Is there no problem out there that can’t be solved by SCIENCE? Apparently not. Indeed, it has recently come to my attention that one heroic nerdy dude actually used MATH to get a girlfriend. No really, an actual girlfriend. As in, a living human female that he’s seen naked. (We can only presume.)
Wired magazine found the story so astonishing that they devoted an entire 3000 word feature to it.
The piece tells the tale of Chris McKinlay, then a grad student in mathematics at UCLA, who went searching for love on OKCupid, a dating site that uses daters’ answers to various questions, ranging from silly to profound, in order to calculate a “match score” that supposedly measures your compatibility with a potential date. But McKinlay wasn’t getting as many dates as he wanted.
So he decided to “reverse-engineer” OkCupid. As McKinlay — ever the romantic — explains on his own blog, he used his mathematical skillz to analyze the “high-dimensional user metadata in [the] putatively bipartite social graph structure [of] OkCupid,” and adjust his own profile accordingly.
Basically, he crunched a lot of numbers to figure out how the kinds of women he was most interested in — in particular one data “cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists” — tended to answer questions. And then he fiddled with his own answers — and his choice of which questions to answer — so he would score higher match percentages with them. Ta da! Suddenly he had more matches.
He claims not to have answered any questions dishonestly, but as Wired notes “he let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.”
It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out that fudging your answers so they’re more like those of the women you’re targeting will make it look like you’re more like them. You can pull this same trick in real life by pretending to agree with everything a person says.
But you don’t have to be a psychologist to see that doing this kind of defeats the purpose of OKCupid’s match algorithms in the first place. You’re creating the illusion of chemistry where there may be none. Essentially, you’re cheating, but in a really self-defeating way.
And by focusing so intently on statistically crunchable data, he also ignored a lot of the more intangible “data” that the profiles provide if you actually sit down to read them. The numbers don’t reveal anything about a person’s verbal charm, or their sense of humor. They don’t tell you about the interesting little details of the person’s life.
As Katie Heaney notes in a Buzzfeed piece on McKinlay’s strange quest:
[M]uch of the language used in the story reflects a weird mathematician-pickup artist-hybrid view of women as mere data points … often quite literally: McKinlay refers to identity markers like ethnicity and religious beliefs as “all that crap”; his “survey data” is organized into a “single, solid gob”; unforeseen traits like tattoos and dog ownership are called “latent variables.” By viewing himself as a developer, and the women on OkCupid as subjects to be organized and “mined,” McKinlay places himself in a perceived greater place of power. Women are accessories he’s entitled to. Pickup artists do this too, calling women “targets” and places where they live and hang out “marketplaces.” It’s a spectrum, to be sure, but McKinlay’s worldview and the PUA worldview are two stops along it. Both seem to regard women as abstract prizes for clever wordplay or, as it may be, skilled coding. Neither seems particularly aware of, or concerned with, what happens after simply getting a woman to say yes.
And that’s where McKinlay’s system seems to have fallen down entirely. Though Wired is eager to present his “hacking” as a great success, it took McKinlay more than 90 dates — 87 of them first dates with no followup — before he found his current girlfriend.
In other words, his wondrous system produced a metric shit-ton of “false matches” and wasted a lot of people’s time, including his own.
And in the end it wasn’t his data crunching that brought his girlfriend to his door; as Wired notes, she found him on OKCupid after doing a “search for 6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA.” Happily for him, McKinlay already matched her preferences in these areas. In addition to appreciating his height and eye color and location in physical space, she apparently was also charmed by his cynical approach to OkCupid dating, so maybe they are a match made in heaven, if not in his data crunching techniques.
While McKinlay was going on first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date after first date, people I know have found wonderfully compatible matches — and long-term relationships — through OkCupid without having to date dozens of duds along the way.
How? Partly because OkCupid’s match algorithms led them to some interesting candidates. But mainly because they read profiles carefully and looked for compatibility in the words, not the numbers.
Is every profile on OKCupid somebody’s experiment? I’m beginning to think so.
Yeah… that Katie Heaney article was bullshit. If you want to actually see some real hashing of the topic check Dr. Nerdlove’s article on this. I think he also called her out as acting on an agenda from his twitter account.
http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/
Basically, the guy went on lots of dates. That’s still good. That’s still an improvement from his first status.
I dunno, this doesn’t seem as bad as all that.
