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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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Shiraz
Shiraz
10 years ago

Errr, I’d say his “experiment” was unethical and refelcted a rather bloodless approach to potential romantic relationships.

How in the hell did this guy rate a feature article in a major publication? The women who went on first dates with him — are they pissed for wasting their time? Why exactly is he being celebrated? Oh, and OKCupid, are they alright that this guy bypassed their system and just made up his own rules? I could swear this “hacker” qualifies as an asshole on some levels. Maybe I’m being harsh…?

Woody A. married his step-daughter. I just took it for granted that he’s a perv.

cloudiah
10 years ago

Ah, the objectification of artsy creative women. Pardon me while I gag for a while.

And the whole Dylan Farrow shit-show (not her part of it, but the various soul-killing reactions to her story) is just so depressing. I’ve mostly been staying away from reading about it.

kittehserf
10 years ago

Someone who uses phrases like “high-dimensional user metadata in [the] putatively bipartite social graph structure [of] OkCupid” would be straight into the “undatable” file for me anyway, before any other considerations.

Kiwi girl:

Because, to me a major warning signal is hearing someone say: I didn’t lie, I just changed my answers a bit.

Changing the weighting sounds like lying to me. Making out something’s important or unimportant to you when it isn’t, just to get a date … that sounds both stupid and potentially creepy.

Dismissing someone’s ethnicity and religion as trivial sounds like he’s a feckin’ robot.

I’d rather date that cat, even if he is a bit of a douchecat.

90 first dates … what are the odds Mr Maths Genius wouldn’t even remember their faces or names after a while? If any had called him again (funny how most didn’t, wonder why that could be) he’d probably have struggled to put name + face + relevant details together.

Viscaria
Viscaria
10 years ago

Just the fact that the NY Times bit is called “Woody Allen Speaks Out” makes my blood boil. Like he’s been silenced.

cloudiah
10 years ago

Oh but technically, Allen didn’t marry his step-daughter, since he never married Mia Farrow nor adopted Soon-Yi. He married the sister of his children with Mia Farrow. Which isn’t exactly better; I’m just being pedantic.

Shiraz
Shiraz
10 years ago

Yep, what kitteh said.

Also, I find myself wondering what his current girlfriend — the one he hacked his brains out to find, thinks about all this.

kittehserf
10 years ago

He would have to train them to act human.

He should have trained himself to act human first.

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

At least we know his name.

Fuck, I just looked at the graphic on the Wired website, and one of the categories in there is “Dog” (second image in the piece, with the 3D balls).

Wow, just wow.

On Dylan Farrow, I’ve been reading a little, but the whole thing makes me so sad I’m trying to avoid it (there’s nothing I can do to help). Props to Lena Dunham and her twitter support for Dylan, and to the others in the media who have stood up to be counted.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Can you imagine seeing red carpet shots and so on all the time reminding you that your sister is now married to your former dad? Those poor kids.

Shiraz
Shiraz
10 years ago

“He married the sister of his children with Mia Farrow…”

Yeah, still gross. At one time he was involved with Soon-Yi’s mother. What, one day he decided it would be OK to date her adopted daughter? Jesus. Didn’t he ever have a “this may be too awkward” moment?

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

psst Kitteh, I think that the cat won’t care if the person is a TRAMP, so long as the litterbox is changed, the catfood is nice, and there are toys and a lap. And a fire, in winter, assuming seasons.

cloudiah
10 years ago

Shiraz, no argument on the “this is gross” front. I hope it’s clear from my comment that Allen is a terrible human being.

Viscaria
Viscaria
10 years ago

My cat is, even now, proclaiming his displeasure with my TRAMPy affair with my laptop keyboard.

grumpycatisagirl
grumpycatisagirl
10 years ago

TW: Woody Allen shit.

The Woody Allen thing is just a giant triggering mess. I don’t know what happened but I do know some journalists are being major assholes about it. Every time one of the brings up the “timing is suspect” I want to scream. It seems completely *unsuspect* to me that a victim of abuse would be triggered and angry by seeing her abuser get a friggin’ Lifetime Achievement Award on international television. Can these journalists not take a second to imagine what they’d feel like if it they saw their own abuser being lionized like that? Also, the ones that “mischievously” bring up Mia Farrow’s brother is a convicted child molester as if that has any bearing on Dylan’s own story . . . ugh ugh ugh it makes me upset and angry.

