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Personal Devlopment
Last night, for the first time in my 31 years of life, I had a second date. Thank you, OKCupid matching algorithm.
On the subject of OKCupid...
Conferring with other LWers at the last London meetup, I seemed to enjoy a disproportionately large amount of success with OKCupid given my modest looks and overall questionable value as a human being. Over the ~18 non-continuous months I was actively using OKCupid in London, I went on dates with at least 30 different women, many of which had positive outcomes of one form or another. Others present seemed to think this was quite a lot.
I don't think I have any particularly great expertise on the subject, and it seems likely I just found whatever worked for me, but I would like to offer myself up as a resource for anyone who wants to mine my experience for useful information.
I am considering using OKCupid "seriously" for the first time; I've had an account for years but mostly for entertainment, with no profile.
I would definitely be interested in trying to understand how you were so successful.
Some observations of my OKC experiences:
A big factor was being in London. I've lived in various other UK towns and cities, and London is the only place OKCupid "worked", in the sense of being a semi-reliable place to obtain a date, with a high rate of turnover in the pool of available matches. By way of comparison, in about 18 months of online dating in Birmingham, (the UK's second-largest city), I went on maybe half a dozen dates.
Age was probably also a salient feature. I was 29-30 at the time, and had a sliding window of 26-32 on ages of prospective matches. I imagine the numbers were probably in my favour as far as site demographics were concerned.
Speaking to other people, I seemed to have enjoyed a large number of 99% matches, even for London. I'd expect to log into my account and see around 15-20 99% matches, which I gather is also unusual. I almost exclusively dated high 90% matches. I didn't engage in any clever strategy for answering questions, though I did answer a lot (> 1000). I do wonder if there are some particularly discriminate questions that most men answer "incorrectly", and I happened to fall on the right side of them.
(My take on the OKCupid matching algorithm is that it's sensitive but not very selective. People who you get on well with will probably be high matches, but people who are high matches won't necessarily be people you get on well with. A disproportionate number of 99% matches were tied to groups in my existing social network.)
I'm pretty sure my comparative advantage on the dating market is a combination of eloquence and dirty-mindedness. There seems to be a large subset of women who I match highly with who really appreciate the ability to subtly encode filth in language. This probably carries well over text-based communications and may account for some of my relative success.
My subjective experience of dating on OKCupid seems to be similar to everyone else, in the "seriously, fuck OKCupid" sense. I would regularly compose thoughtful messages to interesting-sounding women only to get no response, which was disappointing and downheartening. (I do have quite a bit of sympathy for the women on OKCupid in this regard, but that's a whole other essay). This seems to be a fixed experience of being a dude on OKC. I have no idea how much effort I put in compared to other people, or even how to go about quantifying it, but this might be a factor.
Patterns of actually going on dates were very much Feast or Famine. Sometimes I'd go for months without any responses. Sometimes I'd have an elaborate scheduling nightmare. On a couple of occasions I got to second-date territory with two women simultaneously, which was a novel experience for someone who spent his formative years pretending to be mythical creatures and developing strong opinions on which starships were the best. There was a particularly gruelling stretch in early 2012 where I'd just come back from a date and didn't have another one in the calendar, and it felt like I'd gotten out of some sort of debt.
The most sensible approach seemed to be treating the whole process as a way to meet new friends, who happened to be single women who hadn't ruled out sleeping with me. In this regard OKCupid was pretty successful. A little under half of the women I met I maintain some sort of social contact with, even if it's just the occasional bit of banter on Facebook. Eight or so are people I'll actively hit up for social activity, and a couple I'd consider good friends. Romantic outcomes were mixed, but generally positive: a few brief casual affairs, one ongoing long-term relationship and one ongoing intermittent play partner.
After a recent event where I encountered someone I'd been on an OKCupid date with way back in 2011, but didn't remember where I knew them from, I went to the effort of listing every date I could remember to make sure it didn't happen again. This was surprisingly difficult. The number currently stands at thirty women, but there could easily be a couple I don't remember. Prior to making the list, I somehow had the idea that I'd been on quite a few "bad dates", but looking over them, there was only one I'd describe as bad, and a few I'd describe as so-so. The dates themselves were overwhelmingly positive, but I think the overall process can be quite draining.
I think I'm out of observations for now.
The more questions you answer, the more 99% matches you get. If you and another person have given the same answer to many questions, OkCupid tends to overestimate your compatibility.
One idea to avoid this is to first answer a thousand questions, see which ones are marked as Unacceptable most often, and then delete all of your answers and answer only those questions and the ones you consider particularly important.
Wow, that is extremely helpful and thorough. Thank you very much for the time you spent writing that.
