the best way to go is to ask someone of the same sex (and preferences)

Definitely. It is often recommended to guys to focus almost exclusively on advice from other males rather than women until you have reached a level of understanding such that you can reliably distinguish between people talking about what the world 'should' be like rather than what the world is. Having a certain level of social presence also makes it more likely that people will refrain from trying to foist the rules for boys on you and actually give honest assessment's of preferenes.

In my case I'm not looking for a transhumanist match: there are lots of really smart, interesting girls out there that haven't heard of transhumanism, and I have a lot more things to talk about than ethics. (Seriously, who talks about bioconservatism on the first date? Once a girl said on a first date, "There are so many books, it's the only thing that makes me really sad that I'm going to die." And I was like, "Oh, don't worry about that. We're not that far off from solving death, you'll be fine. I personally work on the problem; trust me, you'll have trillions of years to read your books." I was still able to get a second date.) I just do it because I think it's hilarious that I can come across as insane and still get girls by being relatively laconic. Social normalcy screens off epistemic oddity, to an extent. I'm not socially normal but I do an okay job at emulating it most of the time.

So those that would take inspiration from my profile, note that the nerdy parts aren't optimized for success. At all. I just like typing AIXI. AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI...

Maybe they're just sick of half-heartedly dating folks they don't click with.

I had a brief relationship with a nice boy who had never heard of most of the things I'm interested in -- he wasn't an intellectual type. Nothing against him, but it was surprisingly disappointing. After that, I thought, "Okay, in the long run I'm going to want a deeper connection than that."

Remember, these profiles are selected from the pool of "people who link their OKCupid profile on Less Wrong, and ask advice of the LW pool".

...although I am generally surprised at how anxious people in this group are to signal transhuman weirdness, especially transhuman weirdness that only one in a few thousand people would understand or find remotely sane. Do you really have access to such a high quality dating pool that you're looking for people who will be impressed instead of confused when you name-drop AIXI and state your intention to live forever?

I admit that my profile does gratuitously signal transhuman weirdness... I'm okay with that not because I'm expecting a large number of people to be impressed rather than confused/repelled by that, but because I'm more interested in meeting the (smaller number of) people who are interested/impressed/okay with that.

Great profile!

witty, + 5

sci-fi and singularity geek, +5

draws a webcomic + 5

wants kids, +2

degree in worldbuilding, awesome, +10

cooking, +3

vegetarian, -2 :(

likes fancy pretentious cheese, +1

I'm too old, live on another continent, and my wife is next to me right now, -50

Thank you. Now I have a face to go with my pointless Internet crush! :)

Oh man, you read like an alternate universe version of me where I stayed in school and kept reading fiction. Or, if it's not quite that strong, you at least send off a lot of "in my tribe" vibes.

One of my friends likes to call me an "antisocial extrovert" - I love and need people, but, like the bandanas, one at a time. Large groups are overstimulating.

I'm almost exactly the same way. I don't need only one at a time, but I like small groups or pairs. The closer I am to the people in question, the more of them I can handle at once. I'm building a list of axes (that's the plural of "axis" here, not "axe") along which humans are distributed for social/relationship purposes, and I definitely think "what size of group do you prefer to socialize in" is important enough to be on it. (It might actually have been the first one.)

I really want to try your cauliflower soup now.

I have a rant about a set of "most private thing" answers that includes yours. You're not obliged to care, but there it is.

Well, a lot of people like physical activity in a partner -- it says something about physical attractiveness, and also a sort of energetic outlook.

As for the predominance of outdoorsy activities -- honestly some of it is a class/culture thing, but so what. I've also noticed that there's overlap between math and mountaineering -- sort of the same kind of "coincidence" as math people liking Bach. Geeks tend to be drawn to physically demanding individual pursuits: running, climbing, cycling, and to a lesser extent weights. (Swimming ought to qualify but I've never met a lot of geeky swimmers.)

I find it really interesting that I'm included in that, but I think I understand why.

I absolutely share your intimidation by really outdoorsy-oriented profiles. It makes me feel like the person would always want to be off doing things I didn't know how to do, wasn't fit enough for, or just wasn't interested in.

I don't place my mentions of cyclling in that category, for two reasons:

1) Bicycling as a primary mode of transportation is common among people my age in my city. Cycling isn't a hobby for me; my bike is my car. I rarely ride just for pleasure.

