"There are 729,500 single women my age in New York City. My picture and profile successfully filtered out 729,499 of them and left me with the one I was looking for."
I know this is sort of meant as a joke, but I feel like one of the more interesting questions that could be addressed in an analysis like this is what percentage of the women in the dating pool could you actually have had a successful relationship with. How strong is your filter and how strong does it need to be? There's a tension between trying to find/obtain the best of many possible good options, and trying to find the one of a handful of good options in a haystack of bad ones.
I'm somewhat amazed that you looked at 300 profiles, read 60 of them, and liked 20 of them enough to send them messages. Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote, and that's not even taking into account the difference in difficulty between reading a profile and composing a message.
You make a big deal about the number of people available online, but in your previous article on soccer players you implied that the average had a much larger effect on the tails than the average did. If you're really looking for mates in the tails of the distribution, and 1 in 729,500 is about 4.5 sigma event, then being involved in organizations whose members are much more like your ideal mate on average may be a better strategy than online dating.
leplen, thanks for the feedback. Here are my thoughts.
ChristianKI is correct that I looked at match percentage, but mostly I felt that I would learn about someone more from a quick chat than from their profile so I wasn't limited to "perfectly written" profiles. Attractiveness is ultimately less important, but easier to judge.
I didn't think of the "average vs. total" point, but I liked it. Let's do the math: 1/729,500 is 4.68 sigma. If I was picking from a group that was a whole SD better, I would need to only meet a 3.68 sigma girl
There's a lot of data and research on what makes people successful at online dating, but I don't know anyone who actually tried to wholeheartedly apply this to themselves. I decided to be that person: I implemented lessons from data, economics, game theory and of course rationality in my profile and strategy and OkCupid. Shockingly, it worked! I got a lot of great dates, learned a ton and found the love of my life. I didn't expect dating to be my "rationalist win", but it happened.
Here's the first part of the story, I hope you'll find some useful tips and maybe a dollop of inspiration among all the silly jokes.
P.S.
Does anyone know who curates the "Latest on rationality blogs" toolbar? What are the requirements to be included?