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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.
Date-me-docs or any other "long-form" online dating method is a complete meme and I honestly cannot believe that rationalists are so into these things. They're all just cheap talk, smoke, and mirrors. When you're looking for a partner, you need to filter out a ton of people, and you need hard verifiable information to do that. The only hard and verifiable information for people who are otherwise strangers on the internet are:
The rest is just totally made up and fakeable. This is obvious because if you look at the date me docs, all the word-words-words are almost always the same for everybody. You like someone who is thoughtful? You want to have witty and deep conversations? You're into AI and futurism? Wow, truly a rare find.
You need to actually spend time with people in person to figure out the important things. Tinder/bumble/the rest are so popular because they prioritize the information that is verifiable online and get you to actually go and meet up with people. I'm married and I met my wife on hinge, but before that I was extremely active and successful with dating apps, some combination of tinder/bumble/hinge/raya. So take these observations in that context. Also, as a man who dates women these are comments about women but I'm sure something similar applies to men.
(a) A few weeks ago there was an article in the NYT about date-me-docs and it featured a woman in the Bay Area who had one of these. Pretty typical Bay Area woman: Asian, tech worker, pretty cute, had her shit together. And had a super wordsy date-me-doc with a ton of detailed words-words-words. I cold emailed her to set her up with my friend, who is recently single. My email was a pic of my friend (tall and handsome) with two or three bullet points about his background (recruited athlete at very prestigious university; into outdoors stuff), and within a few minutes she responded with her number. For all that hubbub about a date-me-doc, my tinder-lite profile of my friend did the trick.
(b) I travel a lot for work and would almost always use bumble when I had a free night. Bumble lets you specify that you're looking for a relationship. You can just ignore this. I would swipe on these women, match, I'd clearly explain that I'm only there for a couple days, and they'd nevertheless be eager to meet up and hook up. Often these little meetups would lead to a nice connection and we'd keep talking/meet up again next time we were in one of each other's cities (I tend to match with high-income, fancy job, lots of traveling types), but ultimately both parties would know these were just casual flings with a limited shelf-life. That girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship is definitely, DEFINITELY fucking randos on the side. Don't forget it. And inversely, women who say they're looking for "something casual" are very often the ones to crazily show up at your office a few months later wondering why you haven't seen them again.
It's much, much easier to fake a personality (especially through some self-promoting long-form writing) than it is to fake how you look. On my myriad dates the frequency with which someone's personality doesn't match what they seemed like online is way higher than the frequency with which someone's looks don't match their pictures (almost never). If you're getting looks catfished a lot, you really scraping the bottom of the app barrel or you need some practice in recognizing how fat women use angles or how chinese women use filters. The point is, there's only so far someone's curated self-description can get you. You just need to meet up.
This confusion is so bafflingly common that there are entire movies and stock characters about this. When you're at work, or in a coffee shop, or generically in public, are you talking about all the weird sexual shit you're into? No? Does that mean you're not into it? Same for women. Of course women are sexual beings, and of course they are not super open about this at inappropriate times. And there's basically no way for you to connect the public to the private until the very last minute. The distance from that introverted Korean software engineer you just met showing you her favorite books to begging you to fuck her throat or cum inside her without birth control, is like, 5 minutes, tops.
Given this, why put any stock what-so-ever in some pre-planned about me document that has no predictive power?
Almost all women have at least tried the apps. But even if they aren't currently on the apps, their friends are, and this impacts them both directly and indirectly. I have matched with women on the apps who set me up with their not-on-the-apps friends, which always leads to app-like behavior (hooking up). This is not to mention any of the general equilibrium impacts of the apps, which are probably huge.
The ONLY benefit I can see of long-form/date-me-docs style of online dating is that it's just another chance to put your profile in front of someone who might not have already seen it or swiped too quickly on a bumble/tinder-style app. So, like, sure, if you have fun writing about yourself and don't mind an embarrassing document being out there, go ahead and do it. But the likelihood that your manic rationalist dreamgirl is going to find you and date you from this is basically 0.
the definitely here makes this statement false. Many women have hook ups on the side while claiming to only want a serious relationship but the percent is not 100. Furthermore as guy hooking up with such women it is easy to overestimate the percent as you are quickly filtering out those who don't.
Yes, I'm sure the percentage of potential employers who are lying about having a collegial atmosphere, high impact, great advancement opportunities, excellent work-life balance, and unlimited PTO that everyone totally uses freely is not 100%, but if job-hunting it'd be foolish and naive to act based on any other assumption.
I had always assumed that, “🔍 not sure yet”, was the plausible deniability option, but perhaps it’s not subtle enough if rubes like me can figure it out.
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