I'd just note that this particular reputation problem is in many respects the same top current social problem which is that of figuring out how to make institutions and expert authorities verifiably trustworthy after recent widespread abuse and resulting collapse in trust.
Imho we have technology to solve it now ( Blockchain, smart contracts and verification). However societal and cultural shifts are much slower than the tech
Certainly there is a lot of room for improvement and fruit that is both low and widely unpicked, and one has recourse to the implementation of a lot of other under-applied social technologies much less computationally-intensive than blockchains. But even with all the latest tech, I do not think we are yet close to being able to claim we have designs that definitely address the fundamental problems involved with trust in the abstract, in much the same way we cannot remotely claim cybersecurity to be a solved problem.
My assumption is it is difficult to fake hundreds of reviews. So if I see a restaurant with a 4.5 rating and 500 reviews than I have some confidence the rating is informative. When I see a restaurant with a 5.0 rating and 2 reviews or a restaurant with a 2.0 rating and 3 reviews my confidence in the rating is low, although I'm probably skipping the 2.0 restaurant on the basis that if friends of the owners can't bother to give a 5.0 review than it must be a bad restaurant!
As for applying reviews to relationships, I'm not sure I would have any confidence in any ratings. First, if a person had hundreds of ratings what am I to make of that? How would a person garner hundreds of reviews in a dating app? And if the person has only a couple of ratings that is not informative either.
I'm not in the dating arena and have not been for decades. So being old school I find the idea of leaning on relationship apps to meet people to be insane. I can see merit in learning about people via Facebook but I just think the more reliable way to meet people is via real social contact. A good friend of mine met his wife in the line at the airport. When it comes to meeting people, I favor random chance far above manipulated online profiles.
You just started a random conversation after I started a random conversation that was kicked off by a conversation from the Invisible Sun. Are we in the top 1%?
Much of the infrastructure we keep trying to build for modern dating, at least for the benefit of middle to upper middle class women, is an attempt to replicate the roles mothers, aunts, fathers, and uncles used to perform in mate selection.
I guess the infrastructure hasn’t yet come close to mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles at least as they existed 25 years ago. Maybe it’s just around the corner so to speak?
I haven't been on the dating scene for 15 years now (thank god) and I was horrible at dating when I was. Still, it seems to be that there is an easy "solution" to these problems if you are a man. Behave like a decent human being.
And try to meet women in the real world, even if that is scary and hard (as it certainly was for me).
(I get and agree that it is increasingly difficult to be masculine. I agree with those critiques. I am only commenting specifically on the alleged problems with dating apps and "complaint" apps like the Tea thingymajiger.
Very hard to meet women in the real world. People don't really go out anymore (especially the type of introverted women that readers of this Substack would be into) and even when they do go out, they aren't approachable---they might be talking to their friends or have their heads buried in their phones, headphones in. And even if they are out and approachable, everyone's social skills have atrophied terribly during COVID---especially in the younger generations that are in their prime dating age. So it's hard to strike up a lively conversation, assess chemistry, and then transition to getting a date set up.
It is a good advice to be a decent person, but young people aren't suddenly en masse all terrible people. It's almost unbelievable how much social reality has changed in the past fifteen years.
Understood, and I don't disagree. I had a very difficult time with this in the early 2000s, and I know things have only gotten worse. Still, as frustrating as it is, there still really isn't a better way than to get out and try to meet people in the real world.
Perhaps in addition to Market Failures, and the Government Failures our author points to, a third category of Social Norm Failures is needed.
As Arnold likes to point out, attempts to minimize market failures will tend to bring about government failures. What are the causal relationships between market and government, on the one hand, and social norm failures on the other?
Perhaps the only solution is to define success as the peace of mind that comes from the self-satisfaction in knowing that you did everything—within the limits of your ability—to become the very best that you are capable of becoming, while understanding that the universe and our place in it is a dynamic and constantly changing process, with competing and cooperating orders—including but perhaps not limited to designed and emergent types.
Life is a process full of possibilities, constraints, and trade-offs. Can we design a rating system to help us succeed at the game of life—that optimizes for peace of mind?
I've begun to think that the natural female tendency towards selectivity has been intensified by both the dynamics of dating apps and the massive, cheap attention which is now available online.
Combine that with an attitude of feminine privilege (in the sense that women get many allowances and bonuses... and men get many risks and costs) and we have a very unfortunate romantic situation.
I feel pretty sure that older people are unaware of HOW unfortunate it is.
Nothing about a dating gossip app theoretically should cater just to women. But if they let men on the app gossiping about women, it would take ten minutes before people realized the whole concept is pretty creepy..
Each sex has reasonable expectations of what a dating app (or any forum where similar info is exchanged) should do, which will "creep out" a lot of people of the other sex. Thus it makes sense that such forums should be not just segregated, but completely separate.
