You’re 100% right that it’s just a generic “dislike” button. I think you can tell when you get reported on a dating app you get a little pop up that reminds you of the rules, be appropriate, etc. The only time I’ve ever get those messages are after I’ve ghosted or otherwise not engaged with some woman I was talking to/met up with.
Although where the actual guidelines probably have teeth are where the admins review complaints. Nothing ever happened when some ghosted woman mashes the dislike button, but if I were sending unwanted* dick pics or threatening messages presumably they would’ve done something about it.
But of course, it still means when some hot guy sends dick pics he won’t get in trouble but when a creep does he will. But that’s sort of what we want right? People don’t want to see a creep’s dick pics and the creeps should learn not to send dick pics!
Tomato
1yr ago
Is it really that bad? I met my wife on hinge; almost everyone I know is more-or-less successfully meeting people for dates (and more if they want) through OLD.
Tomato
1yr ago
They really did believe that God made man equal
All of my mainstream American education growing up never conceived of equality in the way you’re suggesting. It was always in the sense of “equally subject to and deserving of the protections of the rule of law” or something along those lines. Maybe they actually meant something else but I’m pretty faithfully representing how American Liberalism is explained in mainstream American primary education.
Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary?
No, because I am not committed to the notion of equality you are putting forward. And my views are pretty representative of American liberals (not progressives, who are the ones pushing for reparations). However if, counterfactually, liberals were more committed to the kind of equality you’re describing, then sure, it seems like big enough reparations would definitionally be big enough lol
Tomato
1yr ago
I don't really see the contradiction. Nothing about ex-post or even ex-ante equality is baked into liberalism's concept of natural right. We basically just want institutions to not interfere too much and to treat everybody the same when they do. And if there's a really huge liberal commitment to ex-ante equality (e.g., everyone is born into the same amount of wealth) then taxes and transfers can get us there.
Tomato
1yr ago
There’s still bullying, it’s just that it’s backed up by the teacher and they don’t call it bullying.
I think the main thing is that kids need practice growing up in a social environment where there isn’t an outside authority figure you can ask to intervene. They need to learn that they have agency to alter both themselves and their social environment. A lot of online discourse, both from the left and increasingly from the right, has this flavor of learned helplessness, which ends up making people depressed and also craving some authority figure to fix things for them.
Then the problem is the only people willing to step up and be authority figures are the psychos who were immune to the learned helplessness training anyway.
Tomato
1yr ago
I was on one of these match maker services for free as a guy who got set up with women who were paying $50k+ per year for the privilege. The women might have been serious, but I certainly was not. Any of them could've found me and tried to fuck me for free on bumble.
On these services there are also women on there for free that the paypig men are getting set up with. I think they can't match the paypig women with the paypig men because the paypig women (30+, career successful, not necessarily hot or mother-of-your-kids material) aren't what the men are looking for.
Tomato
1yr ago
Date-me-docs or any other "long-form" online dating method is a complete meme and I honestly cannot believe that rationalists are so into these things. They're all just cheap talk, smoke, and mirrors. When you're looking for a partner, you need to filter out a ton of people, and you need hard verifiable information to do that. The only hard and verifiable information for people who are otherwise strangers on the internet are:
- Looks (verified through pictures)
- Education and work (stated, and easy to verify on google. Almost all women will do this FYI.)
The rest is just totally made up and fakeable. This is obvious because if you look at the date me docs, all the word-words-words are almost always the same for everybody. You like someone who is thoughtful? You want to have witty and deep conversations? You're into AI and futurism? Wow, truly a rare find.
You need to actually spend time with people in person to figure out the important things. Tinder/bumble/the rest are so popular because they prioritize the information that is verifiable online and get you to actually go and meet up with people. I'm married and I met my wife on hinge, but before that I was extremely active and successful with dating apps, some combination of tinder/bumble/hinge/raya. So take these observations in that context. Also, as a man who dates women these are comments about women but I'm sure something similar applies to men.
- There is almost no connection between a woman's stated preferences/dating goals and her actual behavior
(a) A few weeks ago there was an article in the NYT about date-me-docs and it featured a woman in the Bay Area who had one of these. Pretty typical Bay Area woman: Asian, tech worker, pretty cute, had her shit together. And had a super wordsy date-me-doc with a ton of detailed words-words-words. I cold emailed her to set her up with my friend, who is recently single. My email was a pic of my friend (tall and handsome) with two or three bullet points about his background (recruited athlete at very prestigious university; into outdoors stuff), and within a few minutes she responded with her number. For all that hubbub about a date-me-doc, my tinder-lite profile of my friend did the trick.
(b) I travel a lot for work and would almost always use bumble when I had a free night. Bumble lets you specify that you're looking for a relationship. You can just ignore this. I would swipe on these women, match, I'd clearly explain that I'm only there for a couple days, and they'd nevertheless be eager to meet up and hook up. Often these little meetups would lead to a nice connection and we'd keep talking/meet up again next time we were in one of each other's cities (I tend to match with high-income, fancy job, lots of traveling types), but ultimately both parties would know these were just casual flings with a limited shelf-life. That girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship is definitely, DEFINITELY fucking randos on the side. Don't forget it. And inversely, women who say they're looking for "something casual" are very often the ones to crazily show up at your office a few months later wondering why you haven't seen them again.
