Dating apps are very likely one of the biggest scams ever known to 'man'-kind.

[dr froyd]

like Hado mentioned, gamblers fallacy is assuming that independent trials are dependent. Here we're explicitly assuming independent Bernoulli trials, so by definition this cannot be gambler's fallacy

besides that, the formula is:
P( "at least one success in N trials" ) = 1 - P("no successes in N trials") = 1 - P("failure")^N

in general the probability of getting k successes out of N trials follows the binomial distribution, and the formula above is 1 - f(k, n) where f is the binomial pmf with k = 0.


whether the trials are in reality independent is a separate question, of course. If you live in a town with 50 women, then clearly each day is not independent since each woman who rejects you disappears from the pool of women.

.. which is an interesting point in itself in the context of dating. If our evolutionary past was mostly based on small villages and tribes where you typically had no more than 50 women available in total, your sensitivity to rejection should be considerable, since every rejection shrinks your probability of reproducing. But in modern times one can often treat the pool of women as constant since its either constantly refilled, or is extremely large, or you can easily move to new places. So our sensitivity to rejection can be said to be a maladaptation to our actual environment.

 

[Hadoblado]

Okay. My math is clearly worse than yours. Can you explain the formula?

No biggie. Formulas are always eldritch scratchings unless you're familiar with them. Dr Froyd explained it well, but I have this half-written post from before I left so now I'll finish it.

.994 is the chance of not getting a match in a single instance
P(>0 match after 30 days) = 1-.994^30 = 16.5%

n is the number of instances
P(>0 match after 30 days) = 1-.994^30 = 16.5%

P(A) is the probability that A will occur
P(>0 match after 30 days) = 1-.994^30 = 16.5%

1 is total probability
P(>0 match after 30 days) = 1-.994^30 = 16.5%

So to arrive at the chance of any match, you subtract all instances in which there are no matches (.994^30)from all possible instances (1).

The reason all instances with no matches is .994^30, is because how probability works over repeated independent events. The best way of representing this is a probability tree:

This is every single possible outcome of tossing a coin three times. Each toss collapses one "branch".

• The probability of getting [no tails] for one toss is .5.
• The chance for getting [no tails] in two tosses is .5^2=.25.
• The probability of getting [no tails] in three tosses is .5^3=.125... etc.

This works the same for other probabilities. In this case, the chance of no matches after three days is .994^3=.98. You can test this yourself.

The tree for a larger number of independent events can be impractically large, but you can still arrive at the conclusion with the above formula. The tree is useful for proof of concept with a smaller number of events.

I'm not a mathsy dude, it sounds like Froyd is? I probably make lots of mistakes but it's the same concepts.

 

[BurnedOut]

Thanks tonnes @Hadoblado. But the estimations still look quite bleak.

 

[Hadoblado]

Yeah, they're not amazing, but depending on what your priorities are they are worth consideration.

The main question you should ask yourself is whether that .6% represents your chances well. If you are better than average looking and put a solid effort into a profile, your chances are considerably better. But if you're average-looking or worse, .6% might be generous.

I know people that use them with great success. Some of them are the most cringe-inducing people you'll ever meet (not good-looking either, though admittedly fit). They're just mega extroverted and tick specific boxes like being outdoorsy and having a stable middle-class job.

You can also use multiple apps to increase your rolls. This might make sense depending on the cost, this would increase your chances to 30% for the first month (assuming no overlap between userbases and equal utility).

Edit:
Also, if you were to commit, you'd want confidence in your social skills. I'm unaware of anywhere that gives solid advice on this front. Redpill is a trap, but they exist because there isn't a clear authority in this matter for the socially challenged.

 

[scorpiomover]

You are not getting matches online because of capitalism not because of your follies.

People open up private companies that provide services because they make money from them.

When people used to go to nightclubs, most of the money the nightclub owner made was from the alcohol sales.

People pay monthly to gyms to ensure they stay attractive, and for somewhere to show off their bodies.