This is an area in which government regulation will likely ruin everything, by making it illegal to express "bigoted" views and/or to keep out the other sex, possibly with two- (or more) tier "justice" backing it up. In particular, any limits on anonymity will ruin everything. Any "carefully engineered, state backed" monopoly app must be defeated, even if the only way to defeat it is to move dating back off the net.
I expect dating app reviews will eventually settle down, and customers will eventually settle down, and society will adjust to reading between the lines and ignoring the outliers. I'm no customer, and can't imagine being a customer. Maybe they are so normal for the younguns that they can't imagine dating without an app. Doesn't seem like fun to me; the fun was meeting people with no expectations and being surprised.
I wonder if this contributes to the social and political polarization I see today, because people only meet people they already agree with. I can't recall dating anyone whose political views I already knew, and it seldom came up in the first few dates. Or maybe I have cause and effect reversed.
I've been reading people hope for dating app improvement for a decade, but it never arrives. The forces which keep the current frustrating equilibrium in place are both fundamental to the nature of the romantic matching market and robust, and the people who might be in the best position to make positive reforms are not incentivized to do so. In general a lot of internet-enabled social functions go through a kind of life cycle. The start is a wild west full of lots of competition and innovation and a kind of 'innocence', where developers don't have to worry yet about squeezing every possible dime out of the service, and where users' naivete really often correlates with vibes of sincerity and authenticity and before everything gets analyzed to death by everyone for the ideal cynical and quasi-fraudulent moves in strategic optimization, and so which people will look back on as a kind of "golden age". Then various parties start working on understanding and gaming the system, and everybody else has to follow suit in a normative race to the bottom, with "don't hate the player, hate the game" rationalizing which are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. And then people hope there might be some way back to the lost golden age, but there isn't, we're stuck here, this is how we live now, because the players can't get back their innocence like they can't get back their virginity.
Yes. OKCupid is never coming back. Now that everyone understands how datings apps are "supposed" to work, you will never have the same level of sincerity and trust necessary for an OKCupid dating experience to happen. The only way online dating can possibly work is if you have a carefully engineered, state-backed solution that can make competitors illegal and *carefully* design the app to avoid all the race from the bottom dynamics. Even then, I'm skeptical that it's possible (and any solution that starts with "carefully-engineered, state-backed...." is doomed to fail anyways).
I guess I wasn't very clear. I just mean that people's mental baselines will gradually put less and less stock in dating app reviews.
For instance, I've learned that Amazon 5 star reviews are sometimes useful, sometimes not, but the best reviews are the 1- and 2-star reviews; if they are all about shipping delays, or wrong size, or other such immaterial matters, then the product is probably pretty good.
Or short one line reviews -- "Arrived on time and works as expected" -- are irrelevant.
I expect that most dating reviews will end up the same. "Talks too much", "ugly shirt", who cares? Just noise. "Filthy car" probably more important. Looking for one night stands has different criteria than long term potential mates. I believe people will adjust and tune out 90% of the reviews.
It is. My job exposes me to a high-turnover pool of colleagues in the prime matching cohorts, with their adventures and travails being a frequent subject in their office chatter, and their complaints track perfectly with the general airing of grievances about it one can find in the relevant online forums. It's bad out there, very hard to meet and match (and to stay in the most productive mindset about it), and the situation has been deteriorating for a long time.
Thank you! But, please help me to understand the *why*. Why is it so difficult to pair up? Like the low income folks could teach an upper level course on getting things done.
Unfortunately, the matter is both very complicated and very much overdetermined by a combination of multiple important modern trends, and thus there is no way to explain the causes in a manner that would be appropriately succinct for a sub-comment tangent to the original blog post. Not to mention the fact that the explanations rely on some aspects of human nature which remain effectively taboo for public discussion, as of course is true in every culture throughout history and which one should expect given topics that touch directly on primal matters of concern like reproduction.
But as to your claim about the relevant knowhow of "low income folks", a quick reply would be that their example for instruction has no value to those who don't want to do things that way.
Yeah, but the lower income folks don’t seem to be any less happy and could actually be happier overall as far as we know. Maybe it’s just me, but the UMC folks are probably overthinking things as they are prone to do with their neuroticism. That’s where a university level course taught by the “baby mama” crowd might be useful.
Maybe i'm not very observant but restaurants sabotaging other restaurants with bad reviews doesn't seem like a big issue in practice. I suspect the problem is much worse in a dating context because it taps into emotions so much more primitive and powerful than the desire to boost margins by .2% or whatever and those emotions are completely validated in the context of a social media platform predicated on connecting women with bad dating experiences. There is no good accountability mechanism because while it's in line with human nature to punish a greedy corporation no one wants to question a woman's lived experience. Sample sizes are small and the damage of an accusation on character are hard to reverse. It's not as easy as trying the french fries and realizing they're not so bad.
