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water-data-dude 6 hours ago [-]
You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
vidarh 42 minutes ago [-]
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
pcthrowaway 4 hours ago [-]
If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
fidotron 20 minutes ago [-]
If playing the super long game, the app could get a consistent fraction of tax revenue from generated new taxpayers.
phreeza 3 hours ago [-]
Nice idea in principle but (in the case of private) too long a time horizon for typical corporations to care about, sadly.
ant6n 3 hours ago [-]
Dating Apps don’t need to be corporate. You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
zurfer 2 hours ago [-]
If there was no fraud and abuse and legal issues and ...
hypfer 2 hours ago [-]
No, even with that. 10 people are a lot, actually.
intended 35 minutes ago [-]
From people who deal with the trust and safety side of things, at a national scale of a few billion people, 10 people is definitely not enough.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
hypfer 33 minutes ago [-]
Which problems do you see that would require all of this, given that it is a nation platform where you are authenticated via your government ID?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
iso1631 27 minutes ago [-]
Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
sigmoid10 2 hours ago [-]
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
pydry 2 hours ago [-]
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
eru 3 hours ago [-]
Amazon (and Tesla) famously had very patient shareholders, and they are both private companies.
intended 36 minutes ago [-]
Hell no. Sorry for the reaction, but market optimization under current market principles, will result in the narrowest interpretation of the goal.
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
derangedHorse 9 minutes ago [-]
I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.
4848488484 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
expedition32 3 hours ago [-]
What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?
Retric 2 hours ago [-]
People having “large” numbers of children.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
hypfer 2 hours ago [-]
For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
Traditionally families often just had one bedroom for children. That's what things like bunkbeds are for.
kubb 48 minutes ago [-]
As someone who ho grew up in a smalll bedroom with multiple siblings until I was 19…
Fuck that.
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
That might very well be, but now people evidently seem to prefer not doing that, so what is your point?
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
bragh 50 minutes ago [-]
It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
vidarh 40 minutes ago [-]
I have never heard of a government demanding that. Where does that happen?
hypfer 48 minutes ago [-]
What government does that? That's something new to me.
KptMarchewa 52 minutes ago [-]
That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.
sacado2 1 hours ago [-]
Not everyone works from home. But if you do, you can live in unexpensive areas of your country, so it's a non-issue.
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway.
I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
So, in your opinion it is not possible to have kids unless you have 7(!) rooms?
hypfer 1 hours ago [-]
Possible for sure, but not necessarily pleasant, which is for sure a significant part of the reasons why people decide against having (more) children.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
pcthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
vovavili 12 minutes ago [-]
As long as that government is benevolent enough to avoid demographic engineering. Singapore is a fine melting pot, but I'd probably avoid using a closed source government-run dating app in both my home (EEU) and my current (WEU) country.
SwtCyber 4 hours ago [-]
The nice thing is that the government has no reason to keep you swiping forever
brabel 3 hours ago [-]
Its only motivator is to get you and someone else to start making babies as soon as possible. Which is often what the users want too.
fransje26 10 minutes ago [-]
> Which is often what the users want too.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
stymaar 1 hours ago [-]
The government also wants stable couples (divorce are costly to society) and non-toxic relationship (because these too are costly), which is also what the users desire.
sergiotapia 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
SwtCyber 4 hours ago [-]
I think that's a bit too reductive, but the incentive mismatch is real. Commercial apps generally benefit from people staying on the app; a government service theoretically benefits if people pair off and leave.
vidarh 31 minutes ago [-]
It's an interesting question, because on one hand the government goals will remove a lot of the perverse incentives. E.g. having people who aren't going to answer in the pool of profiles shown is mostly a negative. Doing actual, well thought out matches makes sense where for a commercial app favouring one-sided matches that keep one side wanting and not getting frequent answers can be better.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
eru 3 hours ago [-]
> Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
some_furry 5 hours ago [-]
It's also a market for lemons: Every match that leads to a long-term, exclusive relationship is two customers gone for good.
Bluestein 4 hours ago [-]
It's a self-depleting market. The optimum is, a la Big Pharma, to keep 'em in "dating" limbo.-
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
> It's a self-depleting market.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
stymaar 1 hours ago [-]
But where's your infinite growth in MMR coming from in your scenario.
derangedHorse 4 minutes ago [-]
> infinite growth in MMR
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
dan-robertson 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think that a market for lemons is the right analogy or how it relates to your other claims. A market for lemons is one where buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality goods (eg used cars). I think people are mostly ok at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners and the problem you describe is a different thing.
jansan 43 minutes ago [-]
You can try to replace women with bots, as those Chinese dating apps showed a few years ago:
Honestly, the levels of desperation and despair I'm seeing in the hellscape that is modern dating, I think a lot of people would sign up for this. I probably would if I were single. It's very similar to how matchmakers work, and they're popular all over the world, and have been for millennia. They're an unbiased and impartial judge and coach. We all have enormous biases and weaknesses in so many ways, and we could all do with help to better ourselves.
