Thoughts on Dating Apps
I have been thinking about the problem that computer dating is designed to solve. I can see four different approaches, three that exist in both realspace and online, one that could exist online but I am not sure does.
1. Examine the characteristics of many people, looking for someone you believe would work as a partner.
Subscribers to OKCupid answer questions about themselves, if they wish many questions. They look at the answers of other subscribers to find someone who looks like a good fit. It is an approach that people routinely use in realspace, considering people they encounter of the appropriate age, sex, and marital status as possible partners — except in a society such as Saudi Arabia where contact between single men and women is very strictly limited, leaving it to a man's mother and sister to find him a suitable bride.
The great advantage of computer dating is that it lets you search a much larger number of potential partners than you would encounter in realspace. On the other hand, the information you are using is provided by the potential partner, designed in part to make him or her appear a good match, so may be less reliable than what you could learn by direct observation.
2. Search a set of people already selected for you to have characteristics that make success more likely.
OKCupid allows you to filter for people within a given geographical area, by age, gender and some other characteristics. Dating apps as a group carry this farther, specializing in Christians who want to marry Christians, Jews who want to marry Jews, individuals looking for casual sex, individuals interested in marriage and uninterested in casual sex, and other categories of potential subscribers.
On the other hand, computer dating does not use the information implicit in who you associate with in real life, mostly people who have a good deal in common with you. A student at Harvard or Vasser is associating with other people who have passed the same filter, making a fit much more likely than with random pairing — this may be one of the major functions of institutions for higher education. Joining a political movement, becoming involved in a hobby, entering a profession, all put you in contact with a set of potential partners who share with you characteristics that might lead to a good fit.
3. Use an intermediary, someone looking at individuals and trying to match them up.
In the case of computer dating, the program can be the intermediary, showing you not a random collection of individuals but individuals that, in its judgement, fit what you are looking for and are looking for what you fit. The obvious way of doing this is based on the subscriber's account of his preferences for a partner but it also could be, perhaps sometimes is, based on someone else's theory of what characteristics go well together.
The realspace version in more traditional societies is the shadchen, the marriage broker. In a society such as modern-day America, it is done more informally. A colleague's wife suggests that there are a lot of nice girls at folk dancing — I go, despite not being a dancer, and meet the woman I have now been married to for almost forty years. I ask the wife of my married son, a perceptive woman who knows lots of people, if she can suggest anyone my single son or single daughter would get along with.
4. Use feedback on the results of attempted pairings to discover what characteristics predict successful ones.
The first approach depends on individuals knowing what sort of person will work for them as a partner. The third depends either on their knowing that or on someone else figuring it out for them. There might be a better way.
I am imagining a dating app one of whose terms is that, after your first date with someone met online, you provide the app with feedback, report whether things went well or badly, with further reports after any later dates and a final report after you either give up on each other or decide on a long-term relationship. The program uses that information to figure out what characteristics, defined by the information provided to them by each subscriber — not "is X," which the program does not know, but "says he is X" — predict a successful match. The fact that I had a successful or unsuccessful date with someone with a given set of characteristics not only predicts what other people I will have successful dates with, it predicts the same thing for other people who share my characteristics. Thus, over time, the program could provide experimental evidence on successful pairing based on self-reported evidence, making possible a better version of the previous approach.
Have any dating apps actually done this? If so, with what results?
I originally came up with the idea in the context of matching readers with books, inspired by a talk I heard on multi-dimensional voting theory, an approach to matching the positions of voters with the positions of politicians in order to predict electoral outcomes.
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