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.
@Kittehserf
Alright. Kitteh it is.
Also, in that case, I don’t wanna irritate anyone either, really. And, good point on uncomfortable perhaps implying a measure of vulnerability.. while I haven’t ever particularly thought of it that way, It still makes a lot of sense, and I may have to start using it like that.
THIS.
@Kim
Yeah.
Either way, both buttboy and the ‘hacker’ are both pretty reprehensible. Ignorance has never been a good excuse for treating others poorly, especially the self reinforced kind.
@Kim
You’re right, as long as you ignore age cohorts.
You want me to say what I mean? OK. The reason the “to be fair to buttboy” stuff annoys me is that people here have told you they don’t like it before, and you keep doing it*. To then expect me to explain why a comment that starts by implying that nobody else here has been fair to him, but you’re going to be, adds an extra level of annoyance. The passive-aggressive “I’m disappointed” stuff kicks the annoyance level up another notch. The random capitalization makes your comments hard to read, even if I was interested in another round of “but to be fair to the misogynistic asshat”, which I’m not.
*To be clear, I’m not trying to control what you say. You can keep doing the “but, to see things from the troll’s perspective” stuff if you want. I (and anyone else who finds it irritating) can also keep pointing out that it annoys the crap out of me.
@ Kim
Also, buttboy tried to get David to delete his comments in this thread. That’s not the action of someone who’s working on his misogyny and willing to learn from the conversations that he’s having with people here.
Unless he had that sudden painful rush of understanding of just what he’s been doing, and the shame is too much for him. Unlikely I know, but it’s a nice fantasy.
Oh, good, Diogenes the idiot is back. Long time no see. How’s life under your particular bridge?
Citation needed. Including the exact effects that all this “stuff” has on “dating success”. What is the strict definition of “dating success”? Is it quantitative or qualitative? How is it measured?
I’m guessing that the measurement you’re using for a lack of “dating success” is how much moaning someone does about it on Reddit – am I right?
Wait, did buttboy turn out to be Diogenes or did I miss a pile of troll droppings earlier in the thread?
You missed a pile of troll droppings, @cassandrakitty. Just up a bit.
@Cassandrakitty
Eh? The only time I recall anyone saying they didn’t like what I was doing (or gave an opinion at all, for that matter) was back when I introduced myself. After that, Everyone talked to me about it, and I explained myself, and everyone seemed to drop the subject after that, seemingly understanding my position and having no problem with it. (to my understanding anyway.)
Maybe I missed some replies In some threads? (In fact, I would wager I have.)
[blockquote]To then expect me to explain why a comment that starts by implying that nobody else here has been fair to him,[blockquote]
Except that I didn’t mean that, or rather, It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I understand, now that I’m thinking of it, how that was an error of mine. The meaning I was going for was more ‘If I am to give him the benefit of a doubt.’, rather then to imply that no one else was being fair. (However, again, upon you pointing it out, I can see how I got that wrong. I guess I have internalized some figures of speech to mean some odd things.)
Also, I admit I was being passive-aggressive when I said I was disappointed. Though, I was also being honest. It DID upset me that you didn’t read what I said. *Especially* because I want to fit in here, and be a contributing member of the community. I wont lie. It stung to be confronted like that by you two, I apologize for lashing out like that.
Anyway, this is exactly why I wanted you to be frank with me. (Thank you, by the way, for having the patience to do so.)
either way, I apologize for the Errors. Like I said before, my comment before was mostly to point out how even if I assume buttboy is just stupid, he is still VERY stupid. (and reprehensible.) I just didn’t really.. eh.. say it clearly. At all. Not ok of me in hindsight.
(Scrolls up)
Oh. Well that was boring. If he’s going to come back couldn’t he at least try to be more entertaining? Learn to juggle or something, whatever.
@marinaliteyears
Honestly, any comment that starts with “to be fair to (known troll)” is probably going to raise some people’s hackles, because it suggests that other people weren’t being fair. Can you see why that could be irritating to some of the people who’ve been arguing with him in depth for several pages?
