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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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sparky
sparky
10 years ago

Hello, blockquote monster.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Given who it came from, I wouldn’t be surprised if by “labor camps” he meant camps in which women are forced to be in labor as often as possible. Since he’s so fond of the idea of forced pregnancy. Maybe it is DKM and this is the new evolution of his special punishment camps for sluts idea.

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

He will only care about the zygote/foetus until its born, and then will be anti any state measures to help the mother care for the baby (e.g. child support, child benefits). I’m not seeing the moral superiority of forcing a baby to be born and then supporting measures designed to – basically lower that baby’s IQ (e.g. due to poor nutrition) and make it directly have a miserable life (housing quality, ability to heat and cool living arrangements, quality of schools attended, quality of clothing).

So yes, the attempt to force the mother into giving birth is all around punishing the mother, not around caring for life. And apparently I’m the one who is morally reprehensible.

kittehserf
10 years ago

Sounds like he’s been reading The Handmaid’s Tale as a how-to.

leftwingfox
10 years ago

Damn. And I just managed to dig out my old dissection kit, too.

(Yes, I have one. Yeah, it’s creepy, but It’s amazing how useful it can be when messing with crafts and home repair)

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

Auggz — I figured as much, no worries!

I am currently on the hunt for fun free local things cuz I’m broke and not comfy with having my meals paid for with nothing in return. Perks of being next to Yale though, I’ve already got a nice little list. And is it Thursday yet? I wanna see the dinosaurs!!

leftwingfox
10 years ago

Oh, and on a slightly more philosophical note, the whole “Not my fault for their kidney failure” is a total non-starter. If life is so important, rather than punishing sex, then there’s no rape/incest exception, since the fetus is not responsible for the actions of the rapist.

That means the mother must sacrifice her bodily autonomy whether she is responsible or not, so why should I care if Hector isn’t responsible for another person’s kidney failure? Life is more important than bodily autonomy, so kidney time.

scott1139
scott1139
10 years ago

“Size doesn’t determine whether a human being is a person or not. Nor does stage of development. And nor does location (inside the womb or out of it.)”
I’d say the existence of a brain is actually quite important in determining whether something human is a “being” or not.

“The difference, Cassandra, is that the whole reason the unborn baby exists is because of the mother’s choices. I did not bring any of those kidney patients into existence or cause their kidneys to fail.”
I’d like to thank Hector for admitting it’s not about sacrificing bodily autonomy to save lives–it’s about trying to keep women in a subservient role. I do appreciate honesty–even if it’s unintentional.

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
10 years ago

Thanks for finding that poll, sparky! I found it interesting that the same poll asked “Do you think government should make laws aimed at convincing pregnant women who plan to have an abortion to change their minds, or don’t you think so?” and the stats were exactly the same for men and women (21% yes, 72% no, 7% don’t know/NA).

kittehserf
10 years ago

I think Hector may well be possible for kidney failure. Reading his walls o’ text is enough to start my internal organs shutting down.

kittehserf
10 years ago

No to mention causing typing fails – that should be “responsible” not “possible”. 😛

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Think of the wear and tear on a keyboard resulting from regurgitating the same anti-choice talking points over and over again, too. Save the keyboards!

kittehserf
10 years ago

Or the wear and tear on the CTRL V keys from pasting them all the time.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
10 years ago

It’s easy to proclaim you’re the most superior grown-up human being ever. Just keep calling other people morally inferior children and stick your fingers in your ears and refuse to listen to them. Because he said so, everybody!

Sorry Hector, but by your own rhetoric, your morality can be trumped by a brick. The brick will not listen to you or answer your arguments. If you try to engage it, it will just drop painfully onto your toe. Don’t even try to convince it. The brick has spoken. Bow down to it.

Gilly, I’m so sorry your friend had to go through that. My friend went through something similar – first an ectopic pregancy, then a severe case of HELLP that required an immediate D&C to save her life. Both pregnancies were very much wanted. It was an emotionally and physically wrenching process. She didn’t need to be made to jump through a bunch of hoops and medically unnecessary procedures designed to rub her face in her doomed fetus.