A dating app's purpose is to make sure people match up into relationships, so they won't need to date anymore. It's an app whose purpose is to reduce its customer base as much as possible, and thus to reduce its revenue as much as possible.

You're not having to pay the dating app for the alcohol you drink on dates you got from the app, or any other expenses. So they don't use the nightclub model either.

So they either go out of business, or they change the model, and add in features that keep you from matching and finding a relationship, and thus keep you dating and using the app for as long as possible.

Develop a dating app with a different payment model: e.g. if you hook up happily with your swipe from the app, you each pay [imath]15. If you date happily for a month, you pay[/imath]50. If you have a happy relationship, then you pay $200 a year, for as long as you're together. If you don't get with anyone, you pay nothing.

That payment model would provide a strong incentive for the companies that make the app, to make people hook up more, date more, and have longer-lasting relationships.

 

[dr froyd]

obviously it's all the capitalists' fault. It's not like the barrier of entry to making a dating website is virtually zero and different websites compete for costumers. There's a cartel of dating websites and they all collude to keep you from getting pussy.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

This thread was frustrating to read. Too many words and too little definitions.
@Hadoblado @dr froyd
Props to you for staying so constructive and explaining probability.

One major problem with this thread was that probability and events weren't properly defined. Some rules first:
1. Probability of matching is 0.6% on any given day
2. Each day is independent from the others and the probability on any of these days individually is always 0.6%
3. One can either get a match or not be matched, no other results are possible. Let's call it match and !match (not match). We don't look at shit matches or horror matches

If something happens with 100% probability it's often shown as a probability of 1. So in this case match has a probability of 6/10/100 which is 0.006. We know that during any given trial the result will either be a match or !match, so the probability of either result happening is 1. There are only 2 outcomes, so match + !match = 1, therefore !match = 1-match so !match = 1-0.006, !match = 0.994

We know that the probability of a chain of events is a product of their probabilities. With coins, the probability of two tails is 1/2 * 1/2, that is 1/2 multiplied by 1/2 which is 1/4 or 25%.

We want to know what would be the probability of matching over time. We can look at the probability of a continuous string of failures to match as a function of time in days.

The probability to fail on the first try (day) is 0.994. This means that on the first day failure is 99.4% possible, but on the second day it's 0.994 * 0.994 which is 0.988036 or 98.8% a big improvement.
Day 3 = 0.982107784 and so on...

We can simplify this. We know that 0.994 * 0.994 is 0.994^2 or 0.994 raised to the 2nd power, this also corresponds to the number of trials or days that have passed. So in general this looks like 0.994^d where d is the number of days. To get the probability of matching after d days we simply subtract 1-0.994^d or the probability to never match.

Already from this we can tell that failure will become less and less likely as time goes on. Failure is asymptotically approaching 0, which means that after an infinite amount of days failing to match would be impossible or finding a match would become a almost certain. We don't live forever though so let's look at how the success rate changes on the scale of thousands of days or a few years. See graphs below.

Spoiler: dating success visualized

Vertical (blue) axis 0 to 100 % of success
Horizontal (black) axis at the bottom: numbers from 0 through 1000 representing days Click to zoom.

Just for fun this is the amount of days it takes to win the Indian national Lottery, if you play lottery every day for 3.2*10^8 days or about 875,000 years, your chance of winning the lottery is greater than 99%, at this scale your dating success is a 99.999999999999% or basically 1.

@BurnedOut
Running the function tells us that already after 766 days or 2.09 years, your probability of finding a match is better than 99.04%. As you can see this function is asymptotic so an increment from 0.006 to 99.01% takes 667 steps, but an increase from 99.01% to 99.9% takes another 382 days. It would take a total of 1148 days for a chance to match of 99.9%.

Now an average guy doesn't need 99.9%, half of the guys will match after 50% so it will take them 115.5 days to match.

