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

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

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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: Relsqui 11 October 2010 06:32:36PM 3 points [-]

They are not guaranteed, or even likely, to improve your chances for eliciting attraction even from the author, let alone anyone else.

The only thing that "guarantees" eliciting attraction--from me or anyone else--is being attractive. If you write honestly about how you are a person whose interests and values do not intersect with mine, and present it well, I still will not message you. This is not a failure of your writing; it has saved us both some wasted time.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 October 2010 08:07:42PM 2 points [-]

The only thing that "guarantees" eliciting attraction--from me or anyone else--is being attractive.

Where 'being attractive' to a significant degree means 'doing things that elicit attraction'.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 11 October 2010 07:10:20PM *  2 points [-]

Relsqui:

The only thing that "guarantees" eliciting attraction--from me or anyone else--is being attractive.

I have no particular comment on what you write here, but I would like to point out that this makes my above comment sound much cruder than it really was. The phrases "guarantee to improve one's chances for eliciting attraction" and "guarantee eliciting attraction" do not mean the exact same thing.