How Singapore's government-run dating service works
singapore-samizdat.comIf women were (legally allowed and required ) to be paid upfront for Delivering and raising children, the market would sort things out. We would probably get some professional mothers who would have 6-12 children.
You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
Stats consistently show that women only select about 5% of options displayed from online dating apps. Men select about 50%. And women disproportionately give their attention to the most conventionally attractive men. (To say: That 5% is not evenly distributed amoung men.) The bottom half of men (from attractiveness ratings) basically get zero matches... ever. Online dating is brutal.> She wasn't swiping much.I do not think that it is online dating that is brutal, but these dating sites.
I have been through a couple of online dating and personality usually came first, so by the time appearance was revealed, we already could not care much. She was not my type, I was not her type, but that affected nothing.
The reason it did not work out is financial and logistics (different country, I have MS, I am heavily dependent on healthcare, and so forth), not because of any moral failing or what have you.
I doubt the 50% is evenly distributed either and men for sure disproportionately give attention to conventionally attractive women.
Dating is brutal.
Online dating seems like it perhaps speed-runs that a bit, but I don’t think it dramatically changes the essence.
No, all women get some attention using online dating apps. A bunch of YouTubers have created fake online dating profiles with incredibly ugly women (bad face or bad body), and they still get matches. This guy on X has run lots of these tests with hilarious results: https://x.com/MurrayHillGuy1
I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.) Before the apps, couples were mostly looks-matched: the ugos dated each other, the mids dated each other, and the best dated each other. Unless the guy was very personable/funny/rich, most people were looks-matched. Online dating has reduced everyone to a few photographs.> Dating is brutal.Women demonstrate incredibly different behaviour when "selecting mates" when comparing (1) familiar settings, like work, school, church/temple, friend/activity/hobby groups vs (2) unfamiliar settings, like bars, clubs, public places, and online dating. For (1), they find many more men attractive because they can evaluate them on more than looks. For (2), they can only evaluate on looks. If you ask women to rate strangers based only upon looks, they will rank only 20% as attractive. That is what makes online dating so awful for average men.
When young (average looking) guys tell me about their awful/non-existent dating lives at the office, I always recommend that they try approaching women in public more often. Ignore the shit you see on social media where the fake #MeToo women come on to put guys on full blast for approaching. Don't worry about them. They are awful people, and you don't want them. Yes, you will get rejected a lot (maybe 5-10% hit rate), but it is way better than online dating apps. You can approach in supermarkets, stores, cafes, festivals/concerts, gym, parks, etc. That way, plenty of other people are around, and she won't feel unsafe. And start by approaching ugos/low-mids. You only need to get their socials or chat app. Even if you have no serious interest in that woman, you can practice chatting with her. Once you build some confidence, approach average looking women. Eventually, you will find success. As long as you dress average/OK, groom (comb/style hair, etc.) and don't smell bad, they won't put you on full blast if she is not interested. She will politely decline, or give socials, but never reply to chats.
Please don't read this post as an attack on women. It is an attack on our current ecosystem of online dating apps.
Meeting people in public really is the answer, but I think shifting the focus from romantic to being genuine, friendly, and focusing on community in places where it’s not just guys is way more successful (for hetero men)
I met my girlfriend at a coffeeshop. I was a regular and just actively friendly to everyone. Our first date felt more like a second because we already had multiple conversations.
Men have a much greater emphasis on physical attraction than women which is why women need a much higher level of physical attraction when only using that. But building community lets us show off our other qualities which women put a much greater emphasis on.
This is a boilerplate redpill comment.
You literally give the advice to "start by approaching ugos/low-mids. This entire post comes off as vain, but your disclaimer at the end doesn't absolve it of also being misogynistic.
You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.
This is a perverse way to approach people.
> I can confidently say that dating was not brutal before the apps. (I am pretty old.)