Is it good, is it bad? I think it's pretty good odds, it probably means you need to have a good looking profile page and send 115 customized messages to get one woman out of the 115 asked to go on a date with you. And this is all just by sitting at home, with the potential to comfortably write pick-up messages and pretending to look like a god with photoshop.

There's a case to be made that dating apps offer you the scale and volume to date a lot more people than you would get by usual meetings or pure chance.

Here's my 2 cents, you're too quick to hate on these apps even considering how terrible they are, they offer you decent odds of success. Consider how you can spam, copy paste and scale your efforts on multiple dating apps and sites, you can make a bot to send these messages for you.

Personally I belong to the 80% of people who never used these apps. I found the girl I married at a dungeons and dragons session and I wasn't even looking to date. I was incredibly lucky, approximating the math I'm pretty sure there's less than 1 in 100,000 women who would be a good match for me, but as a romantic I'm convinced that there's only one person in the whole world who is the right match for me . IMO there's merit to both approaches. My solution - meeting other people irl during activities that you like is also fine, it increases the likelihood of shared passions and gives you a safe way to get to know people over time.

 

[Hadoblado]

Nice.

Yeah it was frustrating but you're right, we weren't clear. I was reading and writing on a time limit so reading comprehension and communication were poor. The reason I stuck with it is that I'm interested in this sort of interaction. I like science and statistics communication and want to be better at it.

Sorry Burned this could have gone a lot smoother.

What I'm taking from this is that asking/stating infinite hypotheticals doesn't do much unless it's clear what those hypotheticals are measuring. The breakthrough in where we were at occurred from trying to summarise the position of the other. This is something I'm going to lean into in the future because I get into these waters a lot with people here.

 

[BurnedOut]

Sorry Burned this could have gone a lot smoother.

Don't mention it I picked up a text book on statistics after the fiasco

 

[scorpiomover]

Running the function tells us that already after 766 days or 2.09 years, your probability of finding a match is better than 99.04%. As you can see this function is asymptotic so an increment from 0.006 to 99.01% takes 667 steps, but an increase from 99.01% to 99.9% takes another 382 days. It would take a total of 1148 days for a chance to match of 99.9%.

Now an average guy doesn't need 99.9%, half of the guys will match after 50% so it will take them 115.5 days to match.

Then if someone's aim is to get a relationship, then waiting 4 months doesn't seem so long.

If they're only using it as a hookup, then it may not be as much of a return as a hooker.

Is it good, is it bad? I think it's pretty good odds, it probably means you need to have a good looking profile page and send 115 customized messages to get one woman out of the 115 asked to go on a date with you. And this is all just by sitting at home, with the potential to comfortably write pick-up messages and pretending to look like a god with photoshop.

If you look at it that way, then it's about the number of messages the man has sent.

Some men whack out 300 messages a day, so they're guaranteed a date. But that also means that those men who send out 1 message a day, might wait 4 months to connect. Those who send out 1 message a week, might have to wait 28 months.

So then the probabilities become about how many messages one sends in a day/week/month/year.

There's a case to be made that dating apps offer you the scale and volume to date a lot more people than you would get by usual meetings or pure chance.

I think that for those who would happily message dozens of women a day, it would be more productive.

I knew a guy in university who used to get laid every night. He would go up to about 30 women every night, get slapped by 29 of them, and have sex with the other one. Sometimes, he had to ask out 100 women to get laid.

Here's my 2 cents, you're too quick to hate on these apps even considering how terrible they are, they offer you decent odds of success. Consider how you can spam, copy paste and scale your efforts on multiple dating apps and sites, you can make a bot to send these messages for you.

Personally I belong to the 80% of people who never used these apps. I found the girl I married at a dungeons and dragons session and I wasn't even looking to date

I think @BurnedOut would prefer to meet a girl the way you did. Lots of guys would.

IMO there's merit to both approaches. My solution - meeting other people irl during activities that you like is also fine, it increases the likelihood of shared passions and gives you a safe way to get to know people over time.

You don't hear of many couples that met through cooking classes and book clubs.

