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.
So updating your profile by small amounts is comparable to hours of math? Cuz it seems to me that going through other profiles and going “how did I forget to add that movie? I love that movie!” is nothing like this.
Oh and I just did some quick math, if each question takes an average of 20 seconds, which feels about right as a LOT of them are instant answers (a quick look at my answers and the first four are whether you’d consider a poly relationship, are you Hindu, can atheists have morals and do you have kids). That works out to a bit under two hours. And that’s my high end guess in average times. If you hit skip quickly on ones you have no strong feelings on and average more like 10 seconds, it’s 50 min.
Not really a terribly long time if you’re actually trying to find someone who you have shit in common with. Less time than sitting through a movie it turns out you hate!
Kim-
Pretty much. A lot of the algorithm matching you see is based on what you put as important and what they see is based on what they see as important.
So, to point out the fact more directly for some of the doubters on Mr. Douchebag, that means he couldn’t have at all made himself “look more appealing” by futzing with the “importance settings”. He could only do so by changing his answers from what were true to what he thought his intended prey would like.
In short, he invented a way that flattered his l33t hacker skillz to essentially lie about having a metaphorical big penis on a dating site. Revolutionary. And yeah, completely counter-productive even to himself.
But that’s pretty much how all PUA type shit sustains itself, ignoring the massive reality of how it doesn’t work to glomp onto the one or two exceptions that roll around for reasons other than the toolbag method he used to justify the system and justify promoting the system among other lonely people who want a way to avoid the vulnerability and emotional risk that comes from putting yourself out there honestly even though that’s the thing that actually works.
Argenti-
Yeah, you’d think so, but you’d be shocked how many people give the rapist answer anyways. I remember when niceguysofokcupid was still a thing, the number of assholes who had something complaining about the rape question being an obvious weeder question for rape in their profile or in the comment of the questions who nonetheless answered it in the rapist way because… reasons.
It’s not perfect, but as weeder questions it definitely provides very good warning signs in the form of low compatability scores people who are likely to be boundary-testers and other harassers or rapists.
Kiwi Girl:
You mean cats aren’t supposed to have standards as long as you act nice at them? What do you think they are, pet animals?
Shadow Nirvana-
The only way you can improve matching percentages for other people is to answer a different answer than you did before.
If you are answering differently than you would normally just to get around weeding questions and things that are important to people in order to get dates with people who are going to hate you, then yes, you are presenting yourself as something other than what you are.
And that’s just fucking stupid because the way OkCupid works, the thing that makes it better than going to a bar is that it lets you know whose like you and like what you are looking for and lets them know if you are like what they are looking for.
It’s a tool to let you see profiles and meet people who are more likely than average to be people you can have a good time hanging out with and seeing if you have romantic chemistry or sexual chemistry with. That’s it.
So yeah, he’s putting a lot of spin and way too many unethical manhours to stumble on the idea of just lying on your okcupid profile. Whoa, radical.
Yes! That’s the main point about this for me… he took the big draw of the site, that two people can meet based on mutual compatibility, and broke the compatibility system so he could date based on his wants only, not giving the women a chance to decide based on his honest profile. And surprise, it didn’t work.
Shadow Ninja-
No. It really won’t. Those factors are not counted as part of your compatibility rating, because frankly, why would they be. What do they have to do with whether you are similar people who are probably going to like hanging out.
You are actively lying to defend something that it’s really, really weird for you to be defending this personally and this vociferously.
Hey, SN, you know how you can get a date using OkCupid? Present yourself honestly and state what you are looking for in clear terms. Don’t try and shape yourself into what you think people want. Just be honest.
For fuck’s sake, if you can’t be honest on a site where you have a layer of pseudonym and protection from immediate bodily response protecting you, then you as a person are not ready to date anyone.
And you don’t need “game” or “mathematic tricks” to make up the difference, you just need to actually be willing to be the minimum amount of emotionally vulnerable.
Clearly, OkCupid needs a new category: “Men Seeking Putative Data Clusters”
shayla-
But-but-but women aren’t real people, so like it shouldn’t have affected the data. The data is perfect. The sorting method is perfect. He is perfect! I mean, it’s not like there’s a giant red flag here that reveals his main problem with women. Like his treatment of women as pokemon cards to be collected or his over-estimation of his own abilities or inability to understand the point of a system he wants to claim to be an expert over?