The important distinction here is no one is forced to marry anyone. This is entirely optional.
throw930839009 4 hours ago [-]
> desperation and despair
Desperation is from government, because many people just checked out. There are many nicer activities, such as hiking.
> unbiased and impartial judge and coach.
Gov has super strong biases, just the way they punish (or not punish at all) different groups, for the same crime.
> forced to marry anyone.
In every practical way you will be forced to marry. Common law marriage, alimony...
Gareth321 4 hours ago [-]
I am also pretty disillusioned with government right now, and I share your views on common law marriage and alimony, but I see this as one of the few things a government is doing right.
stoltzmann 3 hours ago [-]
>Autocratic goverment gets all your personal info
They got your birth record, your education records, your bank account details, your employment record. They can write themselves a warrant to dig through your life. The government already knows all this.
>chooses a mate for you.
You're not forced to marry whoever you match with in the app.
>This is beyond incentives, it is just perverse!
ok this is just slop
throw930839009 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
amunozo 3 hours ago [-]
Where in the 48 countries in Asia this is like that? Are you reducing the largest, most populated, and most diverse continent on Earth to a single country?
eru 3 hours ago [-]
Oh, yes, all of Asia is one jurisdiction.
blodkorv 14 minutes ago [-]
I dont see how a goverment-run dating service would solve the issue that social-media had made hypergamy run on steroids and that people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
dingaling911 7 minutes ago [-]
Hypergamy is real. "I need to have a baby, but eew this guy is a dork, I'm not giving him my womb, and look at all these cool guys on insta" is a real conversation I've had.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
lordnacho 2 hours ago [-]
I think this would be better than commercial services, which have all the wrong incentives.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago [-]
I want to agree, but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick. Or, it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings / opinions, let's put it that way.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
kubb 43 minutes ago [-]
> but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick
That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
jjmarr 6 hours ago [-]
Gale-Shapley, used in this service, has the property that one side ("proposing" side) is guaranteed their most advantageous stable match while the other side is guaranteed their worst possible stable match.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
Sniffnoy 3 hours ago [-]
> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
Scaevolus 5 hours ago [-]
Given how women initiate most divorces, it's probably best to set it up so they are the proposing side.
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
brabel 3 hours ago [-]
If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest. If women initiate, I’m afraid you will see only a few men getting any pairing. Men are likely to be less picky as we see in the wild.
stymaar 1 hours ago [-]
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
eru 3 hours ago [-]
For initiating, men are less picky.
For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
ndr 3 hours ago [-]
Monogamy is half the reason this is stable on paper.
jjmarr 4 hours ago [-]
> the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores
Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.
michaelt 4 hours ago [-]
If the goal is successful relationships, then probably?
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
boxed 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can measure love at all, and certainly not guess it based on some info you can type into your phone, so that's rules out before we even get started.
16 minutes ago [-]
SwtCyber 4 hours ago [-]
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jmalicki 5 hours ago [-]
Are there keywords to search for to read more? This is the first time I've heard about this! This is super interesting, what are a few well known other stable matches people deeper into this talk about?
jjmarr 4 hours ago [-]
The set of stable matches for a given problem seems to be called the lattice of stable matching.
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago [-]
That is how being the active party works.
“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”
5 hours ago [-]
globular-toast 2 hours ago [-]
Why is it a drawback, though? A stable match is a stable match. Do you lie awake at night wondering if your partner is really the best you could do?
SwtCyber 4 hours ago [-]
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dominicq 5 hours ago [-]
> In short, stable matches mean nothing when nobody is committed and the best options might exist outside of the matchmaking pool
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
SwtCyber 4 hours ago [-]
I think the algorithm is almost a distraction here. Gale-Shapley works nicely when preferences are reasonably well-defined and participants are actually committed to the matching process. Dating has neither property. People are terrible at predicting who they'll have chemistry with, and everyone has outside options.
rmason 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting the different takes different nations take over dropping birth rates. I posted a story here on the Lisdoonvarna dating festival in Ireland. This is a village with a lot of bars wanting to encourage tourism. It has had so much success that the government is now sponsoring it. Quite different than America where the government mandates something as opposed to funding something that has proven successful in a given area.
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
implements 3 hours ago [-]
Tangent: I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens. Use a bit of institutional wisdom to help people make the best of themselves from school age onwards, help people with similar or complementary skills and interests to connect … that kind of thing.
krisoft 2 hours ago [-]
> I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
Mashimo 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a job center to me.
ripitrust 1 hours ago [-]
The author's final recommendation about investing in offline third places is very true in modern Singapore
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
nirui 1 hours ago [-]
> with government workers set to be the first batch of daters
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.
olalonde 2 hours ago [-]
Strange how the country that consistently tops the Economic Freedom Index also has a government-run dating service.
kachnuv_ocasek 1 hours ago [-]
It's almost as though "economic freedom" (whatever that means) and the government schmutzing in citizens' personal affairs are completely unrelated things!