What? Dating been brutal and unforgiving for as long as I've been alive, but I wouldn't say I'm old (between 30 - 40). it was definitely harsh before the apps and had the exact same "everyone wants to date beautiful people, no one wants to date ugly people" "problem" that exists today, not sure what makes you say it's any different than today.
> Please don't read this post as an attack on women
I don't read your comment as an "attack" on anything, women or dating apps. But things like "women can only evaluate based on looks in bars, clubs, public spaces, etc" is wildly out of touch with reality, and makes your comment rightly seem out of touch rather than an attack on anything at all.
> Online dating is brutal.
You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.
Fixed them:
- we get paid for date $1
- we get paid for second date $10
- we get paid for proposal $100
- we get paid for marriage $1000
- we pay for divorce $1500
- we get paid for first child $500
- we get paid for second child $1000
- we get paid for nth child $2000 * (n - 2)
Congrats! Dating apps are now actively lobbying to make birth control illegal. /s
If I wouldn't have to deal with the legal liabilities around moderation and user data, I would love to make a non-profit dating site that was truly optimized towards some benevolent goals.
If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
If playing the super long game, the app could get a consistent fraction of tax revenue from generated new taxpayers.
Nice idea in principle but (in the case of private) too long a time horizon for typical corporations to care about, sadly.
Dating Apps don’t need to be corporate. You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
If there was no fraud and abuse and legal issues and ...
No, even with that. 10 people are a lot, actually.
From people who deal with the trust and safety side of things, at a national scale of a few billion people, 10 people is definitely not enough.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
Which problems do you see that would require all of this, given that it is a nation platform where you are authenticated via your government ID?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40.
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.
The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
Amazon (and Tesla) famously had very patient shareholders, and they are both private companies.
Hell no. Sorry for the reaction, but market optimization under current market principles, will result in the narrowest interpretation of the goal.
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
I think it's unlikely for your worst case scenario to be realized. Underspecified objectives can cause unexpected results, but it can also lead to desired results. Fortunately experimentation is relatively cheap and tuning optimization metrics is the norm for most apps.
What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?
People having “large” numbers of children.
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
This is very much a worst case. It assumes three children, each with their own bedroom, and two work from home parents each with their own office.
Why do you need an entire room each for an office? I work in a corner of a bedroom, and have previously had a desk in a living room. I know lots of people who do the same. I know few families where both parents work from home. Where more than one person works from home they can share an office.
If people work from home to a large extent, less office space is required, so the cost of land should go down. It does not because most people are not working from home.
Not everyone works from home. But if you do, you can live in unexpensive areas of your country, so it's a non-issue.
Until you get laid off or they do RTO, then it’s move back to the big city
Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low".
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
__
To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
Traditionally families often just had one bedroom for children. That's what things like bunkbeds are for.
That might very well be, but now people evidently seem to prefer not doing that, so what is your point?
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.
Or you can keep the smaller apartments and make boarding schools more common. Small kids all live in the same room while the ones old enough to need their own space move out completely to a boarding school. Depending on the specifics, may be a much better solution overall.
I actually attended high school in that way in Poland, despite it being very rare here. I was 15 when I started. While I think it was great for me, I would not recommend doing it for younger people - you need some basic emotional maturity and safety.
Even then, it would not solve any problems here, really.
Hm. Indeed that is an idea, but I'm not sure if that doesn't come with other downsides that might be undesirable.
I guess this will work for something like 10-20%? Maybe? (Speaking from a very german cultural background)
So like, the idea of traditional family is "have kids raised by an institution, have them visit you once in a while"?
It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
I have never heard of a government demanding that. Where does that happen?
What government does that? That's something new to me.
As someone who ho grew up in a smalll bedroom with multiple siblings until I was 19…
Fuck that.
I'm not sure what your problem is with sheetrock, but you can achieve pretty high levels of sound isolation with sheetrock walls.
So, in your opinion it is not possible to have kids unless you have 7(!) rooms?
