Slashdot Mirror
Of Science and Choice In Online Dating
Must be summertime, as online publications turn to the contemplation of Internet dating. The NY Times's piece (registration may be required) takes a not particularly deep look at the reality behind the "science" claims of chemistry.com, eHarmony.com, and others. "The question is how much it really matters to users if the methods have any scientific basis. A friend of mine... said she looked at several dating sites and chose the ones that looked like they had 'the least riffraff.'" Technology Review focuses on studies showing that the overwhelming number of choices presented by many dating sites can be counterproductive: "...more search options lead to less selective processing by reducing users' cognitive resources, distracting them with irrelevant information, and reducing their ability to screen out inferior options." The article concludes with a look at the startup Omnidate, which offers technology for 3D virtual dating. The site has had twice as many women (by percentage) sign up as the other dating sites typically see.
...are the women.
Anyone who can solve that problem deserves a Nobel.
In the salary cheque that is.
No?
The camera doesn't lie:
http://collegeotr.s3.amazonaws.com/images/blogs/b422245a96af7340b70921c641e0b6db.jpg
Simple. Set up a dating site which costs a thousand+ a month for guys but is free for women.
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Run by a couple of maths grads. Last time I looked they were using a regression analysis to match people.
The site's also free.
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Are you suggesting people should get a SECOND Life?
ArrangedMarriage.com. They skip the whole dating thing and set you up to marry the woman/man of your possible dreams. The only bad thing is that the woman's family sometimes has to provide a hefty dowry.
A new meaning was given to the term "slashdot effect" today, as hordes of /. readers register on the site, changing its demographics to be similar to other dating sites.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Sure they did. You go on believing that.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Do people even know what they want from a partner?
People talk and talk about wanting this trait and that trait but they often seem to date people that are nothing like they claim they want. I'm honestly convinced people in general have no idea what they want, so by extension I struggle to see how you could create a site that offers people those things...
Random selection based on
- Age
- Geographic location
- Large important decisions (e.g. Family, yes/no?)
- A few shard interests
Would likely have a very high success rate.
Some people need to get one life before worrying about a second one.
I've considered using it because time-wise, it would be ideal. The problem is everyone more or less says the same cliche crap and, more so with the advent of MySpace, people clearly spend ages taking pictures that make them looking better than they really do which wouldn't matter if the profiles were honest but they're not.
Meeting drunk women is the best way. Their guard is down so they're honest and as a bonus you may just get laid after the first meeting. The only catch is remembering if she's a keeper or not the next day.
Meeting drunk women is the best way. Their guard is down so they're honest and as a bonus you may just get laid after the first meeting. The only catch is remembering if she's a keeper or not the next day.
The trick there is to not be to drunk enough to forget come morning, but you give the illusion that you are.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
My vote is still for OkCupid. I met a couple really great people on there that I am still friends with today, and I met my current partner of over two years through a volunteer organization one of the aforementioned people I met on OkCupid introduced me to. I would guess that, like me, most slashdot users would be more interested in the scientific approach that a site like OkCupid takes rather than profile/picture system most sites use.
Of course not. That entire "article" was written by a PR firm. How can you tell? A bunch of facts and experts and the mention of "Omnidate" at the end.
See: The Submarine.
It's not "dating" so much as it is being efficient by running the population through a filter. If I filter out all women under the age of 22, all political conservatives, and all evangelical Christians, I'm probably not missing out on the love of my life an it let's me focus on people I might actually be compatible with.
The reality is that the vast majority of people in the US seem to have gotten married because they figured "it was about time for that" or something similar. If you have anything resembling standards, dating is really, really fucking hard.
Hope that marrying someone wonderful and having a family isn't part of what you need to be really happy, because it sure as hell isn't guaranteed.
+++ATH0
I was divorced in 1998 after 18 years of marriage.
After a series of "fixups" and other misguided attempts by friends and family, I tried Match.com. I did the questions accurately and honestly. My profile text made it clear I was (a) highly intelligent, (b) looking for a permanent relationship, and (c) pretty particular about who I dated.
Within 72 hours of posting, I had over 400 "matches" in a 50 mile radius of me. WHAT? I don't live in NY or LA, so the statistics were mind-boggling. I imagined there must be a secret kingdom of single, middle-aged women in that 50 miles, just waiting for yours truly to show up on Match.com. The sad reality was that well over 99% of the so-called "matches" were train wrecks, literally and figuratively. I dated 10-12 women from Match and NONE were anything close to a "keeper".
So, one night, I waded through the eHarmony process, set the radius for 150 miles, and waited. ...and waited. ....and waited. Finally, after 6-7 weeks, I got TWO matches. One was a "crossover" from Match that I actually kind of liked, but she declared we had no chemistry on the 2nd and final date. The other match and I spent some time in communicating via eHarmony and finally agreed to a real date in September of 2003.
We got engaged on the following Valentine's Day...lured her into a jewelry store that I'd enlisted to help, and surprised her with a diamond ring. Everyone applauded...it was a nice moment.
The wedding was a few months later in July, so we've just celebrated our 5th anniversary.
A couple of years ago, eHarmony tried to get us to appear in one of their commercials, but we declined.
I don't know about the "science", but we do get along really well, so I have no complaint.
I am my own gestalt.
Not after Slashdot gets done with it.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
This is a very facile thing for someone in your position to say. For many of the rest of us "experiencing life" all by itself simply means interminable years of crushing loneliness.
