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Dating by the Numbers: Why “hacking” OkCupid is a waste of everyone’s time

This data point is an outlier.
This data point is an outlier.

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.

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Marie
Marie
10 years ago

@yzek

Or chooses answers from scope he is (or at least thinks so) capable of changing his current traits for someone he’s attracted to.

-_- Changing yourself so you can fit into someone else’s attraction is already off/ weird, especially since you may not like how you change, and end up blaming it on the person you changed for. Though that’d only be kind of skeevy, the rest of the article cements him as skeevy.

(not to say that you should never change yourself, but doing it for the sole reason that someone you find attractive may find you attractive is just blah. Better to find someone who you like and likes you.)

Also, if he actually did change himself, it’d be different than lying. even lying with “well I think I can change this in the future” is still lying.

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

You know, it’s almost like yzek doesn’t understand what the guy did, didn’t read David’s post with the links, and didn’t read/understand any of the comments here.

vaiyt
10 years ago

“Or chooses answers from scope he is (or at least thinks so) capable of changing his current traits for someone he’s attracted to. ”

He chose deliberately false answers, based on mined data, only so he’d look like someone his targets would like to date. He wasn’t showing willingness to change, he was LYING.

“People who do not benefit from wonderful online cybernetic matchmaker do that often.”

You mean illegally appropriate personal data from other people, fabricate false data about yourself and try to trick people who aren’t interested in you with said false data? That’s interesting. Why do you assume everyone is morally bankrupt?

hellkell
hellkell
10 years ago

It’s been fun watching people like yzek and Buttboy out themselves as to just how morally deficient they are.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

They’re initially so sure that everyone else is as shitty as they are, too.

“Everyone lies about this stuff. Right? They do, right? Surely they do. My complete lack of sexual ethics is totally normal.”

Fibinachi
10 years ago

Or chooses answers from scope he is (or at least thinks so) capable of changing his current traits for someone he’s attracted to. People who do not benefit from wonderful online cybernetic matchmaker do that often.

I hope not. That’s very disheartening information. The knowledge that people in general will pick just the answers they think they can fake or change themselves into embodying, for the purpose of being more attractive is kind of… terrifying. It’s this vast, existentialist gulf of “Everyone who ever talked to me lies to me in an attempt to make me not reject them”. The world proposed in just that phraze, Yzek, is a terrible world full of opportunists waiting for a chance to say the right words to make themselves seem cool.

Like, I’m not currently practicing martial arts, so when someone tells me “Hey, Fibi, I love beating people with my shins and or getting someone in a joint lock, you into that?” I answer: “Well, no, I don’t think MMA is all that much fun, but if that was a really weird come on I’m totally down with it because you’re cute dear god did you just joint lock me aww, my fragile bones”

That weird sentiment of “It’s just the internet, I can lie”, fails the moment you realize… the ad is on the internet, but the people meet in real life

Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

“For someone who has a goal of finding a partner; it should be important to care about what possible partners consider important – unless of course you follow “just be yourself” philosophy.”

But…but…ARGHHHHH!! “Just be yourself” is what makes good relationships good!

Why in the hell would you want to use a dating site to find a partner with whom you can’ the yourself?! What sense does that make?

*head explodes*

Zombie Argenti says that considering what your partner considers important so you can ensure you share those values and this be yourself is how good relationships work.

——

In related things, pharm student and I were joking last night about how if ze left now ze’s be here around 2 am. We’re reaching the point of “I don’t care how it happens, but we need to be in the same (bed)room again already”. Moving sucks.

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

Also, the idea that you HAVE to lie to get a relationship is absolute bull. I was as up-front as I could be when hubby and I got together that I had a bad history, a rough present, and a load of issues. He was as up-front as he could be that he was still getting used to realizing he was bi, also had issues, and was going through a major change in life.

We’ve been together for over seven years now, and I’m very happy with him.

Sure, lying and bullshittery might get you a date… but I don’t think it’ll make anyone very happy in the long run.

Also, something else yzek seems totally clueless about (big shot), his tactic DIDN’T succeed. His girlfriend PICKED HIM, for unrelated reasons. So all this bullshit he did DIDN’T WORK.

I swear, it’s like none of them actually READ.

Yzek
Yzek
10 years ago

Thanks for all direct answers, even those most judgemental (those patronizing third-person talk excluded) and enjoy your life!

Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

“As a rule of thumb, save that vote for the case where you couldn’t POSSIBLY IMAGINE dating someone who answered incorrectly. Still, keep an open mind.”

That one really bugs me. I will not “keep an open mind” with someone who thinks they can be owed sex (f’ex). Or all the ones that follow the format: “would you date a person who…” where the thingy in questions describes me. So I can’t truly require that a potential partner be willing to date a smoker (seeing how I haven’t quit again yet…)

I really want a box for a flat out “never show me anyone who gives X answer”. Otherwise those rapist/abuser screening questions can be hard to spot if you match on shit like organization skills, values, etc.