Possible for sure, but not necessarily pleasant, which is for sure a significant part of the reasons why people decide against having (more) children.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
Maybe we can also go back to the "traditional relationship" where a single person's income can pay for a house, a car, and support 7+ people.
That was never traditional anywhere. It was possible in the 1950s in a few places. Anyone thinking it was traditional is seriously undervaluing women's work.
You'll have to do that over the dead bodies of everyone who benefits from all those things being expensive.
That's a lot of bodies.
Was there a time when an average single person could do that and support did not meant "they live in abject poverty"?
Lots of people did it in the 1970s. Maybe not one income, but one fill time income and one part time income.
For a time, everywhere people typically had homes and cars and families it was required that they could afford it all on a single person's income because women were property, and not allowed to work outside the home (at least after marriage), or get an education, or own anything.
I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
The nice thing is that the government has no reason to keep you swiping forever
Its only motivator is to get you and someone else to start making babies as soon as possible. Which is often what the users want too.
The government also wants stable couples (divorce are costly to society) and non-toxic relationship (because these too are costly), which is also what the users desire.
divorce are costly to society
Maybe they should have a Rebound app as well.
There's plenty of other motivators.
I give it about a month before they start gaming the algorithm to pair people who are likely to be on government benefits with people who can support them.
You make $150k, congratulations all your matches are McDonalds crew members.
You make $200k, the same but now they're all mentally ill because the algorithm deems you capable of supporting thyat too.
As long as you're going dystopian, maybe the government decides that it'll be better for the country if they raise a generation of super-babies and secretly pivots to eugenics as a service.
Yeah, the precedent for the idea of a .gov dating service is Plato’s Republic along with comments in the Timaeus/Critias which make it clear that Plato envisioned a rigged service designed for eugenics. Central control over matchmaking is incentivized to eugenics.
> and secretly adds eugenics as a service
This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
Many of our countries are just one election cycle away from the politicians mandating that the official government dating app only incentivise Anglo-Saxon baby-making...
>This is the primary worry with governments getting involved with dating apps, is it not?
<insert bad faith comment about how it's ok because they're not literally sterilizing anyone and you can opt out of you want>
(bonus points if it's from an account that has a bunch of comments whining about interface defaults and algorithmic nudges matter in technical contexts)
> Which is often what the users want too.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
As long as that government is benevolent enough to avoid demographic engineering. Singapore is a fine melting pot, but I'd probably avoid using a closed source government-run dating app in both my home (EEU) and my current (WEU) country.
Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
I think that's a bit too reductive, but the incentive mismatch is real. Commercial apps generally benefit from people staying on the app; a government service theoretically benefits if people pair off and leave.
It's an interesting question, because on one hand the government goals will remove a lot of the perverse incentives. E.g. having people who aren't going to answer in the pool of profiles shown is mostly a negative. Doing actual, well thought out matches makes sense where for a commercial app favouring one-sided matches that keep one side wanting and not getting frequent answers can be better.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
> Aren't commercial dating sites as a whole summarized as:
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
It's also a market for lemons: Every match that leads to a long-term, exclusive relationship is two customers gone for good.
It's a self-depleting market. The optimum is, a la Big Pharma, to keep 'em in "dating" limbo.-
> It's a self-depleting market.
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
But where's your infinite growth in MMR coming from in your scenario.
> infinite growth in MMR
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
> Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
The entire idea of just wanting MRR and be done with it is a huge, huge part why the world is so screwed. So much of the economy is just devolved into rich people seeking rents.
A dating app with an MMR score for the players is an interesting idea, with matchmaking done based on MMR similarity. Then there could be an annual dating tournament for the best players.
I don’t think that a market for lemons is the right analogy or how it relates to your other claims. A market for lemons is one where buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality goods (eg used cars). I think people are mostly ok at judging the ‘quality’ of romantic partners and the problem you describe is a different thing.