olalonde 35 minutes ago [-]
Technically it falls under "Size of Government", so it would deduct points in theory, though in practice it's probably too small to move the needle.
rurban 2 hours ago [-]
Glad to see that it requires cooperative partners, and not just parents. And that the matched partners are not automatically engaged.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
podocarp 5 hours ago [-]
Entirely dismissing how important looks, vibes, personality are in relationships. Not even dating -- if someone smells, you're not going to be incentives to make friends with them. This seems to me to just be trodding the same pseudoscientific route as MBTI personality tests, trying to condense a person into a list of multiple choice questions. That will never work. No algorithm can do it. Social interaction is not a solved game.
dominicq 5 hours ago [-]
The point isn't to be a complete solution to social interaction, the point is to provide a significantly better than random sampling and pairing.
You can then still apply your usual filters afterwards, such as smell, looks, vibes.
eternauta3k 5 hours ago [-]
It's a shame that they deduce your ranking just from the questions. I think the algorithm would be perfect if paired with a manual ranking by the user.
vachina 5 hours ago [-]
There are obvious deal breakers, and then as you grow older you develop “taste”.
These are well defined criteria which can be queried upon.
However the ranking only works if both sides are honest.
globular-toast 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but someone who looks, vibes and smells right can still be totally wrong for you. I often thought that online dating was inefficient because my eyes, ears and nose can rule out most potential mates without even thinking, but it works the other way too: I've had many partners I've enjoyed being physical with but would never want to settle down and start a family or anything (then again, I'm not a breeder at all, so take that with a pinch of salt). So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. You need all things to be right, and this surely can only be better than e.g. Tinder, where you see only pictures.
tommica 5 hours ago [-]
A very interesting solution to the problem. Surely this data will not be repurposed, right?
But if it helps likeminded people to find each other, then it absolutely has some value.
JasonHEIN 30 minutes ago [-]
tinder by gov ?
jharohit 6 hours ago [-]
person previously dating in singapore - this is awesome! wish i had
ChrisArchitect 7 hours ago [-]
Related:
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
There is no weight/debt/tattoos filter... Then again, maybe those are not a problem in Singapore?
CoinAlko 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you
bell-cot 30 minutes ago [-]
From a few comments in the article and here, I'm wondering how viable Singapore is as a country for typical residents (vs. the 1%) to have children.
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Anyone here familiar, to comment?
PennRobotics 56 minutes ago [-]
I have so many questions of my own:
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
-----
One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
sublinear 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting that when I ctrl-f the linked article and the previous discussion (463 comments), not once is the word "trust" found.
That's the actual problem, though (a lack of it)! Above all else, you'll probably overlook a lot and still commit long-term to someone you can trust.
killingtime74 6 hours ago [-]
Trust for the first date or long term? For the first date you already must supply your government id
MiroslavPokorny 5 hours ago [-]
Welcome to Korea 2.0
tonyhart7 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is good, yes there can be improve but the idea is good
especially for country like korea and japan ???? Yeah bro they need it
aaron695 55 minutes ago [-]
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thrownawaysz 5 hours ago [-]
I thought incels are white right wingers, first time I see this
term in a non-white context. Southern Poverty Law Center is listing them as a hate group for example so by definition incels can’t be black.
altacc 2 hours ago [-]
It appears you have the incorrect definition of incel.
manyaoman 39 minutes ago [-]
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thisrod 6 hours ago [-]
There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore? I've been told that the city's 30 year old gay and lesbian crowd is treated to a lot of fancy dates at public expense.
ValentineC 6 hours ago [-]
> There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore?
I don't understand your question.
tantalor 6 hours ago [-]
The govt pays for the date??
maplant 6 hours ago [-]
honestly that seems like a great way to spend public funds
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
Fuck that.
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-42609353
The important distinction here is no one is forced to marry anyone. This is entirely optional.
Desperation is from government, because many people just checked out. There are many nicer activities, such as hiking.
> unbiased and impartial judge and coach.
Gov has super strong biases, just the way they punish (or not punish at all) different groups, for the same crime.
> forced to marry anyone.
In every practical way you will be forced to marry. Common law marriage, alimony...
They got your birth record, your education records, your bank account details, your employment record. They can write themselves a warrant to dig through your life. The government already knows all this.
>chooses a mate for you.
You're not forced to marry whoever you match with in the app.
>This is beyond incentives, it is just perverse!
ok this is just slop
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_of_stable_matchings
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
https://matchmakerireland.com/
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
You can then still apply your usual filters afterwards, such as smell, looks, vibes.
These are well defined criteria which can be queried upon.
However the ranking only works if both sides are honest.
But if it helps likeminded people to find each other, then it absolutely has some value.
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906432
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Anyone here familiar, to comment?
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
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One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
That's the actual problem, though (a lack of it)! Above all else, you'll probably overlook a lot and still commit long-term to someone you can trust.
especially for country like korea and japan ???? Yeah bro they need it
I don't understand your question.