- You're much more likely to get personality catfished than looks catfished
It's much, much easier to fake a personality (especially through some self-promoting long-form writing) than it is to fake how you look. On my myriad dates the frequency with which someone's personality doesn't match what they seemed like online is way higher than the frequency with which someone's looks don't match their pictures (almost never). If you're getting looks catfished a lot, you really scraping the bottom of the app barrel or you need some practice in recognizing how fat women use angles or how chinese women use filters. The point is, there's only so far someone's curated self-description can get you. You just need to meet up.
- There is almost no connection between a woman's "public" personality and her "sexual" personality.
This confusion is so bafflingly common that there are entire movies and stock characters about this. When you're at work, or in a coffee shop, or generically in public, are you talking about all the weird sexual shit you're into? No? Does that mean you're not into it? Same for women. Of course women are sexual beings, and of course they are not super open about this at inappropriate times. And there's basically no way for you to connect the public to the private until the very last minute. The distance from that introverted Korean software engineer you just met showing you her favorite books to begging you to fuck her throat or cum inside her without birth control, is like, 5 minutes, tops.
Given this, why put any stock what-so-ever in some pre-planned about me document that has no predictive power?
- Everyone is on the tinder/bumble style apps, in some way
Almost all women have at least tried the apps. But even if they aren't currently on the apps, their friends are, and this impacts them both directly and indirectly. I have matched with women on the apps who set me up with their not-on-the-apps friends, which always leads to app-like behavior (hooking up). This is not to mention any of the general equilibrium impacts of the apps, which are probably huge.
The ONLY benefit I can see of long-form/date-me-docs style of online dating is that it's just another chance to put your profile in front of someone who might not have already seen it or swiped too quickly on a bumble/tinder-style app. So, like, sure, if you have fun writing about yourself and don't mind an embarrassing document being out there, go ahead and do it. But the likelihood that your manic rationalist dreamgirl is going to find you and date you from this is basically 0.
Tomato
1yr ago
Everyone I know who took adderall for performance enhancement is insanely burned out mentally and is downright awful physically by their late 30s, just fyi. YMMV but look out.
Tomato
1yr ago
People here hate to admit it but the future will be filled with tall, good-looking chads who are good at socializing.
If society doesn’t collapse we’ll just continue on the same trajectory of mate selection. If it does collapse then physically fit, personable guys will be the ones who actually have useful abilities.
The world is ending and society is collapsing; by the way, you and your armed horde of refugees can’t come over here because of this piece of paper I have.
Dorks like this will rightfully be the first ones killed in any real apocalypse. How did anyone take these guys seriously?
Or more fitting:
sorry, the blockchain says this is my bunker. You see, it’s a decentralized, indelible, trustless system for recording ownersh—ACK!
Tomato
1yr ago
AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
I want to use this as an opportunity to remember that Paul Krugman quote from the 90s about how the internet will be no more significant than the fax machine, which everyone routinely dunks on him for. Show me where in this chart of GDP growth that the internet was widely adopted.
Tomato
1yr ago
People into crypto because the tech allows for new types of transactions
What are the new types of transactions that anybody actually cares about in a quantitatively significant way?
Tomato
1yr ago
Nobody has ever convinced me that “slightly slow transactions on the backend” has any meaningful welfare consequences.
Tomato
1yr ago
The whole point of that article, that selection bias is bad, correctly points out that it gives you a conditional expectation when you often want an unconditional one. But then in the very next sentence it says nbd because you often care about correlations, not expectations. Sure, you often care about unconditional correlations, not conditional ones, which is what selection bias gives you.
Tomato
1yr ago
Aella-simping blogspam aside,
But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”
While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.
That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.
Tomato
1yr ago
This feels like semantics so I'm going to drop it after this, but I'm responding to someone saying "But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard" by pointing out that if society is restricting the ruleset by which Harvard can choose who gets into Harvard, then clearly, plainly, obviously, society is on its face having a say in who gets to go to Harvard. I'm not sure what's complicated about this tbh.
Tomato
1yr ago
Okay fine, but I hope people with this view are ready to bite the bullet and support admitting a ton of legacies and athletes and CEO's kids.
Tomato
1yr ago
I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.
Tomato
1yr ago
They're restricting the space of inputs that Harvard is allowed to use when making admissions decisions. I don't see how it's misleading at all to characterize that as SCOTUS having a say in who goes to Harvard.
In that context, the question of "what we as a society are aiming for" has to do with, "Do we want organizations, even private ones, to be able to discriminate their admissions against individuals on the basis of that individual's race?"
There's one line of argument that's saying, AA is bad because race-based discrimination is bad. I guess I agree with that but I'm kind of a libertarian at heart so my prior is that Harvard should be able to do what it wants. But anyway, I'm not interested in that part of the discussion.
There's another line of argument, which I'm asking about, which is saying that AA is bad because it's not meritocratic, and I'm trying to understand why we should really care about that per se.
I think there’s some serious bias in terms of who is complaining about it online. People for whom it works just don’t congregate online to talk about it.
At least in SF up through 2021 (when I met my wife) it was great and easy for whatever I wanted as a guy and even today in 2023 it seems to work well for all my friends. I have some older women friends who a little bit seem stuck in the “continually hooking up with someone out of their league and being unable to turn it into a relationship” cycle but a lot of them source through non-OLD anyway and I’m not sure whether their counterfactual non-OLD dating life would look better.
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