You can try to replace women with bots, as those Chinese dating apps showed a few years ago:
If you do a good job - all the people find partners, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
If you do a bad job - all the people see it as desparate, and leave, and you need to find new people to join
It's a high churn environment so there's no real way to make money from... er... bums on seats.. so there's no real choice but to make some sort of barrier forcing people to spend money
>t's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job
Spending a couple decades with the government putting it's thumb on the scale trying to get people who score high on government metrics to pair up with other people who score high on government metrics seems like a great way to start a civil war a couple generations down the line.
But I'm sure the marriages will be stable all the way there so there's that.
I think this would be better than commercial services, which have all the wrong incentives.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
I want to agree, but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick. Or, it gives me a lot of conflicted feelings / opinions, let's put it that way.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
> but the fact it's state-run / promoted gives me the ick
That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
> That’s an irrational reaction
Not if you think that your government isn't looking out for your best interests. A well run state is exactly what we need, but rarely what we have. Right now we see rising authoritarianism, less transparency, open bribery, more frequent and blatant lying, less accountability, more corruption, democratic backsliding, attacks on civil rights. etc. All that stuff is going to breed skepticism, and it really should. Eroding people's trust in government by actively working to corrupt it and impede it from functioning properly has been a very successful strategy.
The solution for your food being spoiled is to get rid of it, and get something fresh. Not to stop eating food.
You're right, and you'd think seeing all the ways our government is vulnerable to these problems would result in reforms to fix and prevent those issues, but it seems like a lot of people have given up even trying. Learned helplessness I guess.
>That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
And yours isn't?
Like it doesn't take much beyond a room temperature IQ to look at the arc of just about every government these days and make an estimation of where it's going without some substantial unforeseen change of course. The state of the world should merit a little pause and/or self doubt there.
>A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
Historically the states that have dabbled in this area of policy area has been "well run" in only the most dishonest "they accomplished their short term goals" sense of the phrase.
> And yours isn’t?
Many people trust the government for policing, military, central banking. Some not. Many trust them for health care and education, many not.
Very very few don’t trust the government for anything. So for this random example, a dating service, it feels like it’s ideological conditioning (otherwise the OP would explain why it feels bad for them).
> room temperature IQ
careful, we have a very intelligent individual over here
> arc of just about every government
do you mean the US government?
Gale-Shapley, used in this service, has the property that one side ("proposing" side) is guaranteed their most advantageous stable match while the other side is guaranteed their worst possible stable match.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
> I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair".
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
Given how women initiate most divorces, it's probably best to set it up so they are the proposing side.
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
> Given how women initiate most divorces
In the UK male plus joint is roughly the same as female.
You also need to take the reasons into account as well as why. There are multiple reasons for this. The better off partner has more to lose from divorce, women tend to get custody of children, they might have different feelings of obligation to keep a marriage going (I cannot extrapolate this to other men, but I felt an obligation not to file for divorce until I had exhausted all other possibilities), social pressures and responses are different, etc.
If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest. If women initiate, I’m afraid you will see only a few men getting any pairing. Men are likely to be less picky as we see in the wild.
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest.
These are on platforms where you have profile pics and jobs, front and center on your profile, and the algorithm learns from your preferences based on that. The questions on this platform seem to suggest that the algorithm matches based on anything but that, so perhaps we have different, more open-minded outcomes on what a good partner for someone is like rather than who the ideal man/woman is like.
> If stats from dating websites are to be believed, all women tend to flock on all the same tiny percentage of men and ignore the rest
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
For initiating, men are less picky.
For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
Monogamy is half the reason this is stable on paper.
> the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores
Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.
If the goal is successful relationships, then probably?
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
I don't think you can measure love at all, and certainly not guess it based on some info you can type into your phone, so that's rules out before we even get started.
Are there keywords to search for to read more? This is the first time I've heard about this! This is super interesting, what are a few well known other stable matches people deeper into this talk about?
The set of stable matches for a given problem seems to be called the lattice of stable matching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_of_stable_matchings
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
That is how being the active party works.
“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”
Why is it a drawback, though? A stable match is a stable match. Do you lie awake at night wondering if your partner is really the best you could do?