Nope, the problem must be in women acting in a “outlier” manner from the system by doing stupid meaningless latent variable shit as being actual human beings whose desires matter in a real and fulfilling romantic relationship.
I’m just in general disturbed by the concept of ‘hacking OKCupid’. You’re not supposed to beat the system. It isn’t a mate-bank withholding sex from customers unless they guess the right code or come up with some complex bank-robbery plan.
Although, with regards to the brutally honest thing, I answered honestly and publicly that I was a virgin (a 27 year old woman), and that got some interesting results. And boundary crossing. Creeps can be very polite and patient when they have a virgin fetish.
And of course I ask myself why people find it so hard, and then I read through the creepypms sub and remember that some people have the developed the equivalent of a mating call and dance that involves beating themselves senseless with a brick after flinging feces. Those people don’t need a hack, they need to learn some basic respect and boundaries.
rotating your pictures?
Do you mean like actually tilting the photos or changing them up? How does that get better results? Or do you mean camera angle? So many questions…
Anyway, what this guy did doesn’t rate too high on my scale to get pissed about. It’s sorta just dumb to me and perpetuates this myth that awkward or nerdy guys can’t get dates. It is a bit weird that it’s being portrayed as this dude’s triumph over the evils of online dating through his uber intellect. If your goal was 90 first dates, I guess he won. But, I think to a degree this speaks more to our societal conceptions of dating in general, that it’s some kind of game that you either win or lose at and I don’t think online dating helps that at all.
So you’re trying to use meaningless tweaks to get ahead of people with whom the woman actually has more in common with.
In other words, cheating.
I can imagine maybe the algorithm favors profiles that have been updated more recently, so you don’t turn up a bunch of people who haven’t been on for a year? Or maybe it’s so you’ll always look different so if you keep popping up in the same person’s results, it’ll be harder for her to go “Oh, it’s that creep again?”
Clearly, his problem was with thinking there are 7 types of women, when we all know of course there is only one type! (Gag. Also, looking at the Diverse cluster, it seems to be named that way because the women gave diverse answers to the questions. How is that a cluster again…) I’m really curious to hear from those 90 women because 0/90 is an impressive strikeout rate even under the circumstances. I’m sure they’re so glad they got used in a “social experiment” for a book too, and will be happy to find out they were sorted based on their same-sex experiences and willingness for one-night stands.
katz-
I guess that’s what Shadow Ninja is trying to make sound all sinister so he can get a false equivalence going.
Which, yeah, if you haven’t been on in a while and answered questions and so on, you’re not going to be in the top of anyone’s lists. It’s a “problem” that can be “solved” by just signing on regularly when you are actively looking for romantic partners and being active.
The whole thing is like some Goofus and Gallant thing with Goofus here designing a bad and time-consuming method of solving a problem more easily solved by just getting on his fucking computer and being a real person.
But I guess that wouldn’t have met the real need he wanted of thinking he was super l33t hacker d00d because he could program a script to make a really complex version of lying on your profile in order to waste everybody’s time.
What bothers me the most is how much time and devotion he spent on this little project of his. Like your PhD dissertation got put on the backburner? seriously?
@delphi, yes we probably do work in a very similar area although I’m applied rather than theoretical. 🙂 I’m not sure that he did any boosting because there was no mention of testing, training, and validating data sets in the breathless Wired piece.
I’m also curious as to how he picked the clusters he wanted to pursue, and I imagine it was the ones that made his penis happiest when he looked at the photos – because it certainly *wasn’t compatibility based on answer preferences*. Funny how the Wired piece stays clear away from that angle.
It’s not just that what he did was creepy and unethical, and *purposely contravened the policies of OKCupid* but also that he is now the most salient example of a mathematical/ machine learning / programming geek in people’s heads. Guys I know who work in those areas aren’t like him at all, but he’s just created a negative stereotype for people to laugh at for guys in that group. These are the guys I can be a total geek* around, and I’m accepted for who I am and what I can do, and they’re not fucking scared of/weirded out by me like other subsets of guys. Because female geeks still aren’t really that accepted.
So what he did *hurts other men*.
*I might mean nerd. But this was the correct use of geek when I was a teenager.