Back when I was doing on-line dating (on the long-departed Spring Street Personals via Salon.com), we didn’t have these fancy “compatibility scores” so I had to set some basic
search filters and then read ALL the profiles and try and figure out which ones seemed compatible. They were sorted in order of most-recent update. I probably went on around 50 first dates before I met the person I married. (And there was nothing really wrong with most of the others – they were nice enough, there just wasn’t any chemistry.)
What I’m getting from the article is that OK Cupid won’t let you read ALL the profiles; you can’t see a profile unless it’s got a good compatibility score, and the algorithm for calculating the compatibility score is a bit arbitrary. So there’s some value in figuring out how to game the algorithm so that you can make your own decisions about compatibility without letting some dumb machine do it for you.
(I guess there would be a risk of getting pestered by the sort of people who think they’re compatible with everybody. Back in my day, you had to pay a dollar to send the initial message so that was less of a problem.)
” you can’t see a profile unless it’s got a good compatibility score,”
I wish that was true – I could have done without all those 0-40% d00ds messaging me :/
As a user of OKCupid, I sort of found the entire idea a bit odd because their system, though imperfect, seems to come up with some pretty decent matches. I usually describe them as “as close as you can expect” and frankly met some great people – just no one I was romantically compatible with. So I guess I don’t see the benefit he got except, perhaps, some confidence.
Going on ninety first dates sounds rather exhausting. I don’t see how that’s really preferable to not going on ninety first dates. That’s slightly less than two dates a week for a year, which would be nice with one partner, but 90? Even 45 first dates and 45 second dates would be better, because then you’re enjoying the first date well enough and getting to know the people slightly better. I can’t think of 90 restaurants I’d want to try.
I would rather go a year without dating.
No, OkCupid lets you see people regardless of match score. I’ve noticed looking at the CreepyPMs subreddit that a lot of the creepy messages are sent by guys with really really low match ratings who are obviously only looking at the pictures.
There was some controversy a while ago about whether or not OkCupid was hiding profiles of users who were rated more attractive from some of the other users; I’m not sure what the deal is with that.
No, you can see any matches you want. There are different ways to sort, the default is “Special Blend” but you can look for “highest enemy %” or “highest match %” and then scroll to the bottom of the list to see your lowest matches or whatnot.
You can even, as a straight man, ask OKCupid to show profiles of “girls who like girls” and it will show you all the profiles of women who have absolutely no interest in dating you. And you can then send them messages anyway. It’s really weird.
No, OkCupid lets you see people regardless of match score.
Thanks – I’d never used the site, so I misunderstood what was happening. I guess his goal was to trick other people into contacting him? If so, that’s pretty low. In my day, you were allowed to set basic search options, but after that you had a moral obligation to read ALL the profiles.
Reading the article, yes. He had a program visit thousands of women’s OKCupid profiles and then he would wait for them to reciprocate and visit his profile, and then he’d respond to the ones that messaged him. I suppose it’s faster than my system, but every so often you’ll end up with a Christian who goes around calling herself Jewish (which bothers me so much more than an atheist saying that she’s Jewish).
McKinlay wrote a rather whiny retort to Heaney’s article here:
https://medium.com/philosophy-logic/3e29c4802089
I like a lot of what Dr NerdLove has to say most of the time…but often (including in that article) he’s still treating relationships like some sort of quest. Mind, he treats it as a quest that involves interaction with other human beings…but still…
Like, the bit where he’s like “be optimistic because no one wants to date someone who’s complaining all the time,” is like….well yeah…but then shouldn’t the advice be “get help w/whatever shit is happening in your life so that you can be authentically optimistic?” – I wouldn’t want to agree to a date with someone who seemed more upbeat than they were, only to find out later that they had a pretty negative outlook on life.
I’m not seeing how anyone could interpret this method as “success” because:
– it’s a case study, and people would be stupid to extrapolate from one data point (his)
– we don’t know what the counterfactual is (it’s not a case control study)
– and someone else found him, although who knows how much of an influence his manipulated profile would have had. And would his algorithm have found her?
In my mind, the fact that he manipulated his profile in order to be viewed as more attractive to the group of people he was interested in is fucking creepy.
Only if he lied about things or misrepresented himself. Otherwise, changing your profile to present yourself better is a good thing to do.
For example, I might not want to have my driver’s license photo that makes me look like a cannibal on my OKCupid profile. And if I had it there, some people might recommend removing it.
