sexual selection incentives. There's not much you can do to 'fix' them.

I think what happens is that both sexes go through it and come out the other side. If they were lucky enough not to pair off with a bad mate early they can then choose more wisely.

For a lot of men this means being unhappy and lonely in their 20s, for women it means being unhappy while sleeping around a lot in their 20s. Eventually people figure out what they want.

I'm not sure an app can do much to fix that.

Sexual selection's affect on behavior is a powerful thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7QZnwKqopo

Online dating is a skewed game (for M/F), if you're in the top 2% of attractiveness for men it's great - otherwise it's not worth it. This is compounded a bit by region, if your dating market is pretty even or skewed where there are more women than men (NYC/DC) it gets a lot better (I suspect actually for both men and women, but don't know) - in the bay area it's not worth it.

Women get a lot of matches which while a lot better than no matches (can go on dates, get practice, etc.) leads to a filter problem. Many (based on OKC data [0]) tend to pre-select based on attractiveness*, so the top 2% of men get most of the matches, which pre-filters out high quality candidates that would have a chance in real life. It also leads to lower quality interactions (since those men have more options anyway).

If you're a woman with hundreds of matches it's not really a surprise they'd be multi-tasking on a zoom date, the dates are abundant - each one has low value. This shifts as people get older though - if I had to guess that's probably part of why your recent matches improved after 5 yrs, suddenly there are fewer men available and the competition heats up (both because there are fewer available men and because there are more younger women getting more attention).

If you're a man that gets one match at best every other month, they're so scarce the value is high. I think honestly women and men have a poor sense for how extreme the difference in online dating experience is.

We're not that different from other apes in a lot ways, if you're not really good looking and you're in a skewed market online dating is a bad approach for you (imo).

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

* Men do too obviously, but not to the same winner-takes-all extreme (based on the OKC data).

Check out my comment history, I’d recommend more caution than most people here do.

I’m okay now, but it was tough for a couple years and I still struggle with anxiety.

There's a lot of bullshit - and most people are drawn in by pseudoscience nonsense. I was interested in seeing what people were talking about and the perspective change (also Sam Harris, lots of historical people, Huxley, What the Dormouse Said, everything I'd read etc.)

I tried it basically with as most preparation as you could possibly have and it wasn't enough. There's more detail in my posting history, but I'd suggest caution.

I don't and as far as I know my family doesn't - I wouldn't have tried LSD if I did (I was already nervous enough even without the additional risk). In general I'm pretty stable.

Given all the data I could find it seemed that the majority of people have positive experiences and only a minority have the trouble that I had, but it's possible that it's underreported - either way the risk is real.

I've never tried shrooms, but from what I read the risk there seems similar.

Without going too far off topic into a boring argument that won't go anywhere - I should say my religion comment includes the idea of a god/faith or supernatural creator etc.

I'm a fairly introspective person and I wouldn't say that it shook my world view - in the sense that I went in with a scientific world view and came out with one. I do have a better empathetic appreciation for mental illness and psychosis though (read And Then I Thought I was a Fish if you want to scare yourself). A trip makes you realize how incredible differently someone else's mind can perceive the world.

The challenging or scary part for me at least is when you rely on your own mind as a place where you can reason about things and then you start to worry if your ability to do that has been compromised.

The anxiety attacks after made me think that I really was dying or had a brain tumor or something and since I knew that the drug could no longer be in my system I got scared. I could no longer rationalize it as temporary affects of the drug. Researching all of the psychiatric information I could find online started to convince me that we know very little of how consciousness and mental illness actually work and I felt stupid for taking such a large risk.

Another thing I found scary is that a lot of healthy, normal people believe things I find absurd (like religion) and the information we're exposed to growing up seems to act as the training data for our neural net. I think consciousness emerged out of some evolved way to handle feedback and I didn't want to lose my ability to be able to reason about things.

The physical sensations after were really unpleasant (elevated heart rate, depersonalization, seeing visual patterns) and might have been caused by the anxiety that the LSD seemed to trigger. Also I had really low Vitamin D which seems to correlate with these kinds of issues too.

The fear of death I used to think about more than most people in a kind of distant way, but this experience made it feel imminent and traumatic - I think you're right that another life event could have caused similar symptoms.

I do worry less about things that aren't about people dying so maybe that's a good thing. It also comforts me a bit that everyone on earth is in the same boat, we're all sharing it for a limited time together and can work to make amazing things. Sometimes though, when I really think about the inevitability of dying it's still hard to go to sleep.

I think most people don't think about it.

For a counterpoint to this - I decided to do 150 micrograms of LSD after reading a lot about it on HN, talking with many friends that had tried it or do it fairly regularly and reading as much as I could find (Sam Harris, Huxley, What the Dormouse said etc.).

Nothing can really prepare you for it - the dream like state, the visuals and just the capacity of how different things can be. When looking at things I saw them shift, it felt similar to those computer vision machine learning videos from google. As if I could see my vision attempting to resolve images into objects that fit their parameters. I felt like I got some insight into how consciousness works by messing with it.

The trip itself was mostly pleasant - the next day and several months were not.

The next day I couldn't stop pacing, couldn't relax - kept hyperventilating. I couldn't eat either, basically kept having panic attacks. Over the next few weeks I felt outside of myself - like it was weird to be alive and in a person. I was terrified that I was going schizophrenic or losing my mind. I thought I might have a psychotic break. All of this paired with insomnia/general sleep disturbances (which scared me too). I thought I might have to stop working, I had anxiety with real physical effects (headache, lack of appetite, extreme fear). Even watching TV was difficult/overwhelming.

I had serious existential fear about dying and the inevitability of my family dying (and still do to some extent) - sometimes feeling that everyone else is insane for not being afraid.

I didn't end up taking SSRIs, but I did tell people and got help - it's about seven months later and I feel mostly better.

I'd caution people against trying it.