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Silicon Valley Singles Are Giving Up On the Algorithms of Love (washingtonpost.com)
The Washington Post: Melissa Hobley, an executive at the dating app OkCupid, hears the complaints about the apps [being unable to find good matches] regularly and thinks they get a bad rap. Silicon Valley workers "are in the business of scalable, quick solutions. And that's not what love is," Hobley said. "You can't hurry love. It's reciprocal. You're not ordering an object. You're not getting a delivery in less than seven minutes." Finding love, she added, takes commitment and energy -- and, yes, time, no matter how inefficiently it's spent.
"You have a whole city obsessed with algorithms and data, and they like to say dating apps aren't solving the problem," Hobley said. "But if a city is male-dominant, if a city is known for 16-hour work days, those are issues that dating apps can't solve." One thing distinguishes the Silicon Valley dating pool: The men-to-women ratio for employed, young singles in the San Jose metro area is higher than in any other major area. There were about 150 men for every 100 women, compared with about 125 to 100 nationwide, of never-married young people between 25 and 34 in San Jose, U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016 shows. That ratio permeates the economy here, all the way to the valley's biggest employers, which have struggled for years to bring more women into their ranks. Men make up about 70% of the workforces of Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, company filings show.
"You have a whole city obsessed with algorithms and data, and they like to say dating apps aren't solving the problem," Hobley said. "But if a city is male-dominant, if a city is known for 16-hour work days, those are issues that dating apps can't solve." One thing distinguishes the Silicon Valley dating pool: The men-to-women ratio for employed, young singles in the San Jose metro area is higher than in any other major area. There were about 150 men for every 100 women, compared with about 125 to 100 nationwide, of never-married young people between 25 and 34 in San Jose, U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016 shows. That ratio permeates the economy here, all the way to the valley's biggest employers, which have struggled for years to bring more women into their ranks. Men make up about 70% of the workforces of Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, company filings show.
Not surprising. Here I am reading slashdot at 5:30 PM Saturday night.
Write a heartfelt but rather naive memo explaining that you value diversity but want your company to enhance it in ways that don't 'incentivize illegal discrimination'.
Get promptly fired by your Ivy League Communist wannabe management.
Go on the paid speaker circuit and start a Patreon. Sue your company.
Meet blonde alt right hottie with rich conservative parents on the paid speaker circuit.
"Value her diversity" HARD. Start a family and write a book.
It beats slogging away knocking out boilerplate code in a single sex environment.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
So you're saying match.com and saucey.com should co-brand and cooperate?
OKCupid has long used their userbase for social experimentation. They only match people with those unlikely to work out, because it means they keep coming back and paying while thinking "well, it's matching me with people and I'm getting dates, it must just not be the right one." They're especially fans of social justice matchmaking.
Wasn't Tinder originally meant for quick hook-ups, and not for making marriages like some people use it now? Just imagine the conflict when some people send dick pictures with "how-abouts" while others want to find the true, romantic love. It's like somebody didn't read the fucking manual, literally.
I graduated high school here in Seattle in 1973, and none of my technical friends have ever had a girlfriend. Some of them have had boyfriends, but that's a different story entirely. Girls don't want independent males.
Uh, how many dependent males are there? Like, guys with little to no education who couldn't get by on their own because they've been stay-at-home dads and housewi... househusbands? Is that even a word? Is there a market for sugarmoms? My impression is that most men can't stand women that are richer and more successful than themselves, it hurts their pride. I'm afraid I may have to give you some shocking news: It may not be the economic independence that is the reason why your technical friends are single. They're probably just dorks or nerds. Not geeks, they can be kinda popular. P.S. None of them can be truly rich, if they were they could get trophy wives. It's basically long term prostitution, but if you have enough money it works.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
None of this is even remotely of the same magnitude as the core issue of online dating: men outnumber women on all these sites by a factor of 10:1, if not worse. Women get overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive and either drop out of the service or become extremely picky. Men end up with an extremely low positive response rate and so turn towards a "shotgun" approach of just sending identical messages to dozens or even hundreds of women, further exacerbating the issue.
As long as the gender imbalance isn't solved, online dating is going to remain a game of chance and a mess for both genders. Right now, all it's doing is taking the already fairly dated (but still very widespread) social norm that men should be the ones initiating romantic advances (and therefore take on the numerous refusals and the emotional toll that goes along with them) and push it to a ridiculous limit.
In Silicon Valley they just want someone that showers regularly, doesn't "code" 14 hours a day, and can hold a conversation about something other than their shitty blockchain startup written in node.js. I live here and it's pretty fucking obvious why most of these socially stunted retards can't get dates.
It has nothing to do with love being hard, it's because their algorithms SUCK. Mainly because they look for "desireable" traits rather than excluding 'deal breakers'.
This a 'one night stand' mindset - you end up finding the desirable/attractive but damaged people, not the acceptable ones.