> In short, stable matches mean nothing when nobody is committed and the best options might exist outside of the matchmaking pool
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
I think the algorithm is almost a distraction here. Gale-Shapley works nicely when preferences are reasonably well-defined and participants are actually committed to the matching process. Dating has neither property. People are terrible at predicting who they'll have chemistry with, and everyone has outside options.
I dont see how a goverment-run dating service would solve the issue that social-media had made hypergamy run on steroids and that people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
"People"? For heteros, it is mostly women who have raised their demands. Seriously, are men raising their standards? For men under 30, they are probably lowering their standards!> people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals. They want men who earn (much) more money than them, and that makes those men very rare.
Specific to Sweden, is it really true that women now approach men? I heard about this trend in Denmark and Netherlands, but I am a bit suspicous because it is mostly anecdotal.
Obviously you're wading into hot water by even outlining this analysis. Personally I'm tempted to buy it (if it's true, it's true!) but recently I saw an interesting argument that softened me up a bit to the feminist line. It's that the traditional deal between the sexes has been broken. Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war. In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair. And yet bearing children remains a stubbornly physical chore. Hence a latent feeling of injustice that may balance out the real one you describe.
> and in return men would take on the physical perils of war.
Oh common. Those wars were not for the benefit of women. They were for the benefit of decision making men, the men who ruled. Which were not women. And the men in power sometimes used women as argument for why you should go invade this or that country, but then again appeal to patriotism was even stronger. There are limited situations, like Ukraine today which is defending where the "for other women and children" claim can kinda be made. And even there, fighers are motivated by more then just that.
Traditionally, you was fighting for your male ruler.
The war thing is not deal between sexes. Even today, men are more likely to support invasions, to support parties that lead country to wars.
Countries ruled by woman also go to war, and have done going back for millennia: Boadicea, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, etc.
I would like to see data supporting the idea that men are more likely to support parties that lead to wars, and if its true the reasons why.
In less safe societies and situations men were pressured to take the risks to shield women. "Women and children first". That definitely was to the advantage of women and the detriment of men.
Except that, women with college degrees and in higher socioeconomic groups marry as much as before. It poor people, poor women who stay single.
If your theory was true, it would be other way round. Poor women would be marrying and richer women would refuse marriage. That is not what we see in data.
Hypergamy is real. "I need to have a baby, but eew this guy is a dork, I'm not giving him my womb, and look at all these cool guys on insta" is a real conversation I've had.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
This app in particular attempts to overcome it by using a very clever sorting algorithm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale%E2%80%93Shapley_algorithm
Commercial dating apps are a market for lemons - as a woman, you can't quickly assess whether a partner will be compatible with you or not without investing substantial time and effort. Hypergamy is the expected equilibrium - if you're not sure about the long-term compatibility, you might as well go off of looks or cues of status alone. I would expect the outcome distribution of an app with a much better matching algorithm to be drastically less concentrated in the upper tail. Moreover, a state-run dating app lacks the perverse incentive to keep you swiping, frustrated and jealous.
> as a woman, you can't quickly assess whether a partner will be compatible with you or not without investing substantial time and effort.
I... don't understand. Why do you think this is true for women but not men?
I don't assume that. The supply of men on dating apps is greater than the supply of women, and they tend to be less picky and more open to short-term mate-seeking behavior. This means that the dynamic of these apps is more fundamentally shaped by aggregate preferences of women.
> Team sunrise, or team “it’s 2am and I’m still up”? (close-ended)
Why so weirdly binary? Sleeping at 11pm and getting up well after sunrise is not an option anymore?
> What kind of traveler are you, really? (close-ended, with options like adventure junkie, culture seeker, and I don’t travel much)
Isn't this the type of question that should be open ended? How about being a dynamic kind of traveller? Happy to go if someone else is organizing the trip and happy to stay if I have to do it.
Such a typical Singaporean approach - even fun has to be funnelled into MCQs.