It's usually that people engage in a group that have a commonality, and as a result, the person starts hanging out socially with lots of members of the group, and then you and the other person connect and start hanging out together.

The missing component is that you don't just joing a cooking class. Some of the people in the class will arrange to go for a drink together. If you can become friendly with one of them, you can get yourself included, and then in that social environment where you all have a social contact with a shared passion, then that often results in a man and woman flirting with each other, and both indicating interest in dating each other.

 

[Puffy]

@scorpiomover Yeah I think this is a really good summary. I agree that for people who feel some affinity with this type of forum that the approach you and @Glaerhaidh mention is probably more ideal. I'd also say that loners can feel a need to rush into a relationship where it's often better for them to sort their social lives out first so they don't become overly dependent on the relationship. This approach allows for that as well.

It's a part of why I was encouraging perspective towards self-development in the other dating app thread. If someone's struggling with dating apps chances are they don't need another dating app. They need to work on themselves, have an active social life, and chances are a mutual click will happen somewhere on the road.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Is it good, is it bad? I think it's pretty good odds, it probably means you need to have a good looking profile page and send 115 customized messages to get one woman out of the 115 asked to go on a date with you. And this is all just by sitting at home, with the potential to comfortably write pick-up messages and pretending to look like a god with photoshop.

If you look at it that way, then it's about the number of messages the man has sent.

Some men whack out 300 messages a day, so they're guaranteed a date. But that also means that those men who send out 1 message a day, might wait 4 months to connect. Those who send out 1 message a week, might have to wait 28 months.

To be precise we don't know the average/median/dominant/mode amount of messages these people send. I generally disregard the average and dominant values, mode tells you a lot more about the most frequent value or amount of actions taken by the group measured. Same with income, average is skewed by high income, mode shows you the state of the average people's income.

I recommend you look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

If a guy sends 1 message a day then we can draw a direct ratio of 0.6% being a daily and per message success, if they send more then we need to multiply days by how many messages they send.

There's a case to be made that dating apps offer you the scale and volume to date a lot more people than you would get by usual meetings or pure chance.

I think that for those who would happily message dozens of women a day, it would be more productive.

I knew a guy in university who used to get laid every night. He would go up to about 30 women every night, get slapped by 29 of them, and have sex with the other one. Sometimes, he had to ask out 100 women to get laid.

Yeah, I know that pick up artists do that a lot and they're after casual sex and getting laid. It's what I call playing the numbers game. A male looking at people like that disregards the woman's personality, their own preference for women and simply tries as many times as he can to get any woman to accept the date. I think it reduces the relationship to satisfying physiological needs and reduces people to numbers, but everyone has their own perspective and ways of succeeding in life AND it's quite possible that some of these casual meetings develop into something meaningful.

There's also a problem with this approach in that some women can't reject bad candidates as easily as other women, so a particularly insistent guy might succeed just by being forceful. That's also part of why this strategy is successful, it's about finding the weakest of the group.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

It's something I picked up from computer science because it applies well to many domains of life. Any problem is a search space and in this search space there are hills and valleys (if it's a very simple low dimensional space like a 3d space or 3d+time), some hills are taller than others, you can call these local optima, there maybe a global optimum, but most of the times a local optimum is good enough as a solution to a problem. I will try to give you an analogy using maze-solving because it's a good illustration. Maze-solving is a simple problem with a less than 2 dimensional search space, but 2 dimensional representations are good for our eyes.

Spoiler: broad and narrow search visual guide

One could approach looking for a solution in different ways, flirting with 30 women is what I would call a wide search (broad) it looks into many candidate dates very shallowly. It's good for finding many opportunities, but has a high likelihood that most of these mates are not optimal. You could imagine it like covering as much area of a maze half-way and going back to your starting point in hopes of finding an easy exit, illustrated by the BFS algorithm (breadth-first search).