Example:
OKCupid asks people if they have cats or dogs. Then they let you look for someone that already owns a cat or a dog. They do NOT let you exclude people that have cats or dogs.
That is a one short term relationship system. If you only date people that already have a cat or a dog, you are looking for someone that won't have to change their life style to fit with yours. Perfect if all you want is a couple of months of fun.
However, let's say you want to get married. If they love you, they will grow to love your cat or dog. It will not be a 'deal killer'. But if you are allergic to a cat or a dog, you NEED to exclude those people. You can't ask them to give up their pet just to date you. If you tried that, your success rate plummets.
Same thing with many other such factors. If you are a short man WITHOUT a complex, then you are perfectly willing to date women, regardless of their height. You have no problem asking out someone a foot taller than you. That's healthy, non-discriminatory thinking. But if you try to ask out most tall women, you will be wasting your time, because most such women only want to date tall men.a
The truth is short men do not want to search for short women. Short men want to search for any woman that is willing to date men their size. Guess what - OKCupid knows which women are not willing to date short men but OKCupid will not let you exclude those women from your search..
The dating web sites are all seriously flawed by their 'show me a 10' mindset, rather than a "no deal breakers" mindset.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Lonely Silicon Valley men:
How long must I wait
How much more can I take
Before loneliness will cause my heart
Heart to break?
No I can't bear to live my life alone
I grow impatient for a love to call my own
But when I feel that I, I can't go on
These precious words keeps me hangin' on
Melissa Hobley:
You can't hurry love
No, you just have to wait
She said love don't come easy
It's a game of give and take
You can't hurry love
No, you just have to wait
You got to trust, give it time
No matter how long it takes
(Apologies to the Supremes and/or Phil Collins)
#DeleteChrome
I think they screwed up somewhere. From what I understand about half of the male population is gay, so the dating pool should be pretty good no matter which way you swing. Of course, there is the number of lesbians to counteract that, but urandictionary doesn't have any data on that, so I can only guess.
We're all nerds here, so if technology isn't solving the problem the answer is MORE TECH. In this case the obvious solution is user reviews, which are conspicuously missing from dating sites. I am a solid four-star guy, and I realize that five-star chicks are out of my league, but I also don't want to waste time on two-star and three-star women. It would be great if I could downvote women whose photoshopped pictures don't match reality.
You make love.
Regardless of matching ages, the issue stands. Even OKC admitted it years ago when they did the first analysis of data: men with higher salary ranges on their profile got more responses and more dates.
The raw data is there, you CAN craft the perfect profile, it won't be PC but it's very well known what both men and women want from their first impressions in order to get a first date. I don't know if OKC still publishes the data, they used to when they first started and with some data mining you can make a good profile, initial message etc and your success rate skyrockets. I think my 'success rate' was like 40-50% in terms of responses and I would say about 10% in terms of dates, I still didn't meet my current partner there but I did a number of my previous partners, sometimes simultaneous.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You're right, but for the wrong reason. The gay population of males is tiny, but the unfit male population is huge, far more than 50%. Remember, half of all men are below average, which pretty much gets them out of the dating pool. The Silicon Valley women are accomplished, so they are only interested in a small percentage of top-tier men. These men who do qualify...what would they want with a driven, programmer wife? Thus do both sides claim there isn't anyone available.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Although I no longer give a flying-fuck about sex, I once did and I can tell you that, 1) I could give FUCK-ALL if a man was tall! I'm 5/3" if I stretch and my last boyfriend was 5'7" (self-reported, but if I had to guess I'd say he was STRETCHING WAY TALL!) I didn't care! He ended it, I didn't. 2) I've forgotten, but just don't get so down-hearted and defeated about it! It's not your height; it's your breath! Or body odor! or I dunno what, just keep putting yourself out there. And don't be so damn picky yourself! Somebody is out there.
It does suck for women. Create a female profile on POF and test it out. Men come across as undesirable on these sites. A woman who doesn't have something seriously wrong with her will get 10 messages a day and probably one every 5 minutes when she is logged in. A guy has to stand out in this noise and keep a woman's attention for 3 or 4 messages over a span of 15 minutes. Stand out to much and she will reject you as not being normal enough. Stand out just the right amount and you seem to needy and too easy to be worth her effort. Women don't want a guy who sounds like he is chasing them. If one of her messages is only 6 words long, she might still be interested but was lazy but now the guy is screwed because he can't respond with a short message because then the conversation will die.
Sites like POF let you do a fair bit of mining. In Ottawa, Canada - age range 30 to 50, excluding BBW - Active men on a given day outnumbered women 3.5 to 1*. The median time before a woman's account becomes inactive or deleted was 88 weeks (that blew me away). Seeking "a relationship" or "marriage" makes your profile significantly more attractive.
*Ottawa has a lot more single women than men due to the federal government being here.
In fact, the traditional belief that men are more promiscuous than women can't actually be correct, due to basic maths. if you have e.g. 100 men and 100 women, and each man has dated 3 women on average, then each woman must have dated 3 men on average as well, out of mathematically necessity.