2) Because of the first point, dating another cyclist--or at least a bike-friendly person--is actually a practical matter for me. If I date someone who has a car and no bike, and we travel together, I'm relying on that person for transportation wherever we go, and cannot leave by myself if I want to. This is inconvenient at best, and potentially scary at worst. We could travel separately, but drastically different speeds make that a bit of a nuisance ... plus, traveling with my date is just nicer.

This is not to say that I wouldn't date someone who didn't use bikes for transportation. But it's easier, and if it's going to be an issue I'd like to establish that up front.

Besides ... it's a filter for the sorts of people who might think "Ugh, why are these stupid bicyclists riding in the road?! Don't they know it's just for cars?!" ;)

Outdoors-adventure stories/pictures: I also enjoy such activities in moderation (e.g. I play beach volleyball several times a week), but doing so is seen as an attractive quality (evidence of "spirituality", health, attractiveness, willpower, etc. in comparison to the stereotypical couch potato or computer nerd). So you should expect people to sell that part of themselves to the extent that it exists in any quantity.

I haven't really followed the thread at all, but I grant permission to anyone to do what they want with it; it's their karma. I have a few LW posts that I'm already busy with for the next 5 days or so.

I believe you haven't written a post yet, Relsqui? I think you should do it. If you want, write a draft and set up a piratepad and link to it from here so that other people can contribute and edit.

I like the OkTrends blog; the analysis is more casual than scientific, of course, but the content is stuff that I was really interested to learn.

Also, as a more general point, I think that non-scientific but enormous back-of-the envelope calculations (like OkTrends) are a good supplement to tiny but scientifically designed studies. If the big&sloppy approach and the little&precise approach give completely different results, that's cause for further investigation. Pre-Internet, we didn't have the opportunity to do that much big&sloppy statistics, except very crude things like the census; but today, I think it might be useful to double-check the results of small experimental studies (e.g. in medicine) with self-reported stuff from an enormous population sample.

I and 100 others second the recommendation to read OKtrends: simple, frank statistical analysis. It's not the most useful information, but I was really surprised at their frankness when discussing touchy subjects: religion, race, attractiveness. They're very down-to-Earth in their analysis.

Also a bit about what people are looking for dating wise would be useful. Generally that is too dull to put in the profile itself, but required for advice I think.

Good point.

While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages--basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you're female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you're male--but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than "UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.") Similarly, knowing that "vegetarian" is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren't one.

Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you're trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn't roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don't. If you don't believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW's readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They're not all inane, but ...

(I suppose I'm making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I'm wrong, feel free to disregard.)

By the way, just in case you don't feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I've seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn't make the stunt any less scummy.

Don't get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actually the gospel truth. The site's judgments are based on that standard. So don't take them too seriously.

The author of that blog seems to give advice based purely on statistical correlation without making any effort to distinguish between correlation and causation. See this post for example.

I moused over your photo thumbnails to see what whpearson was talking about and thought, "Man, who does that smile remind me of? Oh, it's Kaylee! That's a Kaylee smile."

And then I read the actual first line of your profile and cracked up.

Unsolicited advice: Your third pic with the red dress is the best - but only 3? You could use a few more.

Aspartame is evil!

Ahh you and alicorn make me feel old. I would never have guessed so many people where were under 25.

I prefer the third picture to the first, although that may just be the clothing colours and fewer jpeg artifacts. You might want to crop the third to remove the plastic cups and extraneous people.

Other than that, I think you have a good mix of factual info to quirkiness in your profile.

You might think about re-ordering your categories of interests in terms of what is most important to you. If people are scanning then they might switch off after reading something that isn't so important (movies?) before reading something that is.

I didn't realize there were Lwers in the New Haven area; I should've expected that to change once school started up again. Tom McCabe is nearby too, I reckon. There should be a meetup, but I'm not allowed to organize those anymore.

I would make your third picture your display picture.

I don't have many specific names/titles listed in the favourites section, but I found that I received more messages when I did.

Things you couldn't do without: Aspartame. Nice. :)

I seem to recall someone laying into superstition surrounding aspartame risks here a while back. Including rather adamant skepticism about a friend's belief that it was the cause of her difficulties. Was that you or do we have another fan of artificial sweetener? :)

Reiterating advice I gave someone else -- you would look better with less blurry photos.

Out of curiosity, why do you consider Schubert lieder to be controversial?

Presumably people who are 'not photogenic' are not made of some different type of material that reacts differently to light than photogenic people. The problem must either be a lack of good quality photographs or an issue with uncomfortable body language when being photographed.

