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Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong
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If one is able to improve how people are matched, it would bring about a huge amount of utility for the entire world.
People would be happier, they would be more productive, there would be less of the divorce-related waste. Being in a happy couple also means you are less distracted by conflict in the house, which leads to people better able to develop themselves and achieve their personal goals. You can keep adding to the direct benefits of being in a good pairing versus a bad pairing.
But it doesn't stop there. If we accept that better matched parents raise their children better, then you are looking at a huge improvement in the psychological health of the next generation of humans. And well-raised humans are more likely to match better with each other...
Under this light, it strikes me as vastly suboptimal that people today will get married to the best option available in their immediate environment when they reach the right age.
The cutting-edge online dating sites base their suggestions on a very limited list of questions. But each of us outputs huge amounts of data, many of them available through APIs on the web. Favourite books, movies, sleep patterns, browsing history, work history, health data, and so much more. We should be using that data to form good hypotheses on how to better match people. I'm actually shocked at the underinvestment in this area as a legitimate altruistic cause.
If an altruistic group of numbers-inclined people was to start working together to improve the world in a non-existential risk reducing kind of way, it strikes me that a dating site may be a fantastic thing to try. On the off-chance it actually produces real results, Applied Rationality will also have a great story of how it improved the world. And, you know, it might even make money.
Thoughts? Any better options?
There seem to be perverse incentives in the dating industry. Most obviously: if you successfully create a forever-happy couple, you have lost your customers; but if you make people date many promissingly-looking-yet-disappointing partners, they will keep returning to your site.
Actualy, maybe your customers are completely hypocritical about their goals: maybe "finding a true love" is their official goal, but what they really want is plausible deniability for fucking dozens of attractive strangers while pretending to search for the perfect soulmate. You could create a website which displays the best one or two matches, instead of hundreds of recommendations, and despite having higher success rate for people who try it, most people will probably be unimpressed and give you some bullshit excuses if you ask them.
Also, if people are delusional about their "sexual market value", you probably won't make money by trying to fix their delusions. They will be offended by the types of "ordinary" people you offer them as their best matches, when the competing website offers them Prince Charming (whose real goal is to maximize his number of one night stands) or Princess Charming (who really is a prostitute using the website to find potential clients). They will look at the photos and profiles from your website, and from the competing website, and then decide your website isn't even worth trying. They may also post an offended blog review, and you bet it will be popular on social networks.
So you probably would need to do this as a non-profit philantropic activity.
EDIT: I have an idea about how to remove the perverse incentives, but it requires a lot of trust in users. Make them pay if they have a happy relationship. For example if the website finds you a date, set a regular payment of $5 each month for the next 10 years; if the relationship breaks, cancel the payment. The value of a good relationship is higher than $5 a month, but the total payment of $600 could be enough for the website.
I wouldn't jump to malice so fast when incompetence suffices as an explanation. Nobody has actually done the proper research. The current sites have found a local maxima and are happy to extract value there. Google got huge by getting people off the site fast when everyone else was building portals.
You will of course get lots of delusionals, and lots of people damaged enough that they are unmatchable anyway. You can't help everybody. But also the point is to improve the result they would otherwise have had. Delusional people do end up finding a match in general, so you just have to improve that to have a win. Perhaps you can fix the incentive by getting paid for the duration of the resulting relationship. (and that has issues by itself, but that's a long conversation)
I don't think the philanthropic angle will help, though having altruistic investors who aren't looking for immediate maximisation of investment is probably a must, as a lot of this is pure research.
I don't think he was jumping to malice, rather delusion or bias.
I meant malice/incompetence on the part of the dating sites.
I think that's the business model of eharmony and they seem to be doing well.
That sounds a lot like really wanting a soulmate and an open relationship.
That's a nice thing to have; I am not judging anyone. Just thinking how that would influence the dating website algorithm, marketing, and the utility this whole project would create.
If some people say they want X but they actually want Y... however other people say they want X and they mean it... and the algorithm matches them together because the other characteristics match, at the end they may be still unsatisfied (if one of these groups is a small minority, they will be disappointed repeatedly). This could possibly be fixed by an algorithm smart enough that it could somehow detect which option it is, and only match people who want the same thing (whichever of X or Y it is).
If there are many people who say they want X but really want Y, how will you advertise the website? Probably by playing along and describing your website mostly as a site for X, but providing obvious hints that Y is also possible and frequent there. Alternatively, by describing your website as a site for X, but writing "independent" blog articles and comments describing how well it actually works for Y. (What is the chance that this actually is what dating sites are already doing, and the only complaining people are the nerds who don't understand the real rules?)
Maybe there is a market in explicitly supporting open relationships. (Especially if you start in the Bay Area.) By removing some hypocrisy, the matching could be made more efficient -- you could ask questions which you otherwise couldn't, e.g. "how many % of your time would you prefer to spend with this partner?".
I absolutely agree, but I am not sure that anyone was even considering this as a way to make money.
Unfortunately, for all the same reasons we cannot make money, we cannot get people to sign up for the site in the first place.
Two proposed solutions for this:
1) Something like I suggested before that matches people without them signing up somehow.
2) A bait and switch, where a site gets popular using the same tactics as other dating sites, and then switches to something better for them.
Neither of these solutions seem plausible to work at all.