Getting to know 1 woman is a narrow search (intensive search). One invests a lot of resources into one candidate solution and you have good chances of reaching an optimum if your candidate is good to begin with. The problem is that you may have only had the time to get to know a few, maybe less than 5 women, to the needed depth. So this approach suffers from candidate scarcity. In maze solving this would be trying one path until it reaches the end, if we get to exit then we are really fast and we skipped all other paths, if we don't we've invested a lot of time and need to go back where we started, illustrated by the DFS algorithm (depth-first search).


Finding women is not a 2 dimensional problem, it may be a 100 plus dimensional search space.(This is quotable I want it on a t-shirt) We can't visualize it, we can't define all the variables at play, we don't know people and ourselves well enough to represent the problem mathematically. Although it has to be said that there must be a mathematical solution, we just don't know enough yet BUT a good AI programmer or a mathematician would be able to develop an incomplete search space that would approximate the real solution and would be good enough for finding decent candidate dates. I believe as a general rule that if you can define your problem well enough, if you can use modelling tools like maths to have a model that matches with reality, then finding a solution will be easy. Understanding the problem is really hard, finding an approximate solution or a local optimum in a problem domain you understand is easy. Maths can most definitely be used to help you find a match or an ideal partner.

Coming back to what I did let's assume I'm a dude who looks for 5 things in a woman:
1. She likes metal music
2. Is intelligent like I am XDXD
3. Is good looking like I am Xd
4. Likes fantasy
5. Is a fun person

What can I do to find a woman who matches these traits?:
1. I could go to a metal concert, or join a metal band and I'd be likely to find a girl who likes metal. Maybe she loves it too much actually and is a total metalhead.
2. I could go to a fantasy convention and meet a fantasy nerd, a total bookworm who recites lore and is asocial.
3. If I tried a dating site I could look at good looking girls and I could read their profiles to judge if they are intelligent, but it would be impossible to find people who are into fantasy or metal. I'd be dealing with normies all the time.

Simplified 3d search space. Tops of the hills are optimum solutions and the hills are interest groups centered on a topic.

Why going to a D&D session was a good approach? Because people there are above average in terms of fantasy, fun and metal and intelligence. It's a place where I'm meeting people who already check a lot of boxes for me.
I think everyone can find an activity that would give them the highest probability of meeting people with the highest amount of desired traits or lead to other events that help them connect like going to a pub after the concert etc.

In my case D&D lies in the vicinity of most things that I already like so people in that local area of the search space are going to be close to some optimum that I'm looking for.

Ok I'm done . I love how idiotically math and theory heavy we can get over dating. Sometimes I'm proud of my autism XD

 

[washti]

Where one can meet guys like Nassim Taleb but younger? Quants are boring and he's not.

 

[dr froyd]

@washti you have an excellent taste in men, ma'am

 

[scorpiomover]

Is it good, is it bad? I think it's pretty good odds, it probably means you need to have a good looking profile page and send 115 customized messages to get one woman out of the 115 asked to go on a date with you. And this is all just by sitting at home, with the potential to comfortably write pick-up messages and pretending to look like a god with photoshop.

If you look at it that way, then it's about the number of messages the man has sent.

Some men whack out 300 messages a day, so they're guaranteed a date. But that also means that those men who send out 1 message a day, might wait 4 months to connect. Those who send out 1 message a week, might have to wait 28 months.

To be precise we don't know the average/median/dominant/mode amount of messages these people send. I generally disregard the average and dominant values, mode tells you a lot more about the most frequent value or amount of actions taken by the group measured. Same with income, average is skewed by high income, mode shows you the state of the average people's income.

I recommend you look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)

If a guy sends 1 message a day then we can draw a direct ratio of 0.6% being a daily and per message success, if they send more then we need to multiply days by how many messages they send.

It would be much easier to see what is going on, if we could see the statistical distribution, i.e. a graph where the x-axis is the number of messages sent each day on average by a man, and y-axis is the number of men with that value of x, i.e. the number of men who send x messages each day on average, with the mean, median and mode all indicated.

There's a case to be made that dating apps offer you the scale and volume to date a lot more people than you would get by usual meetings or pure chance.