It's more about the distribution than the average. Say, in a group of 100 men you have 50 who have never dated, 25 who have 1 date, 15 who have had 2 dates, 5 who have had 3, and 5 who have had 50. Then in the corresponding female group you have 5 who have had 1 date, 20 with 2 dates, 25 with 3 dates, and 50 with 4 dates. The average is the same for both groups, but any random woman you select is likely to be more "promiscuous" than any random man.
The same with cheating. If some men are cheaters, they must be cheating with someone, which implies female cheaters they're cheating with. Or, if they somehow are only cheating with single women, then some other single men must be getting *zero* partners to make up the difference. e.g. if married men are more promiscuous than married women, then single men must be less promiscuous than single women, which is a result that would seem to be contradictory to common sense: what's more likely is that married men and married women are equally likely to be cheaters.
No that doesn't work. You're mixing promiscuity and cheating, which are two different things, so your conclusion simply doesn't follow from the rest of your argument. But, even ignoring that, it falls apart for the same reason I listed above; distributions matter more than averages.
Besides which, if, say, 100% of men cheat, and 0% of women cheat, it's quite possible that there is a subset of women who service a large number of cheaters. Professionally. There might even be a name for sure a profession.
So, there are a lot more men than women in Silicon Valley. OK, but since babies are born in almost exactly a 50:50 ratio that means that some places in the US must have more available women than men? I presume single men in Silicon Valley can't move to these places since there are no suitable jobs, but perhaps they could at least vacation there. Ahh, perhaps people in Silicon Valley don't get vacations either.
Notes:
1: Since I am in the UK and married I am asking where all the single women are purely out of curiosity.
2: My wife is from a different European country, so I don't see that there is a problem with dating someone in a different US state.
1) I didn't whine, I stated a fact - one you agree with (that short men are fine asking tall women out and that women are NOT OK with it.) You are the only person here whining.
2) What would you think if someone said "jews are money grubbing bastards?" But you are fine attacking nerds as immature perverts.
3) Stop being upset when people call you on your personal flaws. It's OK for women to complain about men being shallow pigs only interested in sex with thin women. It's also OK for men to complain about women being shallow pigs only interested in relationships with tall men.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That is a one short term relationship system. If you only date people that already have a cat or a dog, you are looking for someone that won't have to change their life style to fit with yours. Perfect if all you want is a couple of months of fun.
This could be intentional. If you find a permanent relationship, then OKCupid will permanently lose you as a customer. Even if you don't pay them to be a member, they will have one less profile they can use as bait for attracting new members.
I am not really here right now.
At one level you might think it. But, I've talked about it with a number of Indian co-workers. At least, of the castes that end up working in America, there's some *stupidly* expensive wedding expectations, *stupidly* expensive rings and gold, and you'd f-ing well better have the house and car figured out before the wedding. Because your mother-in-law is moving in. These nice cricket-playing engineers were all working themselves silly over this stuff.
When I suggest to them that they just elope and have a $50 civil wedding (like I did), they just don't even fathom how that's a possibility. Trust me, the Indian system sucks, just in different ways.
Uh, how many dependent males are there? Like, guys with little to no education who couldn't get by on their own because they've been stay-at-home dads and housewi... househusbands? Is that even a word? Is there a market for sugarmoms?
More than you might think at first. I know a *surprising* number of professional 40-something women (doctors, college profs) supporting educated but generally ne'r-do-well "indie filmmaker type" stay-at-home man-baby hubbies.
I think the reasoning is this. "I don't really have the assets/looks/personality that men above or even paralleling my social status want. If I marry someone a little below my station (university staff, male nurses, etc), there'll always be a lot of unspoken tension about that power imbalance. But, if I marry some good-looking 6'2" drifty-doofus who is good with kids, we both know where we stand".
The problem, at least in your specific case, isn't the women.
After reading your post, it's pretty obvious that it's you.
Required reading for internet skeptics
In a marriage someone has to marry up and someone has to marry down. Traditionally men have married down as women have not really had real jobs. That has changed. Now women have equally good jobs so now some women need to marry down. But women have been brainwashed that the perfect man will earn more than them, be handsome, a great father and help around the house. The fairytale cannot happen for everyone. Some women computer engineers will have to marry baristas. Its not because there is a shortage of men, its because now women have equally good jobs and given the silicon valley costs and lifestyles 2 bristas getting married cannot afford to live here and 2 engineers getting married would be too busy to run a household.
**Life is too short to be serious**
We have not reached true gender equality until it's socially acceptable for a man to reject a woman because she's too poor.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Actually, he's not wrong. Most women do act quite entitled. He just failed to mention that most men also act that way as well.
I call this phenomenon the natural population governor of the developing world. The more materialistic we become, the more choosy we are about our partners, the less we spawn. I've often thought that China didn't need a law for birth restriction. They just had to give them bling.