The camera also adds (visual cues that make it look like it adds) weight, and messes with color. My best friend just got married and had lots of photos taken of her and her husband. He looks fine because he starts out skinny as a rail and his coloration works in the photos. But in the very same photos, she develops a blotchy complexion and her hair color looks unnatural and gross. And while she's not fat, the extra ten pounds on the glossy photo nudge her a little that way. Her body language looks fine in photos (and if she were tensing up, wouldn't she also look tense on video? Video of her looks much better), and the quality of the photographer or camera can't be the issue because in the very same photograph her husband looks exactly like himself in real life and she looks weird.

Matt you have some great points.

I have lurked so far in this subset of the open thread and am now willing to throw in a couple remarks on my view of OKCupid.

1.) The OK trends blog to me cannot be read as serious social statistics analysis. It's intent is to get hits and keep their sky high google page rank. It is almost entirely a marketing ploy, and I find it impossible to source them on topics like "what makes a good picture?", "what makes a good message?", "are you all a bunch of racists?", &c.

2.) I have used their site for a little more than a year. My experience there is almost entirely positive, but my expectations for it are small. I find the website gaudy and slowly loading, and have arrived at a practice of logging on once a week, on Sunday morning; I update my journal, answer any messages, and do a quick search. Many Sundays I see no point in sending anybody any messages at all. I only contact somebody if there is something in their profile which genuinely interests me and inspires me to write them a message which has at least one sentence in it which I like.

The vast majority of profiles have no such content. At least 80% of the time I go through a woman's profile and she does not have one item in there worthy of a comment. I read ten profiles this morning and sent messages to none.

3.) I have a theory that most of the women on OKCupid put almost no effort into it; they are not genuinely interested in meeting any of the OKCupid men; they are participating by some complex motivation somewhere between playing around in a virtual world and window shopping what might be out there on the off chance, extremely remote, that they decide they want to buy; and also to compare what is advertised in the virtual world with the reality that they see around them in the real world.

4.) If anybody wants to look at my profile, I am tgroupguy. I would link to it, but there are a couple things in my profile which are obviously not LessWrong mainstream. If you want to see it anyway, I would be interested in reading what you have to say. You may not want to post it here; if you send it to my okcupid box I will not see it until next Sunday morning, but I will respond.

(SarahC and Relsqui's profiles are very far above the OKCupid standard.)

I know why I'm not photogenic:

1. Bad posture (which I can fix when I'm standing at a mirror, but which shows up a lot on candid pictures.)

2. Trouble with facial expressions (I'm not sure how to put this ... I'm not good at knowing how my face looks, and I have a dumb expression in most pictures. The general effect is "chipmunk.")

3. Small total volume of pictures (neither I nor my friends are in the habit of taking lots of pictures of each other.)

One of my defects is -- I'm not sure if there's a shorter way to put this -- knowing what my body position would look like to an observer. It's why I can't do something like, say, golf: you'll tell me to change my form and I won't understand what I'm doing wrong because I can't "see" myself. I think that photogenic people and performers, apart from being physically attractive, are really good at "seeing" themselves.

I like your ideas. Although some become harder to enact the less frequent your desired partner type is, which seems to be a problem for some people.

I'll note that if you are only willing to spend limited time on it and have the choice between improving general attractiveness and A/B testing profiles, I would pick the former.

I'm currently aiming for the increased salary and improved fitness.

I don't hold out much hope for OKcupid, I think I'll do better just getting out more to the sorts of events that the people I am interested in might go to.

1) I don't want to alarm you, but there's a tiger next to you.

2) I second the comments about your pictures. Get someone with a real camera to take some for you, smile when they do it, and then crop/balance them.

3) You made me giggle a few times; points for that.

4) I do too message men!

5) You get to goad the reader into asking you out and still have it sound like a joke exactly once. The second time it's desperate. (You do it once in the "message me if" and once in a photo caption.)

Where in CA are you from? :)

I get the sense that your profile content doesn't do you justice - perhaps you could afford to be more arrogant? No one you want to meet would find you boring.

I like most of your pictures, but I would include a few where you look more friendly and approachable, eg. pictures of you at work.

Perhaps I am alone in this, but the 2nd/middle picture looks terrible - as if you hadn't washed or shaved your head in a week.

I think the blurriness of your pictures makes you look less attractive. There was an OK Trends blog about this: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

I like it. I like the humor, I like the varied skills and interests.

Really like your "you should message me if" section. I would word it a bit differently, but definitely intriguing.

Well, you've got preselection going for you, I guess.

I don't think the "head back" picture is a good pose.