I think that for those who would happily message dozens of women a day, it would be more productive.

I knew a guy in university who used to get laid every night. He would go up to about 30 women every night, get slapped by 29 of them, and have sex with the other one. Sometimes, he had to ask out 100 women to get laid.

Yeah, I know that pick up artists do that a lot and they're after casual sex and getting laid. It's what I call playing the numbers game.

If you're looking for "the one", and you expect most women to not be "the one", how are you going to get to know if she is "the one" without dating lots of women until you find "the one"? Then you're still playing a numbers game.

If you choose to get to know them by being friends before you know if they're "the one", then you're still playing a numbers game, with friendship.

A male looking at people like that disregards the woman's personality, their own preference for women and simply tries as many times as he can to get any woman to accept the date. I think it reduces the relationship to satisfying physiological needs and reduces people to numbers,

Even if you add compatility and mutual attraction to your criteria, if your goal is still to find such a person, then you're ultimately focussed on your own goals, and thus disregarding the woman's personality.

You're still a player, who is just looking for a woman who acts like she likes you back. Whether she really likes you but doesn't show it, or she only pretends to like you, is irrelevant to your way of thinking.

but everyone has their own perspective and ways of succeeding in life AND it's quite possible that some of these casual meetings develop into something meaningful.

If you are looking for the mutual comfort & ease of a naturally-occurring friendship, then you have to realise what that is.

If you want to go to the cinema to see the latest Star Wars film and your friend does too, then you both go to the cinema together. If you both want to see something else, you both watch something else together.

If you want to go to the cinema to see the latest Star Wars film and your friend wants to see something else, then you both go to the cinema, but see different films, and meet up again afterwards.

If you want to go to the cinema to see the latest Star Wars film and your friend wants to see something else, but you both see the film you like, you won't be friends for very long.

What matters, is doing the things together, that you both want to do, looking for what you DO match on, and both accepting that when it comes to the elements of your activities that don't match, that you BOTH do your own thing.

There's mutuality on both sides, when it comes to the things you both like, the things where your preferences are similar, AND the things where your preferences are dissimilar, where you like different things.

Then you may meet a woman who you are only currently interested in having casual sex with, who feels the same. Since you both feel the same, if you are friends, you will both say you'd like to do it together, and you'll both have sex together.

If you are friends, and you feel that you'd both like to date, you say so, and you date each other.

If you are friends, and you feel that you'd both like to date but not each other, you say so, and you date different people.

If the man only wants casual sex, but the woman wants a relationship, then the man should find casual sex with someone else AND the woman should find a relationship with someone else. If both of those are achieved, then both will be happy, and will find it easy to be friends, because all of their needs are satisfied.

But if one of those is not achieved, then they won't be happy & friends for very long. So if you are friends, and you wish to date, but not each other, you help each other find people to date, or have a relationship with, or have sex with, according to your individual preferences, so you both have your needs satisfied, and you are both happy to remain non-sexual friends with each other.

There's also a problem with this approach in that some women can't reject bad candidates as easily as other women, so a particularly insistent guy might succeed just by being forceful. That's also part of why this strategy is successful, it's about finding the weakest of the group.

Yes, bad faith actors can always prey on the weakest in the group, when it comes to anything, such as those people who are most easily conned into giving sex, or their money, or their time, or their effort, or their skills.

If that's an issue for you, say, you live in a society with police that are there to protect old people from murder, or theft, and attempt to punish those who commit murder or theft against old people, then you live in a society that promises to protect the vulnerable from bad faith actors.

In which case, your issue is that the dating-vulnerable are also not simillarly protected, when it comes to sex & dating.

Or, you may live in a society with police that are there to protect all people from murder, or theft, and attempt to punish those who commit murder or theft against all people. Then you live in a society that promises to protect everyone from bad faith actors.

In which case, your issue is that everyone is also not simillarly protected, when it comes to sex & dating.

So it sounds like your problem is that there's no "dating police".