Can I infer poly from that? I would expect that would reduce the field quite a bit, and introduce a lot of complications into the process, if that were the case while one was looking on OKC. (There's a Chrome extension to highlight people's answers to a handful of poly-compatibility questions; I found the hit rate for positive answers to be middling.)
"Monogamish" is probably a better description. My girlfriend and I are ostensibly polyamorous, but mostly we're just busy.
A significant proportion of my OKCupid matches were polyvangelists back when I was still quite skeptical of it. A couple of years ago I went to a "99% Party", where the two hosts (themselves 99% matches) invited all their 99% OKC matches, and each guest was allowed to bring a 99%-matching plus-one. That was a surreal experience. There was obviously some selection for extroversion and people who could turn up to a stranger's house in Islington on a week night, but I learned that my OKCupid matching-space neighbours were a lot more pro-poly, soapbox left-wing and literary than I was.
Interesting stuff. I've not had a great deal of success with OkC, but I tend to get bored of the dating site cycle – the few dates I've been on haven't been very exciting, and I tend to prefer meeting people in person (like at parties) as I find that more immediately engaging and exciting.
Could you link to your OkC profile? It'd be interesting to have a look at!
I ended up retiring the profile I went on all the dates with, because I didn't think it was getting me enough dates. It also went through a couple of complete rewrites over the period in question.
I do actually have a pretty coherent personal theory of how OKCupid profiles should be constructed, but I'd be hesitant to evangelise about it, because it's probably just optimised for being me.
Let's hear it!
I didn't have that much luck with OKC. The matching is quite OK, but the pool to too small in Germany and my predisposion (4 children) makes it difficult. I did find friends that way though.
There may be some other online dating site that's more popular there. Here in Italy there are very few people on OkC, nearly none of whom outside major cities, and most of whom foreigners only staying in Italy one or two semesters, but Badoo is much more popular.
(BTW, this week I am in Germany, and it looks like all advertising on all web pages and Android apps thinks I should try out Lovoo (never mind I'm already in a monogamous relationship, and never mind I'm leaving tomorrow anyway), so you might want to check that out.)
I know of some other platforms and tried one for a short time. I liked the OKC approach and bet on that. Maybe I'll try other later. But Lovoo really looks like the wrong audience.
This date was with an 81% match, the highest personality match in my city that was also attractive (higher matches turned out to be unappealing to my tastes).
For some strange reason, OKCupid thinks my best matches are in Oregon, Ontario, and Belgium. I wonder whether I should move.
Did you optimize your match score? 81% doesn't sound a lot. You can increase your visibility without reducing your honesty by applying the techniques of this guy:
http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/
Note that you don't need to scratch OKC. Just apply adaptive boosts (weigh safe bets higher) and don't answer ambiguous questions or questions where you expect mismatches (except if they are important for you).
This brought me out of the ~70% range into the >95% range without any lying.
Apparently, it boils down to visibility. Answering the least amount of questions that are compatible with the class of women that you are interested in while still maintaining high match percentage. (Apparently each answer is a potential mismatch) This supposedly leads to a high match which means you will turn up in their searches more often. Then visiting thousands of profiles. (The example used a script to do it automatically.)They will see that you visited. Some will be intrigued enough to visit you back, of those, some might send a message. It is probably worth it to send a message to visitors anyway.
Yes. One could summarize it that way.
Clicking thru profiles didn't net me any messages though. Probably not enough as there are only a limited number (~10 >95%) in my vicinity. But I did get nice messages from three 99%-matches across the globe.
I have answered 500+ personality questions, avoiding those with badly designed answers and those that are too saucy. The website says my highest possible match is around 99.7%.
And your highest match in your area is?
There are a couple of 96%.
I think that article describes an approach that's not-exactly-honest. Also, note that while he had lots of dates, most weren't very good. He was genuinely reducing the quality of his matches.
A milder, one-account approach is probably reasonable.
Well. Yes. But then I'd guess that most dating by many people is not-exactly-honest.
I don't think so. I put significant thought into estimating how many dates (by my current measure conversions with >1000 words count as dates) are needed to find someone who clicks (meaning emotional response/infatuation). The OKC questions only ensure lifestyle-compatibility but not physical attributes and 'chemistry' which are mostly orthogonal. Thus one doesn't get around the 25-100 needed dates (except if you accept non-clicking).
I agree.
Just take a woman who's vegan and has a principle not to be in a relationship with any person who eats meat. Take a new atheists and a believing Christian.
I personally don't really believe that "clicking" is mostly a matter of matching but a process of a mating procedure.
