Somewhat unfortunately, fringe communities online have co-opted a lot of discussion around online dating to be pretty hostile and borderline misogynist, so any analytical discussion around Tinder is steeped in bitterness. As a straight man in NYC who online dates a fair amount (1-2 a week) and does relatively well, I can offer some anecdotal perspective.
At the end of the day, the biggest reason for this disparity is that most women find most men unattractive. That statement begs repeating - statistically, women find the _majority_ of men to be less attractive than what they believe to be the "average" man. Look no further than the oft-cited and since-deleted OkCupid post which dug into this in great detail. [1] More contemporarily, women-centric communities like /r/FemaleDatingStrategy will happily just come out and state this as fact. [2] (warning - if you're a man who struggles with self-esteem I wouldn't recommend clicking that link, you're only going to feel worse)
The real kicker here has and always been the chart which demonstrates that women rated 80% of men as being less than average attractive. Anyone with other single friends in their 20s and 30s can attest to this; it's pretty common to hear a complaint from a woman like "there wasn't a single cute guy at that bar" or "none of my coworkers are people I'd consider dating."
I don't really know what the answer is, you can't tell people what they should or shouldn't like. Telling men to just "be more attractive" doesn't really work, and telling women to "lower your standards" is equally silly.
As I've read elsewhere on HN, the future I envision is one where a good chunk of straight men are largely just removed from the dating market. We're already beginning to see that, with 28% of men in 2018 reporting no sexual activity, with that number only likely to rise. [3]
The only advice I can give to men in that position, especially ones who don't hit the marks which serve well in OLD (tall, white, and fit) is not to beat yourselves up. Your personality probably isn't the problem, you don't "hate women", and you certainly don't just need to "shower and touch grass"; you're playing a game in which the odds are stacked against you. There are certain immutable traits which our society finds incredibly important in hetero attractiveness, and if you're lacking those traits, it's absolutely no fault of your own.
If you are on a linux distro that supports apparmor (ubuntu/debian etc), such issues can be easily prevented by creating a sandbox profile and alias commands like node/npm to run using it.
alias npm='aa-exec -p sandbox npm'
alias node='aa-exec -p sandbox node'
is this website real? (nytimes.blog) it is registered on namecheap, hosted behind cloudflare, whois doesn't match nytimes.com, is running wordpress with an off-the-shelf theme, etc
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”
Shameless plug: I wrote undocker[1] to convert docker images to a rootfs tarball, so I can run them with plain systemd.
Goal: no more daemons to run 3rd party containers, systemd is good enough by now: resource limits, isolation, chroot, dynamic users, logging, and more.
Low-level tooling is done, I am now building ecosystem around it: easy installation, convert to deb/rpm, systemd units, etc.
I maintain that it isn't just hard, it is computationally impossible.
We should all know that given a belief about the world, and evidence, Bayes' Theorem describes how to update our beliefs.
But what if we have a network of interrelated beliefs? That's called a Bayesian net, and it turns out that Bayes' Theorem also prescribes a unique answer. However, unfortunately, it turns out that working out that answer is NP-hard.
OK, you say, we can come up with an approximate answer. Sorry, no, coming up with an approximate answer that gets within probability 0.5 - ε, for 0 < ε, is ALSO NP-hard. It is literally true that under the right circumstances a single data point logically should be able to flip our entire world view, and which data point does it is computationally intractible.
Therefore our brains use a bunch of heuristics, with a bunch of known failure modes. You can read all the lesswrong you want. You can read Thinking, Fast and Slow and learn why we fail as we do. But the one thing that we cannot do, no matter how much work or effort we put into it, is have the sheer brainpower required to actually BE rational.
The effort of doing better is still worthwhile. But the goal itself is unachievable.
I buy around 3 times as many books as I finish (although I do finish many books). There is a special pleasure in browsing second hand book shops and pick up stuff you like the idea of reading.
It also used to give me tremendous pleasure giving a friend, a colleague or even a random encounter a book I myself had enjoyed at some point, although after the emergence of kindles, that became less and less appreciated (although some will still accept recommendations).
I pile up books on my desk, on shelves, next to my bed, and it gives me pleasure just looking at them. I hate accumulating physical possesions except books.
I look at my shelf (and my desk, and next to my bed) and it's a monument to things I have had fleeting interests in and things that are life long passions, stories that sits so deep inside me that they have come to define part of who I am, but of course also stories that were mere dreams and left no mark (although I have another pile in a corner for those books that I intend to get rid of... One day).
I love books, it has been the one constant in my life since I was very young child.