Later, she went on to have a beautiful, much-loved daughter. If the anti-abortionists had had their way, she would have died in horrible agony and neither she nor her daughter would be here right now. They never take into consideration the future unborn lives they might be saving by allowing emergency abortions. Not to mention the surviving siblings and spouse who would have to go through the grief of losing their mother and wife. How is that in any way a superior moral position? A woman is unquestionably a breathing, living, thinking, autonomous human being. There is no dispute about that. There is a dispute about the personhood of embryos, which will never be resolved. Why would you give more weight to the entity whose personhood is in question?

Anti-abortionists talk about abortion as if it’s the result of some wanton partying teenager tripping off to the clinic to use it as birth control before going to get a pedicure. Almost nobody gets an abortion lightly. Every situation is different. It’s a choice best left to a woman and her doctor, not a bunch of preachers and lawmakers making one-size-fits-all laws (while quietly ensuring their own wives and daughters have full access to abortion care, should an unwanted or life-threatening pregnancy arise).

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
10 years ago

Hey, one of our other trolls did that – using bizarre shortenings of people’s nyms. Always referred to CassandraSays (as she was then) as Says.

I was a little sad I missed that troll. I wanted to see it try to address me as “Butt”. Or “Pants”.

emilygoddess
emilygoddess
10 years ago

Late to the party again, because trolls always seem to pop in in the threads I’m not tracking. I kinda wanted to see mister “you’re too emotional” defend his choice to refer to a blastocyst as a “child”. Or how not wanting to risk one’s health and even life in pregnancy and childbirth is a “selfish whim” (referring to women’s lives as “trivial” is misogyny, in case anyone was unclear).

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
10 years ago

Anti-abortionists talk about abortion as if it’s the result of some wanton partying teenager tripping off to the clinic to use it as birth control before going to get a pedicure. Almost nobody gets an abortion lightly. Every situation is different.

Yes. Thank you. QFT because as many as people as possible need to *get* this.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

Seconding grumpycatisagirl — I can’t imagine abotion is taken lightly even by people who knew it was what they were going to do if their primary birth control failed.

emilygoddess
emilygoddess
10 years ago

NGL, if I found out I was pregnant I’d be on the phone scheduling an abortion ASAP. This is about 50% me being pretty sure I don’t want to experience pregnancy and childbirth, and 50% the fact that I have an IUD, so if I’m pregnant, it’s probably ectopic. And despite these extremely non-trivial reasons, I’d still be a little sad about it, partly because of the pro-life guilt trip, and partly because I’d feel like I missed out on something. Wouldn’t make abortion any less the right decision for me, though.

leatapp
leatapp
10 years ago

NGL, if I found out I was pregnant I’d be on the phone scheduling an abortion ASAP.

Emilygoddess,
Me too.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Yeah, I really don’t like the dialogue about not taking abortion lightly because it kind of buys in to the idea that abortion is immoral, even if unintentionally. I’ve never been pregnant, but if I ever had been? Not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would have had an abortion, and I wouldn’t feel guilty about it at all.

(Which is another part of the dialogue that I don’t like, the idea that it’s only OK to have had an abortion if you feel terrible about it, like you’re supposed to do penance.)

Ally S
10 years ago

I agree with cassandrakitty. The pro-choice movement ought to focus on fighting cultural attitudes that shame women for exercising their reproductive rights, and any common ground with the anti-choice movement’s hatred for abortion only legitimizes anti-choice narratives. I’m really high right now but hopefully that made some sense.

katz
10 years ago

I was a little sad I missed that troll. I wanted to see it try to address me as “Butt”. Or “Pants”.

It was always the last 4 letters of your nym, so you’d be “ants.”

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
10 years ago

Every situation is different.

That’s the big thing. There is certainly no reason to shame someone who doesn’t already feel terrible about having an abortion in the hopes that they *will* feel terrible, but certainly people who do feel any sadness/grief about it shouldn’t have their feelings minimized. Either way attempts to shame a woman in that position are offensive and appalling. No-one-size-fits-all here, so that’s why we need to leave it up to the person whose body it is.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

Cassandra — for my part, I wasn’t commenting on morality or the like, but that it’s a medical procedure and thus I doubt even people sure that it’s what they’d do if they were pregnant treat it as just another thing on their list of errands. Maybe that’s a shitty definition of lightly? I was trying to say that I doubt anyone just completely ignores the medical side of things.