Shiraz
Shiraz
10 years ago

It’s clear, Cloudiah…no worries. 🙂

kittehserf
10 years ago

psst Kitteh, I think that the cat won’t care if the person is a TRAMP, so long as the litterbox is changed, the catfood is nice, and there are toys and a lap. And a fire, in winter, assuming seasons.

I wonder if he requires a house DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH.

Viscaria – see, your kitty has standards.

Has anyone seen the picture of Allen hugging his and Soon-Yi’s daughters? They look so stiff and uncomfortable. It doesn’t look like “this is Dad and we love him,” it looks like “we’ve been told to pose with creepy uncle and can’t wait to get away”. Even allowing for standard teenage embarassment with parents, in this case, it makes my skin crawl.

Shiraz
Shiraz
10 years ago

“Has anyone seen the picture of Allen hugging his and Soon-Yi’s daughters? They look so stiff and uncomfortable. It doesn’t look like “this is Dad and we love him,” it looks like “we’ve been told to pose with creepy uncle and can’t wait to get away”. Even allowing for standard teenage embarassment with parents, in this case, it makes my skin crawl.”

Ewwww. God. My skin is crawling too.

cloudiah
10 years ago

I see from the sidebar that David recently tweeted this, and it’s a pretty good distillation of the facts of the Farrow case.

Kim
Kim
10 years ago

So if the sort of woman he’s looking for tends to put “yes”, but he doesn’t really give a fuck whether she does or not, he’d put “yes” as the answer he was looking for and mark it as mandatory. Thus making it more likely he’d be matched with women who said yes => the women he’s looking for.

I thought that what you see as your match with someone is different to what they see as their match with you, because it gives more weight to what you want. So you’d have to match what you say you are to what they say is important, not vice versa.

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

@Kim, ah, and IMO that makes it even worse. So what he did was make sure he was higher than he should be in their search results, rather than simply affecting his search results.

Pond scum, like cream, floats to the top.

Argenti Aertheri
10 years ago

Kim — you’d have to do both really, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt with regards to “I didn’t lie”. Which is, admittedly, probably bullshit.

But I’ve answered some in the weirdest manner possible because there is no “anything but that answer” option — check all the others and make it mandatory. And I am MASSIVELY annoyed that there is no actual “no, really OKC, this isn’t a ‘keep an open mind’ situation” — meaning if you check the boxes that you want a partner who thinks ze is never owed sex, and make it mandatory, you may still get matches who think rape is okay. Just to top off that shit sundae, on the app there is no way, at all, to see the answers to questions you marked as important or the questions with unacceptable answers (both are things you can view online, if you actually look at their answers to the questions). And, of course, that one, and a few other really skeevy ones that amount to “is rape okay if…” are kinda obviously asking that so rapists are prolly gonna lie anyways. Not all of them, sure, but exchanging real names is your choice and they don’t do background checks or anything and the goddamned safety tips link is tiny and in the footer. Call me paranoid, but “we have no idea if this person has been arrested for rape or murder” should be highlighted. There is a question about whether you’ve been arrested, but it’s yes/no, so rapists and drug users would put the same answer, if truthful.

Now, I’m sure most OKC users are fairly decent people, but the answer to how much do they care about their users safety seems to be “not very much”. Point here, besides that I’m cranky, is that it’s no safer than meeting anyone else you met online.

This creeper is definitely a creeper, and I apologize if my obsession with math made it seem like I thought otherwise.

Kim
Kim
10 years ago

Talking to people I know who’ve used OKCupid, I do think there is something to their algorithms. I know best friends who signed up for the site; they ended up with a 99% match to each other.

When my friend and I were using OK Cupid at the same time, this was a bit of a problem because we got mostly the same guys for matches. More than once we both went out with the same guy without realising til afterwards.

Kiwi girl
Kiwi girl
10 years ago

This:

Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morn­ing, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.

combined with this:

McKinlay’s dissertation was relegated to a side project as he dove into the data. He was already sleeping in his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.

For McKinlay’s plan to work, he’d have to find a pattern in the survey data—a way to roughly group the women according to their similarities. The breakthrough came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First used in 1998 to analyze diseased soybean crops, it takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single, solid glob.

Suggests that UCLA computers were used to do all this unethical data collection/botting.

I wonder what the university’s policy on this is.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Do you remember when there was a big fuss about some dating site (not OKCupid) making at attempt to screen out convicted sex offenders? There were actually some dumbasses getting all “hey, convicted sex offenders need love too, don’t they deserve a second chance?”.

Not from me they don’t.