97%. But I guess that's really not too surprising. One of the things I like about okcupid is how it's easy to make the match rating act as a warning. Make it ignore choices that differ form yours but you don't feel are important, and put high value on the ones that do. I can usually tell at a glance if someone is religious or highly socially conservative.

If anyone's interested in giving advice on the "actually looking attractive" aspect of OkCupid profile optimization: I am wondering what to do about facial hair. This is what it currently looks like, and I don't like it very much at all. Possible options include going back to something like this, or aborting Operation Facial Hair altogether. (My Best Face ranked the first aforelinked photo as my worst, and the other one as my best (which surprised me a bit). That is some evidence about what people prefer, but not very strong evidence, because there are several other differences between the photos that could account for some of the variation.)

You have the same first name and initials (I'm assuming) as an ex-boyfriend of mine. You're also about the same age, live in the same general area, and look quite a bit like him.

So that was slightly startling. Also, yeah, 96% match rating. There seems to be an LW value cluster that's packed pretty tightly, relative to general personspace.

40% match. Wow. Picture me backing away slowly.

You may want to expand the sections "The first things people usually notice about me" and "The six things I could never do without". The former is a chance to provide a random detail about yourself. As for the latter, "eudaimonia" is a great answer, but if I didn't know the transhumanist connotation and looked it up on Wikipedia, I'd conclude that you must be a fan of virtue ethics :)

ETA: Oh, and a while back OKCupid got rid of the "I am , , and " section, and incorporated the text into your self-summary. You may or may not like that.

Drop the Myers-Brigg type indicator (very last season), and replace it with the hip and stylish Five factor model.

Or your profile will just end up attracting a bunch of Jung-fanboys who want to talk about their dream journals. :3

Ok, want to ask advice about something ... touchy.

Nice double entendre

Including the phrase 'sexually compatible' seems to send the right signal without being excessively crude. You can also use the question system to filter this kind of thing. There are questions that explicitly handle these sort of preferences and also the ability to select a set of questions as mandatory.

Apart from that you can do a search through all the sex questions and answer every one of them. That is what I did when I lost the 'more desiring of sex' picture on my profile and wanted to reclaim it. This will (obviously) lower the match ratings of prudes and also allow you to see [comparisons on various relevant criteria[(http://www.okcupid.com/profile/sadielou13/compare/bayesian_prior). Even if you haven't explicitly mentioned anything about prudishness you can make a reasonable inference about relative prudishness of potential matches by looking at a get a good indication of that from looking at "kinkier", "more old fashioned", "more desiring of sex" and "more moral".

(I just noticed that my rating puts me at +31% on 'pure'. WTF? I must be confused about what purity means since I could have sworn I was no such thing!)

Just say "No prudes". Why make it more complicated?

I'd keep it impersonal and put mentions of it with words that aren't associated with sex normally or are negatively associated with sex.

"Sex is nifty" is good in that it doesn't associate you with the sex, so doesn't illicit mental images. Nifty is also an odd word to associate with sex.

"I don't have a religious view on sex" is also unlikely to get the pervs going. Both of these are a bit boring through.

Failing that, to keep it more light hearted you might want to try adding in some sexual double entendres? Hard to balance the right level of subtlety and understandability though.

The girl I'm primarily dating put sex as one of the six things she couldn't do without. That didn't put me off. It also screens off crazy social conservatives.

Somehow I doubt that the part about needing a guy to have lots of sex with you is worth mentioning.

I agree with wedrifed; answering questions is a good way to express this and match on it without putting it up front in your profile. By the same token, you can sort the public answers of a potential match to see if you're compatible in that way.

I've seen plenty of women's profiles that mention sex. I imagine if armies of pervs were a terrible problem that probably wouldn't happen as much?

If you don't want to risk that though, my recommendation would be to leave it off entirely, deal with it in messaging or in person. It seems to me that if you don't want to state it outright, you're likely to be misinterpreted.

Ok. Replying to self to keep things organized. Have made a profile.

Some of the match questions are really poorly phrased. For example, consider the question "Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?" which has four possible answers:

* 1 Yes, and I enjoyed myself. * 2 Yes, and I did not enjoy myself. * 3 No, and I would never. * 4 No, but I would like to.

This neglects some fairly obvious other options such as "no, and indifferent." Many other questions had similar problems. The question about contraception was confusing since it wasn't clear whether abortion was considered contraception for this purpose. I assumed that it was not but I could see someone interpreting it as referring to any form of birth control.

I really like this; good pictures, and, yes, good writing.

Your six things made me laugh. But your "private thing" answer annoys me--conveniently, I have already written out a rant about why.

The word you're looking for is probably xenophilia.