If a human goes through a certain process he feels an emotional response. That process is not easy to engineer. However in the somato-psycho education there are a bunch of practitioners who feel more physical intimacy (=chemistry) with their clients than the feel with their romantic partners.
Practically for myself opening up myself and not screwing up somewhere along the process is a lot harder than creating initial "chemistry".
I'm using The Charisma Myth, Neil Strauss' Rules of the Game, Nonviolent Communication, some other books and quite some LW posts to improve my social skills with good results. Apparently I made quite a good impression on my last job. I'm careful to clearly use only non-dark techniques (I avoid any that involve lies; The Game actually involves lots) and to stay authentic.
Nice, do you have any specific tips? If I wanted to add say the five most useful tips you've got, which would they be? Or the five most useful concepts?
My Anki decks spits out:
Take a stance. Take space. Take a breath. Take your time. Keep still. - This projecting self-confidence via posture was the first thing that I can clearly say worked. I use my fencing stance as a base.
Don't nod often or vigorously.
Consider your clothing. The color of clothing apparently signals something:
Red: ambition or passion. Useful to wake up an audience.
Black means you're serious, and won't take no for an answer.
Blue: trust. The darker the shade, the deeper the trust it elicits. <-- I prefer this.
Gray: quintessential color of neutrality in business and politics.
Practical Charisma: Before important events warm-up. Free time. Spend time with people supporting your. Positive athmosphere (music).
Recently I tried to apply an exercise from The Charisma Myth to project more benevolence: Imagine the people around you with angel wings and striving to achieve good. It almost always makes me smile so I will definitely continue it as it also improves my spirits. It actually brought back some positive stance which I think declined a bit in the last year(s). Whether I actually do project more benevolence I can't say (yet).
How do you Ankify knowledge like that? Or, to be specific, what's on the other side of those cards in Anki?
I make cloze texts involving the habit.
Example:
Front: You should take...
Back: a breath, a stance, take up space, take your time and keep stil
But for me the remembering of the text is less important than to be reminded of the habit at all. There wouldn't have to be page B. I'd just rate how well I did the habit. The cloze is just a quick check of how well I remember the key instructions.
I use a program I wrote over the last couple of months to improve my productivity and enforce habits in myself via conditioning. Whenever I hear of an interesting productivity trick or a useful habit, I add it to the program. So far, I think it's working, but there is so much overhead because of the sheer quantity of near-useless tricks that it will take some pruning before it actually becomes a strong net win.
I wonder in which way you add the tricks. Could you give an example?
I started an Anki deck for habits and tricks which reminds me of the tricks (cloze-style).
There is a levelling system. Every minute of work gives one experience point, with a bonus if it was done with the pomodoro technique. The program also contains a Todo list, which I use for everything. In this list, there is a section on habits. This section is filled with repeating tasks. Each evening, I tick off all the habits I kept that day. For each habit I don't tick off, I get a small experience drain the next morning. This encourages me to keep every habit, so that I can keep the daily experience drain to a minimum. Avoiding this negative reinforcement works very well as a motivator, and seeing the number for tomorrow's experience drain go down whenever I tick off a task also serves as positive reinforcement as well.
Sounds similar to HabitRPG - missing out on daily/weekly habits there lose you 'health' and doing them/doing your to-dos/habits such as a certain amount of work you get experience, which lets you level up.
Yes, it's pretty similar. I think their idea of making the punishment affect a separate health bar rather than reducing the experience directly may actually be better. I should try that out some time. Unlike HabitRPG (I think?) my program is also a todo list, though. I use it for organizing my tasks and any task that I don't finish in time costs experience, just like failing a habit. This helps to prevent procrastination.
HabitRPG can also work as a todo list.
Yep, although it hasn't yet implemented losing health if you don't meet it by a deadline - it's on the list of improvements to come, though. @Florian_Dietz, if you were interested in using what HabitRPG already has and implementing that functionality there, I'm sure a lot of people would be very grateful!
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Implement what functionality where? I don't think I'm going to start working for that company just because this feature is interesting :-) As for my own program, I changed it to use a health bar today, but that is of no use to anyone else, since the program is not designed to be easily usable by other people. I always find it terrible to consider that large companies have so many interdependencies that they take months to implement (and verify and test) what took an hour for my primitive program.
HabitRPG is completely open-source, and has very little actual staff (I think about 3 currently). Contributing to HabitRPG has more info (scroll down to 'Coders: Web and Mobile') - basically the philosophy is 'if you want something changed, go in and change it'. I thought you might like the app in general, and by adding that feature be able to get everything out of it you do with your own app, while helping lots of other people at the same time.
Fair enough - it does require more testing, and if you've got one going that works for you that's great :-)
I am re-learning negotiating by teaching it.
Max L.