@Shadow Nirvana
I don’t know or care about those other examples, but how does this constitute a “backlash”? The guy wrote a book called “Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid” and the book is being marketed (I got 200+ women to go out with me and bagged me the fiancée of my dreams – AND SO CAN YOU!) and, gasp, criticized. Someone on Buzzfeed disagreed with the fawning Wired piece. Boo fucking hoo.
Katie Heaney, the author of the Buzzfeed article wrote a book about her wacky dating adventures. Feel free to criticize that fairly, unfairly or how ever you like. Have at it. People can judge what you say when you publish an advice book. I think his outrage over Buzzfeed is childish, but I get that no one likes criticism and it is pretty amusing that they offered him a job.
I don’t find what he did particularly wrong or outrageous, even though I think his “hacking” job of OK Cupid is being overblown. It’s a commercial enterprise, not a unquestionable force for good. They charge people $1-2 to “promote” their profile for 15 minutes. I don’t see the problem of people wanting to learn how make their profile more appealing or know how the website’s algorithms work. I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to disagree and voice their concerns.
The guy should be happy for the publicity because this “backlash” is pretty weak and will be forgotten momentarily by everyone but him and over-zealous defenders such as yourself.
Anyone else in love with the cat profile David found, with that amazing street shot of the cat. So debonair and self-assured. *Swoons*
Oh I missed this in the breathless wall of admiration that was the Wired item:
So his testing sample “clustered in a similar way” therefore his method “worked”? Actually, it sounds like the method didn’t entirely bloody work.
– did he still get 7 clusters?
– how did the distances between the clusters change?
– how did the question/answer weights change?
– what was the conclusion that the test sample was “similarly” clustered based on?
Because if I read this as an article that I was peer reviewing, those are the questions I would be asking. I don’t care that this isn’t in peer reviewed literature, those are basic questions that should have been asked. Journos who don’t know to ask those questions shouldn’t be writing pieces on technical stuff they don’t understand.
Reading on another site, I found out that the “Dog” cluster is women who have dogs (and not related to his personal opinion on attractiveness). If the most salient feature of one of the bloody clusters simply boils down to a woman owning a dog, I would not anticipate that many of these clusters would be useful in practice.
The most important result of all this math and hackery is that:
>>>Dating with his computer-endowed profiles was a completely different game. He could ignore messages consisting of bad one-liners. He responded to the ones that showed a sense of humor or displayed something interesting in their bios. Back when he was the pursuer, he’d swapped three to five messages to get a single date. Now he’d send just one reply. “You seem really cool. Want to meet?”
Basically, it changed his OKCupid usage pattern as if he was an awerage woman (like being able to get up to two dates a day). Sooo creepy.
Brooked:
Yes, he didn’t hack OKCupid, he botted it. Against their botting policy. And when his bots were detected, he created a new botting method. He data scraped OKCupid, which OKCupid actively seeks to prevent.
Imagine you run a dating website. You earn revenue this way, and you know you have to make your site attractive for people to use because profit! So you set up terms and conditions and privacy policies, etc, to make people feel comfortable about using your website. You strongly restrict access to your datasets (e.g. only make them available to your in-house mathematicians/statisticians who use the data to improve matching algorithms so the site continues to be useful to people who use it).
Then, someone comes along and scrapes information on thousands of your users to make their penis happy. While the users may have taken pains to ensure that their profiles mean they are relatively anonymous, the amount of data scraped for each user now makes at least some of them identifiable on the basis of the way they answered 300 questions. None of the users gave their permission to have their data used in this way, so there is no informed consent to have their OKCupid profiles used. The data on these profiles are stored on a university’s network, which is obviously outside of the OKCupid servers – who has access to this data now?
Can you see how this is wrong?
Oh, and if anyone’s curious, this isn’t what Amy Webb did at all! Let’s see if I can embed:
What she did was analyze other women’s good profiles because she was reaaally terrible at making a profile.
As for “that Canadian girl”: (She’s a woman, not a girl, and she has a name: Erin Wotherspoon.) She’s a foodie who runs a review blog about the food she has on the many dates she’s asked on. She admits flippantly that her aim is to have people pay for her to eat nice dinners. Naturally, she’s been sent death threats for it. A nice thing for her to do? Certainly not. Does the backlash against women doing a bad thing turn a hundred times more intense, violent, and sexual right off the bat? Yeah.
Nope, embedding fail. Here’s Amy Webb’s TED Talk.