The random caps thing may be purely my issue, so don’t feel like everyone is judging you for that. I think the reason I automatically skim comments that look like that is that a lot of MRAs for whatever weird reason have a tendency to use capitalization for emphasis, so when I see it I’m subconsciously going “ugh, those guys”.
@Cassandrakitty.
Of course. Combine an unintentional implication that no one else was being fair, and a lack of the intended condemnation, (Especially after a long argument with said troll.) And I perfectly understand where I went into the wrong from the get go, and why everyone was understandably annoyed.
As for the caps thing, it is a really annoying habit of mine. Its been a pain retraining myself to stop doing it. Even if its purely your issue, I don’t blame you for being bothered by it. its bad form irregardless of how many people it may or may not bother. (plus, it bothers *me* when I notice it, and that is more then enough.)
I should specify, I meant “that no one else was being fair” WAS the unintentional implication.
Darn messy sentences. I really ought to work on that.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea where the capitalization thing came from? I’ve always wondered why so many MRAs do it, and you’re the first non-MRA I’ve encountered who does (though they seem to do it as a replacement for italics). Is there some forum where everyone does it that got people into the habit or something?
..huh. No, not that I can think of. I mean, I suppose it could have been my circle of friends, (who probably outgrew it while I still did it, sometime after I lost contact.) or any number of websites I went to regularly in the past. (gaiaonline, neopets.. to name a few.) none of which I imagine have much to do with MRA specifically, and none of which lack an italics feature.
It is pretty bizarre though, to know I share a habit with any number of MRA.. gross. Now I have extra reason to kick the habit as soon as humanly possible.
LOL! Sorry, didn’t mean to make you feel contaminated by association. I just wondered if maybe it was a relic of, say, a forum where certain html tags didn’t work and people had started doing it as a work-around and then it just became a habit.
Well, now that you say it like that, I have a working theory on why it has become so big a thing for me: Ive been pretty slow to embrace HTML, Especially in places where it isn’t a built in button. (like here, for example. Notice how I use * to emphasize when not capitalizing incorrectly, and have yet to use the block quote correctly.)
Mostly because I’ve always had it as a button, and when I haven’t had it as a button, its like arcane magic as far as my understanding goes.
I know I had the capitalization habit (which I hope I managed to outgrow since) from doing a lot of IRC based chatting in college. It only had bolding, underline and 16 colors (for both text and background) and using all of these were discouraged in most chatrooms I frequented. (Mostly because some users misused them horribly in the past with things like flooding the channel with multicolored ASCII art.)
If you use Firefox apparently there’s a plug-in that makes it easier. I haven’t tried it, but I think Kittehs was saying that it worked well for her in another thread.
Citation needed. Plus where is your definition of “dating success”? And your measures?
Come on, Dogknees, put some effort into this.
Random caps is also popular in pseudo-science, conspiracy and extreme religious circles. They do it on websites where they have access to everything HTML has to offer. Since MRAs have overlap with all those sub-cultures, I’d say it’s related. Not that that gives any indication of why they do it, or where it started.
But we’re not talking about different age groups. We’re treating men and women as monoliths.
Back at the original post, I don’t get why the hacker thinks he’s a success. 91 first dates with no follow-up sounds like a pretty rubbishing dating pattern to me. I mean, unless you’re into first dates. And probably pretty awkward ones at that, if there was no second date.
So he manipulates women who otherwise wouldn’t date him to go on a date with him. And clearly, neither of them enjoy that experience enough to go out again.
Dude, those women you think you want to date? You actually don’t like going on a date with them. And the reason why they wouldn’t go on a date with the real you? It’s cos they already know they won’t enjoy dating you. Sounds like the OKCupid algorithm you worked so hard to hack was actually doing a good job in preventing you from going on dates with people you don’t enjoy dating!
TL; DR: Get a clue!