Alexandros comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Coscott 25 February 2014 04:57AM

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Comment author: Alexandros 26 February 2014 11:25:05AM *  8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Randy_M 26 February 2014 03:31:09PM 2 points [-]

I don't think he was jumping to malice, rather delusion or bias.

Comment author: Alexandros 26 February 2014 11:00:41PM 1 point [-]

I meant malice/incompetence on the part of the dating sites.