Epistemic status: intuition and some experience, no sources.
Long-form profiles are mostly a waste of time. The two key weaknesses are 1) the primacy of photos and 2) adversarial communication
Tinder made millions by realizing that many, many users make snap decisions based on photos and the rest doesn’t produce as strong of results. That’s not to say no one reads the profiles and decides on them, but at least a minority do (and some will just stay anchored to their impression of the photos while reading anyways).
Dating is a “lemon market,” where everyone playing wants to attract the highest-quality partner they can relative to their own status. That means when you write a long-form profile, you’re incentivized to fluff it up and present yourself in the best possible light, and when you’re reading a profile you need to take that into account when trying to evaluate quality. And even if you’re honest, other readers will probably still apply the critical lens. This doesn’t degrade the value of the long-form profile signal to zero, but it does discount the return on your time investment.
Now that I’m happily engaged I tend to think my pessimism on the value of online dating full stop was well-warranted and there’s no substitute for in-person socializing, particularly in a group/community space where the adversarial presentation dynamics are reduced. If my current mind was thrown back in time to when I was 18 I’d skip online dating altogether and just get into more clubs and study groups and stuff in college.
I see at least two ways in which it isn’t a lemon market for everyone/every circumstance:
1. If you value compatibility a lot and seek a long-term relationship, you’re wasting your own time if you try to cover up things that some people might consider to be flaws or dealbreakers. 2: Some people are temperamentally quite sensitive to rejection, and rejection hurts more the more someone gets close to the real you. To protect against the pain from rejection at a later point, some people are deliberately very open about their flaws right out of the gate.
Doing a lot of 2. can be sign that someone isn’t ready for a relationship (as it almost exclusively turns off potential partners), but I think it’s possible for people who are temperamentally tempted to self-sabotage that way to transform it into a strength. Combined with developing self-confidence about one’s good qualities, an awareness of (and openness about) one’s weaknesses can seem quite appealing.
You might say “but then you’re indirectly signalling positive qualities again (“awareness of flaws; the confidence to admit flaws”), so this is still about presenting oneself in the best light possible.” Hm, sort of, but if you’re actually admitting to things that some people will consider to be dealbreakers, you’re opening yourself up to the luck of draw (“will she/he consider it a dealbreaker or not?”), so in the instances where you get lucky and she/he is okay with it or finds it endearing, you actually sent a credible signal! (I.e., you partly overcame the dynamics/incentives that make it difficult in early-stage dating to update much on quality and compatibility.)
High quality, interesting, funny writing has been a difficult to manufacture signal up till now. It’s possible GPT-n will change that. But folks on LW are probably filtering for people who will filter for making real pretty with the letter forms.
Folks on LW are also the kind of people who might take advantage of letting GPT-n do the funny writing for themselves if they lack the skills themselves.
Most people don’t even engage in basic steps like testing their photos on photofeeler right now. I highly doubt that a significant amount of online daters will use AI generated responses even if the tech is available.
I think my model here is something more like, “ML agents that can do good text generation get rolled out to the masses by google and apple, and then some amount of glue infrastructure is developed or even just you can say, “hey google, help me with my dating profile” and it’ll do a thing that’s 70th or 80th percentile for writing quality, diluting out those of us who were doing 85th to 99th percentile writing.
Grammary already helps me to improve my writing quality and gives me suggestions on how to write better. We will likely see services like Grammary improve and that might increase average writing quality.
On the other hand, I don’t expect the average person to let an ML agent write their whole profile as that would feel to weird to the average person in the same way that testing photos on photofeeler feels weird to them.
Epistemic status: intuition and some experience, no sources.
Long-form profiles are mostly a waste of time. The two key weaknesses are 1) the primacy of photos and 2) adversarial communication
Tinder made millions by realizing that many, many users make snap decisions based on photos and the rest doesn’t produce as strong of results. That’s not to say no one reads the profiles and decides on them, but at least a minority do (and some will just stay anchored to their impression of the photos while reading anyways).
Dating is a “lemon market,” where everyone playing wants to attract the highest-quality partner they can relative to their own status. That means when you write a long-form profile, you’re incentivized to fluff it up and present yourself in the best possible light, and when you’re reading a profile you need to take that into account when trying to evaluate quality. And even if you’re honest, other readers will probably still apply the critical lens. This doesn’t degrade the value of the long-form profile signal to zero, but it does discount the return on your time investment.
Now that I’m happily engaged I tend to think my pessimism on the value of online dating full stop was well-warranted and there’s no substitute for in-person socializing, particularly in a group/community space where the adversarial presentation dynamics are reduced. If my current mind was thrown back in time to when I was 18 I’d skip online dating altogether and just get into more clubs and study groups and stuff in college.
I see at least two ways in which it isn’t a lemon market for everyone/every circumstance:
1. If you value compatibility a lot and seek a long-term relationship, you’re wasting your own time if you try to cover up things that some people might consider to be flaws or dealbreakers.
2: Some people are temperamentally quite sensitive to rejection, and rejection hurts more the more someone gets close to the real you. To protect against the pain from rejection at a later point, some people are deliberately very open about their flaws right out of the gate.
Doing a lot of 2. can be sign that someone isn’t ready for a relationship (as it almost exclusively turns off potential partners), but I think it’s possible for people who are temperamentally tempted to self-sabotage that way to transform it into a strength. Combined with developing self-confidence about one’s good qualities, an awareness of (and openness about) one’s weaknesses can seem quite appealing.
You might say “but then you’re indirectly signalling positive qualities again (“awareness of flaws; the confidence to admit flaws”), so this is still about presenting oneself in the best light possible.” Hm, sort of, but if you’re actually admitting to things that some people will consider to be dealbreakers, you’re opening yourself up to the luck of draw (“will she/he consider it a dealbreaker or not?”), so in the instances where you get lucky and she/he is okay with it or finds it endearing, you actually sent a credible signal! (I.e., you partly overcame the dynamics/incentives that make it difficult in early-stage dating to update much on quality and compatibility.)
High quality, interesting, funny writing has been a difficult to manufacture signal up till now. It’s possible GPT-n will change that. But folks on LW are probably filtering for people who will filter for making real pretty with the letter forms.
Folks on LW are also the kind of people who might take advantage of letting GPT-n do the funny writing for themselves if they lack the skills themselves.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it 🤣
But shortly after than it’ll be available to everyone and we’ll have lost another useful signal
Most people don’t even engage in basic steps like testing their photos on photofeeler right now. I highly doubt that a significant amount of online daters will use AI generated responses even if the tech is available.
I imagine it will get commercialized.
Photofeeler also happens to be a commercialized product.
Interesting. Maybe you’re right.
I think my model here is something more like, “ML agents that can do good text generation get rolled out to the masses by google and apple, and then some amount of glue infrastructure is developed or even just you can say, “hey google, help me with my dating profile” and it’ll do a thing that’s 70th or 80th percentile for writing quality, diluting out those of us who were doing 85th to 99th percentile writing.
Grammary already helps me to improve my writing quality and gives me suggestions on how to write better. We will likely see services like Grammary improve and that might increase average writing quality.
On the other hand, I don’t expect the average person to let an ML agent write their whole profile as that would feel to weird to the average person in the same way that testing photos on photofeeler feels weird to them.