Fibinachi
10 years ago

Wait, I missed that the first time around. I didn’t read (Sorry, LBT), all that detailed.

From what I see, finding a group of questions which are considered important by potential partners can be used to improve your overall compatibility score without any kind of lying about oneself. For someone who has a goal of finding a partner; it should be important to care about what possible partners consider important – unless of course you follow “just be yourself” philosophy.

I second Argenti in splattering brain matter all over the virtual room. My ego wants me to add “copious amounts of ” to that previous sentence, but even if I fancy myself smart I have no idea what Yzek is trying to communicate there. It’s important to care about what your partner wants, unless you are just yourself?

… is the hint there that you don’t care about other people, and find doing so a coy manipulative tactic to get them to like you, Yzek? Sorry if that’s reading way into things, but there’s little other way for me to understand that sentence.

That… might be the most inadvertently revealing thing I’ve ever seen, topping such wonders as “I don’t hate women, those bitches” and “It’s not like I’m angry they ignored me…. those bitches ignored me ON THE BEACH

It’s important to care about what your partner considers attractive, unless you are being just yourself…

Wow.

Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

Mikey, is that you?

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

And now he’s trying divide and conquer.

Dude, you are so dumb. Like really really dumb.

Marie
Marie
10 years ago

@argenti

Why in the hell would you want to use a dating site to find a partner with whom you can’ the yourself?! What sense does that make?

*head explodes*

Zombie Argenti says that considering what your partner considers important so you can ensure you share those values and this be yourself is how good relationships work.

I don’t have anything to add, but QFT.

I really want a box for a flat out “never show me anyone who gives X answer”. Otherwise those rapist/abuser screening questions can be hard to spot if you match on shit like organization skills, values, etc.

When you look at someone else’s profile, can’t you have it show you questions marked very important/ mandatory by you? I swear I could do it earlier :/

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

I’d rather have a way to prevent people who answer those questions the wrong way from contacting you. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a “if person says that they think sometimes someone is owed sex, they’re automatically blocked” button?

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

Does this mean you’re leaving, yzek? Please say you’re leaving.

And you say WE’RE condescending, but YOU’RE the one defending a goddamn spambot.

Marie
Marie
10 years ago

@LBT

But what about freeze peaches! Surely spambots deserve freeze peaches too!!leleven

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

Well, seeing how it’s freakin’ impossible to keep mailcarriers from delivering spam in this country, apparently this is so. *eyeroll* Seriously, I miss being in New Zealand sometimes, where you could put “no spam or circulars” above your mailbox, and the post service would have to OBEY.

Yzek
Yzek
10 years ago

@Please say you’re leaving.

I cannot promise I won’t be back; I must admint MB writes about something interesting once a year or two. And I’ll probably learn a lot again about: how terrible am, who I’m defending (or even supporting) – just because I don’t 100% agree with someone here.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Ew

Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

“When you look at someone else’s profile, can’t you have it show you questions marked very important/ mandatory by you? I swear I could do it earlier :/”

Online yes, app no. And it shows you all questions you’ve marked as important, not just ones where their answer is unacceptable (and you can view by unacceptable answers, but it shows all of then, even ones that were marked as not very important). No way to filter by important answers where their answer was unacceptable (which is just plain weird, it’d be two variables and thus no harder to code than searching by gender and age within a location…three variables)

kittehserf
10 years ago

‘corse it is. My best clothes will even let me blend in with my surroundings. I can see how it confuses some men!

*Pictures Marie, in exquisitely tailored camoflage, invisible besides the foliage plants in a posh restaurant*

Hey, don’t laugh. The uniforms of the customer service staff at the Concert Hall here used to be beige. That’s bad enough, but the walls were covered in pale leather. The staff looked like floating heads and hands if they stood still. 😛

kittehserf
10 years ago

But…but…ARGHHHHH!! “Just be yourself” is what makes good relationships good!

Unless you’re a skeeve like Yzek, of course. Or lying PoS in the original piece, who had 87 no-repeat dates from his slimy little program.

Maybe that’s why shitbags like this think lying is essential – because the odds of any woman wanting sex with them if they are honest about themselves are really poor.

katz
10 years ago

I suspect there’s an overlap here with the people who think that girls should act mysterious because once guys get to know them they won’t be interested in them anymore.

Marie
Marie
10 years ago

@yzek

And I’ll probably learn a lot again about: how terrible am, who I’m defending (or even supporting) – just because I don’t 100% agree with someone here.

Gosh, why is it that whenever trolls come here they try to pull the ‘you just don’t like that I don’t agree’ shit? Like, seriously? Yzek, you keep apologizing for the douchebag of the articles’ bad behavior, and wonder why you don’t get good reactions from people. Get a clue. :/

@argenti

ah. thanks for explaining :3

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