I've started working on this. I'm not really ready to loudly announce this yet, but you can check out my plan and what little code I have so far (really just data structure definitions) here:
I did a deep dive on this a few weeks ago. If you're interested, the following is what I what I think were the most interesting studies. Sorry for my personal citation style. My conclusion is that there are differences, some of them not as big as claimed in popular media and for the majority we don't know their origin.
Buss. 1989. Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures
Feingold. 1994. Gender Differences in Personality: A Meta-Analysis
Grijalva et al. 2014. Gender Differences in Narcissism: A Meta-Analytic Review
Hall, Canterberry. 2011. Sexism and Assertive Courtship Strategies
Joseph, Newman. 2010. Emotional Intelligence: An Integrative Meta-Analysis and Cascading Model
Lukaszewski, Roney. 2010. Kind toward whom? Mate preferences for personality traits are target specific
Oliver, Hyde. 1993. Gender Differences in Sexuality: A Meta-analysis
Snyder et al. 2008. The dominance dilemma: Do women really prefer dominant mates?
Su, Rounds, Armstrong. 2009. Men and Things, Women and People
Wood, Eagly. 2002. A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences
Video walks on Youtube. If you haven't heard of them before, they're simple first-person videos where the filmer walks around some area with a stabilized video camera - no talking, just walking. I've really missed traveling and watching video walks while exercising has been a great way to satisfy that travel craving a bit and also trick my brain into experiencing some semblance of normalcy (not sure I could remember what a crowded street feels like otherwise haha).
I'm partial to Japan so my favorite channel has been Rambalac [1], and I recently also started watching another channel with the very creative name JAPAN 4K [2]. There are tons of other channels and places too, for example I recently watched a few in Lisbon [3] and Seoul [4] and Copenhagen [5]. They're very relaxing and fun to watch and going from place to place with no cuts captures the usual tourist experience quite well. If you like traveling you can probably find some that are interesting to you!
I can certainly see a lot of parallels with Oculus / Facebook.
Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years.
Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability! Conversely, I couldn't tell anyone what to do from my position; the important shots were always called when I wasn't around. Some of that was on me for not being willing to relocate to HQ, but a lot of it was built into early Oculus DNA.
I could only lead by example and argument, and the arguments only took on weight after years of evidence accumulated. I could have taken a more traditional management position, but I would have hated it, so that's also on me. The political dynamics never quite aligned with an optimal set of leadership personalities and beliefs where I would have had the best leverage, but there was progress, and I am reasonably happy and effective as a part time consultant today, seven years later.
Talking about "entitled workers" almost certainly derails the conversation. Perhaps a less charged framing that still captures some of the matter is the mixing of people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd. The wealth of the mega corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense, with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness.
The communication culture does tend a bit passive-aggressive for my taste, but I can see why it evolves that way in large organizations. I've only been officially dinged by HR once for insensitive language in a post, but a few people have reached out privately with some gentle suggestions about better communication.
All in all, not a perfect fairy tale outcome, but I still consider taking the acquisition offer as the correct thing for the company in hindsight.
At the end of the day, the biggest reason for this disparity is that most women find most men unattractive. That statement begs repeating - statistically, women find the _majority_ of men to be less attractive than what they believe to be the "average" man. Look no further than the oft-cited and since-deleted OkCupid post which dug into this in great detail. [1] More contemporarily, women-centric communities like /r/FemaleDatingStrategy will happily just come out and state this as fact. [2] (warning - if you're a man who struggles with self-esteem I wouldn't recommend clicking that link, you're only going to feel worse)
The real kicker here has and always been the chart which demonstrates that women rated 80% of men as being less than average attractive. Anyone with other single friends in their 20s and 30s can attest to this; it's pretty common to hear a complaint from a woman like "there wasn't a single cute guy at that bar" or "none of my coworkers are people I'd consider dating."
I don't really know what the answer is, you can't tell people what they should or shouldn't like. Telling men to just "be more attractive" doesn't really work, and telling women to "lower your standards" is equally silly.
As I've read elsewhere on HN, the future I envision is one where a good chunk of straight men are largely just removed from the dating market. We're already beginning to see that, with 28% of men in 2018 reporting no sexual activity, with that number only likely to rise. [3]
The only advice I can give to men in that position, especially ones who don't hit the marks which serve well in OLD (tall, white, and fit) is not to beat yourselves up. Your personality probably isn't the problem, you don't "hate women", and you certainly don't just need to "shower and touch grass"; you're playing a game in which the odds are stacked against you. There are certain immutable traits which our society finds incredibly important in hetero attractiveness, and if you're lacking those traits, it's absolutely no fault of your own.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/iu5nu...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...