thomblake comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - LessWrong

19 Post author: Relsqui 11 October 2010 06:35AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (329)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 08:22:12AM *  10 points [-]

Frankly, I think that all this advice is simply irrelevant for all practical purposes. The goal of a dating site profile is to elicit interest and attraction from people who would in turn be attractive to you. However, what this post presents are just instructions for satisfying the author's entirely abstract vision for what a nice profile should look like. They are not guaranteed, or even likely, to improve your chances for eliciting attraction even from the author, let alone anyone else. Ultimately, the listed advice ends up being pure noise at best. The fact that a post like this one is getting a significant number of upvotes should serve as a strong warning signal to lots of people here that they greatly overestimate the level of "rationality" that they supposedly apply to all issues.

One basic problem is that the author starts with an impossible goal, namely providing fully general advice that will apply to people of all sexes and sexual preferences with unchanged wording. While such an approach resonates well with the modern popular forms of idealism, it is far too detached from reality to allow for any sensible results.

Another part that struck me as completely detached from reality is:

There are two schools of thought on whom you should ask to judge your profile's attractiveness. One is to ask the sort of person you're trying to attract: members of your preferred gender, and probably of your own culture.[...] The other school of thought is that the right people to ask are those who share your gender/culture preference, and have been successful attracting such partners. [...] Both have potential biases, but anything both types of critic agree on is probably correct.

That's about as realistic as saying that there are two schools of thought on what to do when the low fuel light in your car lights up: one is to to keep driving and pray to God that he might keep your car running no matter what happens, and the other is to pull over at the next gas station and fill the tank. If you're a man looking for women, the idea of asking women for advice in love and dating, versus getting advice from men who are successful with women, stand in about the same relation when it comes to the expected practical success. This is entirely uncontroversial among people who have any real knowledge of these matters.

Comment author: thomblake 11 October 2010 06:18:00PM 6 points [-]

Your criticisms of this post seem valid, but could likely be equally well-applied to (for example) most of what Eliezer and Yvain have written. To test this for yourself, go to a random post from (for example) the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and see how much empiricism stands behinds its claims.

Posts like this are fine, though they should be followed up by empirical study if anyone cares.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 06:58:48PM *  2 points [-]

thomblake:

Your criticisms of this post seem valid, but could likely be equally well-applied to (for example) most of what Eliezer and Yvain have written. To test this for yourself, go to a random post from (for example) the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and see how much empiricism stands behinds its claims.

I disagree. While I certainly have disagreements with these posts you mention, their approach is still fundamentally sound. They don't, at least in the great majority of cases, provide unsubstantiated practical advice in this vein, and they rarely, if ever, fail elementary sanity checks like these ones I mentioned.