I’m confused why people are so bad at dating. It seems to me like there are tons of $20 bills lying on the ground which no one picks up.

For example, we know that people systematically choose unattractive images for their dating profiles. Sites like PhotoFeeler cheaply (in some cases, freely) resolve this problem. Since photo quality is one of the strongest predictors of number of matches, you would think people would be clamoring to use these sites. And yet, not many people use them.

In the off-line dating world, it surprises me how few self-help books are about dating. Right now, zero of the top 10 Amazon best-selling self-help books are about dating. I see only two dating books in the top 50: The 5 Love Languages and Super Attractor. To the extent these books exist, they often have little to no empirical support; my guess is that horoscopes are the most frequently read source of dating advice. Evidence-based books like Mate are less widely read.

Possible Solution #1: Inadequate Equilibria

It might be that we are in an Inadequate Equilibrium. Eliezer proposes three general ways in which seeming inefficiencies can exist:

1. Cases where the decision lies in the hands of people who would gain little personally, or lose out personally, if they did what was necessary to help someone else;

This doesn’t seem very compelling in the case of online dating. Anyone could choose to use PhotoFeeler for themselves, for example.

2. Cases where decision-makers can’t reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information

Again, this isn’t compelling. PhotoFeeler clearly lets you know what other people think of your photos.

3. Systems that are broken in multiple places so that no one actor can make them better, even though, in principle, some magically coordinated action could move to a new stable state.

Regressions done by Hitsch et al., as well as common sense, indicate that improving your own photos, even if you do nothing else or nothing else changes about the world, does make a significant impact in your likelihood of finding a good partner. So again, this seems uncompelling.

Possible Solution #2: Free Energy

I’ve seen a number of novice rationalists committing what I shall term the Free Energy Fallacy, which is something along the lines of, “This system’s purpose is supposed to b

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{evolution + trust: truth, lies and consequences in small tribes + psychological effect of lying} {cons. [c]} = event observed here.