You know what's are great goverment run (or supported with money) dating programs? University. Erasmus. Things like Americorps. Even if the literal match is on the apps I feel like those sorts of environments are great.
Yes, for most countries. But people are quite young when they go to uni and change a lot between 18-25.
Tangent: I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens. Use a bit of institutional wisdom to help people make the best of themselves from school age onwards, help people with similar or complementary skills and interests to connect … that kind of thing.
> I’ve often wondered why governments don’t provide a ‘dating’ service for employers and employees, or even better some kind of career development and management service for citizens.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
Sounds like a job center to me.
Dating services should be run by private foundations that receives public grants. More foundations competing would be good too.
Interesting the different takes different nations take over dropping birth rates. I posted a story here on the Lisdoonvarna dating festival in Ireland. This is a village with a lot of bars wanting to encourage tourism. It has had so much success that the government is now sponsoring it. Quite different than America where the government mandates something as opposed to funding something that has proven successful in a given area.
https://matchmakerireland.com/
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
The author's final recommendation about investing in offline third places is very true in modern Singapore
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
Strange how the country that consistently tops the Economic Freedom Index also has a government-run dating service.
It's almost as though "economic freedom" (whatever that means) and the government schmutzing in citizens' personal affairs are completely unrelated things!
Technically it falls under "Size of Government", so it would deduct points in theory, though in practice it's probably too small to move the needle.
> with government workers set to be the first batch of daters
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.
Entirely dismissing how important looks, vibes, personality are in relationships. Not even dating -- if someone smells, you're not going to be incentives to make friends with them. This seems to me to just be trodding the same pseudoscientific route as MBTI personality tests, trying to condense a person into a list of multiple choice questions. That will never work. No algorithm can do it. Social interaction is not a solved game.
The point isn't to be a complete solution to social interaction, the point is to provide a significantly better than random sampling and pairing.
You can then still apply your usual filters afterwards, such as smell, looks, vibes.
I think this is the key point. Put differently: Vibe matters. I cannot tell you how many times that I match for a date online, then less than ten minutes after meeting them, you think: "Oh, this will never work." Example: Photos are heavily photoshopped or old/out-of-date, overweight, weird/odd body language, etc. Humans are infinitely sensitive to a million different things that are impossible to authentically transmit via primarily photography-based online dating.> Social interaction is not a solved game.If I met them in real life first (cafe, supermarket, park, etc.), you can politely disconnect and move on if something seems off. The more that I do online dating, the more that I see this "vibe wall". Since third spaces aren't really coming back, I'm pretty sure that speed dating (or assisted group dating) is key. Sure, it is uncomfortable to meet many people so quickly (say an hour or two), it helps to get over the vibe wall. It could act like an artificial third space, but with a romantic intent.
I have an idea for a dating app: What if people could only make videos using in-app video recorder (and clipper)? This would completely remove the problem of photoshopping/filters. Plus, video can much better transmit "vibe" compared to photos and "profile". Example of something fun: Show a short video that is trending on TikTok (hand picked by staff), then ask someone to react to it. You can do the green screen effect, just like TikTok. It could be a nice way to visit someone's personality and check their vibe.
It's a shame that they deduce your ranking just from the questions. I think the algorithm would be perfect if paired with a manual ranking by the user.
There are obvious deal breakers, and then as you grow older you develop “taste”.
These are well defined criteria which can be queried upon.
However the ranking only works if both sides are honest.
Yes, but someone who looks, vibes and smells right can still be totally wrong for you. I often thought that online dating was inefficient because my eyes, ears and nose can rule out most potential mates without even thinking, but it works the other way too: I've had many partners I've enjoyed being physical with but would never want to settle down and start a family or anything (then again, I'm not a breeder at all, so take that with a pinch of salt). So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. You need all things to be right, and this surely can only be better than e.g. Tinder, where you see only pictures.
A very interesting solution to the problem. Surely this data will not be repurposed, right?
