Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.
Imagine
A ranks X and Y in that order
B ranks Y and X in that order
Both X and Y rank A and B in that order.
A will propose to X and match.
B will propose to X and get rejected.
B will propose to Y and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A.
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.
Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships
Gale-Shapely provides the best possible stable outcome for the proposing side.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.
Stable marriage algorithm or stable matching algorithm?
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
> basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is better than a perverted and corrupt democracy. Democracy isn't the perfect be-all and end-all form of governance that will work well for everyone, a fact even ancient greeks recognized. Letting the masses decide the future of a country just because they're the majority is like letting the passengers fly the plane because they outnumber the crew.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
the kind of issues that Singapore has been fairly effective at, getting people to speak the same tongue or not spitting on the street, what you could put into a bucket of 'public discipline' measures I think is over-romanticized.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
"In 1992, Deng exhorted CCP cadres to “learn from the world, especially from Singapore”, touching off a “Singapore fever” in PRC political and academic circles."
This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.
It's about prioritizing candidates for the costly initial audition, and breaking symmetry for the introduction, something particularly useful for people who can't just approach other at random in a social setting.
Meetup got enshittified years ago already, and the changes drove away the small communities that once made up so much of the site; the only groups which prosper on it now are mainly large for-profit ventures.
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
this is their third attempt at a government run dating service I think :/
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
Yeah the world is in a 60 year trend in declining births. An app isn't going to fix anything
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
The only new variable in the last century of humanity is birth control. All others (hypergamy, economic mobility, migration, etc.) are recurring and have not impacted birth rates significantly in the past.
Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates
Imagine A ranks X and Y in that order B ranks Y and X in that order
Both X and Y rank A and B in that order.
A will propose to X and match. B will propose to X and get rejected. B will propose to Y and match. Y will never get a proposal from A.
https://github.com/abhchand/stable-matching
It’s an effective yet simple algorithm. Also widely used in North America to match medical students with their residency of choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#In_Singapore
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale–Shapley_algorithm
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching_problem
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
https://jamestown.org/fortnight-end-singapore-model/
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/607615/summary
https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/construction-singapore-mo...
https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-...
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/singapores-success-cont...
https://www.fpri.org/article/2019/12/the-odd-couple-singapor...
https://aphrodite.global/
The project was partially started by some students/scholars from there.
Basically all dating apps are optimized for enabling casual hookups at this point.
>All the apps I know suck.
Do ALL the apps suck, or are you maybe not appealing enough for being picked for casual hookups by the users on the app?
Dunno, @beeforpork sounds hawt
If they don't have your interests, feel free to start a new group?
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Rapacious
ADJECTIVE
1 given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed.
2 inordinately greedy; predatory; extortionate.
a rapacious disposition.
grasping, voracious,
Synonyms:
ravenous
Antonyms: generous
3 (of animals) subsisting by the capture of living prey; predacious.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Edit:
Share of all likes received according to ChatGPT
Top 1% 16.4%
Top 5% 41.1%
Top 10% 58.0%
Top 50% 95.7%
Bottom 50% 4.3%
Historically they were compelled