I got a message from a guy once who was literally my highest enemy match in the entire world. I didn’t reply.
And I knew a guy there who hacked OK Cupid to have a very high match with EVERYONE. He only answered a couple of questions, but they were ones that everyone answers the same way. As far as I could tell though, he didn’t actually go on dates. He just liked chatting to people online. He was active in the OK Cupid forums, and his favourite thing was telling NIce Guys to stop whining.
@barcognito
I’ve had dudes do this to me. They’re creepy :/
Ok, some info on the math behind match scores, cuz I joined recently and being a stats geek…
You answer questions, if you want, other people do likewise, with each question you have to answer how important it is to you. From irrelevant to mandatory (which doesn’t mean mandatory btw, it just means, ah I’ll get there in a second). Irrelevant gets 0 weight, and mandatory gets, uh, 250? weighted points, the rest get weighted points on what looked like a log scale (so they get further and further apart the more important it is). Then they take your answers and the weighted points for them, and multiply it by everybody else’s to get the match/friend/enemy score.
So all he really did was say things were more or less important to him based on whether he thought the women he was looking for would check the options he did. Assuming he isn’t lying about not lying, he spent a lot of time and too much math to set the weights to wtf they actually meant to him. That is, if his pretty little algorithm said that his ideal woman was, idk, almost certain to check off the answer he preferred, he’d put it as mandatory instead of “a little important”. Pretty silly since whatever the question was it was likely that the sort of woman he was looking for would answer it with the option he preferred. Like, if it’s, idk, “would you date a smoker?” and he thought he didn’t give a shit if she would, but his math found that nearly all the women he was interested in put that they would, he’d put “yes” as mandatory to increase the match percent for that question.
——
Relatedly, I found someone else who thinks the gender binary is the pits, has read the posts here occasionally, and is fine with just being friends. We only started talking yesterday, so I don’t have high hopes or anything, but hey, anyone who likes it here has odds of being the sort of person I want to be friends with.
Oh and I didn’t play the OP’s false weighting game. And my profile was basically one long string of “warning: I’m diagnosibly mentally ill, if you can’t deal with that, there’s the door, if you think that’s romantic or want to fix me or something, fuck off”
I am tentatively hopeful I might manage to make some friends up here, since everyone I know is in Pittsburgh, Pecunium, or busy with work (and childhood friends, particularly those I might contact again, are all LOOK AT MY KIDS! which is adorkable, but they’re clearly also all I AM EXHAUSTED!)
And argh your gender options are binary. That’s annoying.
I’ve had dudes do this to me. They’re creepy :/
Fucking seriously? I knew you could answer “Yes” to the “Do you think rape is OK sometimes” questions and still stay on the site, but there’s an “I would like to harass lesbians” button too?
90 dates to get one successful hit is not efficient, mathematically or evolutionarily. In fact, it’s kinda pathetic. If you want to entertain yourself with algorithms, this was a fun experiment, and if you want to pretend that your ability in that department led to a successful match that you alone were totally in control of, mmkay, but seriously, my dating pool of choice is a local bar, and the strikeout rate there, for pretty much everyone, ain’t nowhere near as bad as one in ninety, no algorithms involved.
Of course alcohol often is, so…
@kiki
Luckily the dudes I got weren’t too harass-y, though I still was some creep-ed out. Mostly cuz, like why would straight* dudes be messaging me when it breaks it down by “x who likes x” One of them was about 25, and the other one was 30. I’m 19, for comparison :/
*iirc the ones I got were straight.
Not to excuse their behavior, but did you have the box checked that you were looking for friends? I only ask cuz I’m not really looking for a date so if someone not interested in my apparent gender had a really high match percent or something I might try making friends. But creepy is creepy, regardless whether they were trying to make friends or not.
@argenti
I did have the box checked (cuz it’s true) but I’m a lot more suspicous about meeting guys over that site, especially guys that much older than me. Though they may have been just looking for friends, but still. 30 yr old guy trying to talk to 19 old girl. idk I felt it was rather creepy.
I get a lot of messages from guys with 0% match. I can usually guess how creepy the message will be by the match percentage, the lower it is the creepier the message. The last one was a guy with a fetish for virgins (which is creepy all on it’s own, his whole profile was about wanting a pure virgin to deflower). I don’t even know why he messaged me, my profile outright states I’m kinky and on the opposite side of the country.
I love how the point about not treating women as people sailed right over Shadow Nirvana’s head.