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Notes -
Somewhat Contra Scott Alexander on Dating
Astral Codex Ten: "In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences"
I say "somewhat contra" because there is a bit of a disguised Motte and Bailey here. The Motte is that describable preferences like age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children have strong predictive and filtering power. This is obviously true. The implied Bailey is that modern dating apps suck, long-form dating profiles like old OKCupid and "Date-me" docs are much better, and the nerdy rationalist coke-bottle glasses waifu you've always dreamed about is just around the corner. This is false.
In the old days, dating sites were based around writing a profile and answering questions about yourself. In current year, online dating programs have converged around the "swipe" model. Why? One common theory I see is that users (customers) finding high-quality long-term relationships is bad for the app, because it causes users to leave and decreases the userbase. This sounds plausible, but if it were true we would expect to see a "two models" system. One mass-commercialized model where people looking for casual fun can swipe to find hookups, and a second non-profit or premium model where people can write long-form profiles to find high-quality partners. What we observe instead is convergence around the "swipe" model. Some would blame Match Group for buying OKCupid and monopolizing the market:
But Match Group isn't a monopoly anymore. In fact, their main competitor, Bumble, is also a swipe app. Sounds more like revealed preferences than evil capitalism to me.
Suppose OKCupid, being an early iteration of online dating, was an inefficient market. Whom would we expect this market inefficiency to benefit? People who are good at writing long-form engaging content for their profile of course. Who are the people currently telling you OKCupid was the greatest thing since sliced bread? Really makes you go "hmmm".
You already know.
Yes, age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children are all vital filtering tools. The dirty little secret is that you can tell all of this quite reliably from only a few photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words. Photos are also harder to fake, thus making them a more credible signal of social information. If any doubt remains, it takes literally two seconds to scroll down and see her info.
Far from being the cause of our modern romanceless society, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are simply lenses into the inherent nature of the sexual market at the margins. Those who are both in demand and willing to partner up are long since unavailable. There is no law of nature, nor any other reason to believe that every person has a "soulmate". Some people just suck.
What has changed in the modern world is the quality of single life. In the past, before internet porn, before women could reliably hold down careers, people had to pair up. It was socially demanded, it was the only way to obtain sexual gratification if you were a man, and it was the only way to provide for yourself economically if you were a woman. The positive externality of these "sad" marriages was that they generally produced children.
It's not the sexual market -- or well, it may be, but the crappiness of dating apps doesn't show it. The problem with dating apps as a category is the incentives are all wrong. To keep making money you want to keep people paying, not pair them up.
Yeah, dating apps clearly capture a small subset of the sexual market. Firstly, user numbers aren’t ‘that’ high compared to truly universal apps like Instagram which a substantial proportion of non-elderly people have. Tinder reports 75m “active” users worldwide. Depending on source maybe 20-30% of those users are women. Many of those women (I say from personal experience with my friends and women I know) never meet anyone from the app, it’s purely an attention button when they’re single through the ‘likes’ / swipes feature. Other occasionally text someone but don’t meet up. Of the women I know who have used Tinder, I’d estimate maybe 20% have actually dated or fucked someone they met on the app.
So again the relevant grouping shrinks. The population of Tinder and Bumble and Hinge who are having sex with people from the apps are largely a small, promiscuous sub-group that is unrepresentative of much of wider society. Even in gay society, which is much more promiscuous and has fewer inhibitions about sex, daily Grindr users are a minority, just three or four million worldwide on by far the top platform for gay hookups, when it’s likely at least a hundred million gay men live in countries where Grindr is the main gay hookup app. And indeed comprehensive surveys of the gay community find substantial numbers of older gay men in largely settled relationships; the specific world of the urban gay scene, white parties, gay clubs, Grindr, drag race fandom etc is a subset of a more more heterogenous community. 70% or more of gay men in some surveys have downloaded Grindr, but the number regularly hooking up on it is a tiny fraction of that.
What is really the case is that hookup apps, as open meat markets, capture the imagination of people interested in sex and dating (which is many people, I’d say), both becuase they’re very public and because they’re interesting - and, of course, because they represent a source of a lot of data. A huge amount of modern research on the sexual marketplace is based on the OkCupid stats released like a decade ago, for example. Collecting data is the single biggest burden by far in psychological research, especially if you’re not just studying college students.
The emphasis on a tiny proportion of highly promiscuous urbanites therefore heavily screws up our understanding of the romantic marketplace; average people are much more boring by comparison and require much more work to study.
Well, why not?
It’s obvious from the statistical and anecdotal data points that there is a substantial fraction of young women who are voluntarily choosing to stay single. I think knowing why they are doing this is the key to understanding the problem and potentially finding a solution (if one exists). Given that they are on apps at all, they must be at least “interested in sex and dating” as you say.
If the answer is that these women are fucking turbochad on the reg, or are minor chad’s side piece, then the incels are right and the solution is to crack down on all forms of heterosexual nonmonogamy.
If the answer is that these women would love to be in a relationship with guys who really exist and who would mutually agree, but matchmaking is the rate-limiting step, then Scott and friends are right and the solution is for Elon Musk to buy Tinder.
If the answer is that these women straight up do not want to be involved romantically or sexually with the men who fell the same about them, and have better quality of life single, then the solution is probably to go all-in on VR AI waifus and rev up the industrial baby-making factories to continue the species.
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