But if it helps likeminded people to find each other, then it absolutely has some value.
person previously dating in singapore - this is awesome! wish i had
Related:
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
Glad to see that it requires cooperative partners, and not just parents. And that the matched partners are not automatically engaged.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
There is no weight/debt/tattoos filter... Then again, maybe those are not a problem in Singapore?
There are lots of overweight and/or tatt'ed people in Singapore! In general, I have found people get a lot fatter once you travel from Thailand/Cambodia/Laos to Peninsular Malaysia/Singapore/Indonesia. I don't know if it genetics, food, or "lifestyle". And loads of Singaporeans are up to their eyes in debt because they want to look flashy when they are young -- designer clothes, jewelry, bags, shoes, cars, etc. For me, the quickest way to know if a Singaporean is broke is if they are young, have a mid-to-shit job, but are wearing flashy clothes.
tinder by gov ?
Thank you
>> The truth is that we don’t really know what exactly makes love work, such that we can articulate and implement it on a societal scale. It’s too messy, too complex, too idiosyncratic, and too human. Anyone who claims otherwise probably has a course to sell you on negging and pickup artistry.
The author, who is a gay man, obviously didn't study any pickup material since if he would he'd realize how wrong he is. If he'd study pickup material and the surrounding works he'd realize that what women write in these preferences is completely meaningless so his example of meeting a guy as a guy on this website is completely useless for men meeting women, since women do not work like that.
All of these algorithmic matching will become totaly useless and wrong depending on the behaviour of the male. In a completely mismatched pair the women will fawn over the guy if his behaviour is congruent with what attracts females. And even on a complete match the women will run away in panic if the guy is a total tool sexual-behaviour-wise to what (dis)attracts women.
Also: nothing will solve marriage problem as long as women are in the workforce.
Look up books by Rollo Tomassi, he has a blog and has written on these topics if you are one of those "citation needed" people.
Interesting that when I ctrl-f the linked article and the previous discussion (463 comments), not once is the word "trust" found.
That's the actual problem, though (a lack of it)! Above all else, you'll probably overlook a lot and still commit long-term to someone you can trust.
Trust for the first date or long term? For the first date you already must supply your government id
I have so many questions of my own:
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
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One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
Welcome to Korea 2.0
The biggest issues in Korea dating is young men either (1) don't have enough money to date (because local women expect men to paying for everything) or (2) women reject men with old-fashioned social views. In my personal experience, comparing the most developed places in Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore), young Korean men are the most like their fathers with out-of-date social views.
From a few comments in the article and here, I'm wondering how viable Singapore is as a country for typical residents (vs. the 1%) to have children.
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Anyone here familiar, to comment?
Middle class life is pretty reasonable in Singapore. You can have two working parents with boring, average corporate jobs (the economy is very strong in Singapore), then you live in modestly priced public housing, ride public transit everywhere, and send your kids to public schools. It seems fine to me. And the middle class isn't something rare in Singapore; it is most of Singapore. You can also hire a cheap domestic helper to cook most of your meals, clean your home, and shuttle the kids to and from school and activities. This is a very common pattern in Singapore.
I think this is good, yes there can be improve but the idea is good
especially for country like korea and japan ???? Yeah bro they need it
The marriage rates of these countries is not really the issue. Much of the remaining difference between East/Southeast Asia and the West is actually births out of wedlock, which the region still heavily stigmatizes.
As Singaporean commenters have said, I think this is more of a positive eugenics scheme.
I thought incels are white right wingers, first time I see this term in a non-white context. Southern Poverty Law Center is listing them as a hate group for example so by definition incels can’t be black.
It appears you have the incorrect definition of incel.
There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore? I've been told that the city's 30 year old gay and lesbian crowd is treated to a lot of fancy dates at public expense.
> There is an amusing irony in this approach to marriage promotion: who isn't already married in Singapore?
I don't understand your question.
The govt pays for the date??
honestly that seems like a great way to spend public funds