I have started to come to the following realization:
Happiness is guaranteed to no one. The best one can expect out of life is that you can always find some way to respect yourself and say "I did something with my life that I can look myself in the mirror and approve of." That status of self-respect is prerequisite for happiness, but it is by no means a guarantor. There is every chance that you'll just get out there and do your thing and live your life and be alone and lonely right up until the day you die.
+++ATH0
...at least when it comes to attraction.
Getting into a relationship you better use your head or your life will turn to crap. You've do NOT want to hook up with someone who's self centered and irrational.
But determining if there'll be sparks....forget the science and go with your gut. Most of the people you "should" get along with based on statistical methods and science you will find boring. Many of the people you shouldn't be attracted to will turn you into a horny toad. The trick is to find someone who's good for you, and be good to them back. Oh and by the way those hormones that make the sex great will make any kind of reasoned rational logic go out the window at least for some of your relationship.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I met my current wife through pof.com, a free dating site. It took a couple of years of using pay and free online dating services. I also used a local dating service for $1200. I went out on an average of 1-2 new dates per week. 1 was the norm and 2 was maybe once a month. I ended up not liking most of the women and they didn't like me. After shelling out all that cash and spending all that time and effort, I ended up marrying a woman that made contact with me first through a free website! If I could go back and do it over again I would just focus on what I liked to do to make myself a better person and let it happen on its own.
seems like a lot of it is a fairly straightforward decision tree.
There are things someone requires (gender, age bracket, willingness to relocate either for the relationship or for work etc), and an individual may have their own quirks/fetishes. Then you have things which are preferred but not necessarily required, height, haircolour, food preferences and so on. And then you're matching based on answers to other questions with a personality profile (which is largely psychologist nonsense but not entirely. if you ask 200 questions, even stupid questions each with a scale out of 5, you have 1000 possible points, you can do a fairly straightforward matching (0.5% each, want to assume some distribution etc.) then by virtue of the large sample size a close % match probably means something. Not necessarily a lot, but it does tell you something about how they answer questions at least.
I suppose the big advantage to online dating is if you know there is something you specifically do, or do not want that is not always immediately obvious when meeting somene (smoke, drink, shave, like harry potter, likes to travel whatever) you can immediately cull that lot from your target selection pool. People who would fall into an exclusionary category that isn't obvious can consume time otherwise spent looking for people who wouldn't be excluded. Esspeecially if they are mutually exclusive, I like to travel, she doesn't well neither party will be happy in the long run, it might be more efficient (albeit less fun) to simply skip each other and move on. You have to know what you want (which is a decidedly iterative process), and then be honest about it, one can see the advantages.
I'm in my late 20s, have done the online dating thing off and on since college, as well as asking out people in real life. If I go back and think about which were the best relationships/sex in terms of online vs offline meeting, offline meeting tended to be the best. There's just far too much useful information you get from seeing someone up close, listening them talk, watching their body language. We have lots of mental machinery dedicated to parsing that stuff, and almost none of it is activated during online dating (even pictures are no good, because they're so often old photos or outright deceptive).
...with the exception of Slashdot, of course. ;-)
So, at this point in my life, I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on IM, forums, computer games, etc. and spend more time around real people in the real world. I think it happens to a lot of nerds as we get older. We look back and realize we don't have much to show for all the thousands of hours spent on inane IRC conversations, first person shooters, and forum flame wars. All that stuff is so much emptiness when you get right down to it...
Their guard is down so they're honest and as a bonus you may just get laid after the first meeting. The only catch is remembering if she's a keeper or not the next day.
It's not a problem if you have to chew your arm off in the morning.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
PoF's for nerds? All I've seen are a bunch of cheap, English-challenged women who kind of need a lift in other areas of life...
As a resident of New England, I feel I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the "excess" of single women in this area are single for reasons that do not in any way assist an average tech-inclined guy in getting a date. Add to this the general innate hostility of a large number of New Englanders and the general disinterest (outside of Cambridge, perhaps) of doing any activities that don't involve sports and/or drinking, and I have had much better luck with "web dating" in other parts of the country, however less attractive the odds may appear on the surface.
It appeals to the moronic masses who believe in stuff like Astrology, or new age religions. You might be shocked to hear that usually these are women.
These systems are designed to precondition potential matches into thinking that some mystical, all-knowing, compassionate sentient computer brain has made the perfect match made in heaven.
"Well, shit, I spent three effin hours filling out eHarmony's wanna-be MMPI-2 by 'Dr' Warren ... and the system didn't even reject me! I'm suitable, and there must be some validity to this."
(next time, I probably shouldn't lie to eHarmony about my possibly kinky autoerotic asphyxiation fantasy, or that thing about small rodent insertions.)
The point is, after a match is made on eHarmony (or Chemistry,) people go into the first date believing that there is a higher probability of the relationship being successful. The time is no longer completely fearful, but actually there is some mystery and *gasp* optimism about it.
And that, my pale, geeky friends, is the magic behind these heinous systems. Follow the yellow brick road.
I have much, much more to say on this topic, but I'll save the rest for some other time. peace out.
and went straight to Omnidate's website to sign up?
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Us introverts need to stick together.
The irony of this statement made me at once laugh and cry a little.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
When I used OKCupid regularly, I encountered a large number of women I would classify as crazy.
Because they use regression analysis to match people, that means you must correlate with the crazies.
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