After writing this I realize that the problem with analogy is even more fundamental than this, though I think many of the features I mentioned are valid.
The two things are completely different because it's not men sabotaging other men to outcompete each other on the Tea app, it's women sabotaging men as they soothe hurt feelings and amplify misunderstandings, to say nothing of outright revenge. You could modify the analogy to say that restaurant customers might have incentive to write false reviews sometimes to get perks or something but I think the two are still just not very similar.
I was going to comment that the metaphor was flawed due to misalignment of who the competitors are in this context.
The issue with the dating app is almost exactly the inverse of the rating of goods/services. With goods and services most people in the US seem to give 5/5 stars for “pretty good, didn’t kill me”, ie giving overly high scores. With dating it will be 0/5 for the same outcome due to emotional issues. The trouble is that the negative reviews are far more damaging for dating, and far more potential downside to falsely report.
Every relationship a person ever has ends except one.* That leaves X women leaving a relationship on a mixed note at best (and if they gave a green flag it wouldn’t mean very much anyway) against one woman who’s married to you at which point the app is irrelevant. It’s not really possible to have lots of satisfied customers.
*Actually should say that if you’re lucky things don’t end with one.
Exactly, dating markets are structured to have many returns and rejections, as it were. Especially an issue since it isn't a one sided buyer to good/service market, but a matching market where either side can end it. That basically guarantees one side is going to have bad feelings about it, even if it is was perfectly fine and normal.
Back in Usenet and uucp days, I found there was a newsgroup dedicated to prostitute reviews. It was an interesting deep dive for an hour or so. They were quite clinical, multiple ratings for each prostitute in more categories than I thought existed, and seemed to take a lot of pride in trying to be objective with few 0s or 1s or 5s.
It would have been interesting to find a john-review newsgroup, but I doubt many prostitutes knew about Usenet and uucp. I don't know if it ever migrated to the Internet, and I wonder how well it would cope with a sudden influx of more amateurish reviewers.
I'd just note that this particular reputation problem is in many respects the same top current social problem which is that of figuring out how to make institutions and expert authorities verifiably trustworthy after recent widespread abuse and resulting collapse in trust.
Imho we have technology to solve it now ( Blockchain, smart contracts and verification). However societal and cultural shifts are much slower than the tech
Certainly there is a lot of room for improvement and fruit that is both low and widely unpicked, and one has recourse to the implementation of a lot of other under-applied social technologies much less computationally-intensive than blockchains. But even with all the latest tech, I do not think we are yet close to being able to claim we have designs that definitely address the fundamental problems involved with trust in the abstract, in much the same way we cannot remotely claim cybersecurity to be a solved problem.
My assumption is it is difficult to fake hundreds of reviews. So if I see a restaurant with a 4.5 rating and 500 reviews than I have some confidence the rating is informative. When I see a restaurant with a 5.0 rating and 2 reviews or a restaurant with a 2.0 rating and 3 reviews my confidence in the rating is low, although I'm probably skipping the 2.0 restaurant on the basis that if friends of the owners can't bother to give a 5.0 review than it must be a bad restaurant!
As for applying reviews to relationships, I'm not sure I would have any confidence in any ratings. First, if a person had hundreds of ratings what am I to make of that? How would a person garner hundreds of reviews in a dating app? And if the person has only a couple of ratings that is not informative either.
I'm not in the dating arena and have not been for decades. So being old school I find the idea of leaning on relationship apps to meet people to be insane. I can see merit in learning about people via Facebook but I just think the more reliable way to meet people is via real social contact. A good friend of mine met his wife in the line at the airport. When it comes to meeting people, I favor random chance far above manipulated online profiles.
“When it comes to meeting people, I favor random chance far above manipulated online profiles.”
+1. Thank you.
But most people don't have the personality to start a lot of random conversations.
Agreed, and I am one of them. But if you are looking for a mate, you have to try to overcome this anxiety.
You just started a random conversation after I started a random conversation that was kicked off by a conversation from the Invisible Sun. Are we in the top 1%?
Much of the infrastructure we keep trying to build for modern dating, at least for the benefit of middle to upper middle class women, is an attempt to replicate the roles mothers, aunts, fathers, and uncles used to perform in mate selection.
I guess the infrastructure hasn’t yet come close to mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles at least as they existed 25 years ago. Maybe it’s just around the corner so to speak?
I haven't been on the dating scene for 15 years now (thank god) and I was horrible at dating when I was. Still, it seems to be that there is an easy "solution" to these problems if you are a man. Behave like a decent human being.
And try to meet women in the real world, even if that is scary and hard (as it certainly was for me).
(I get and agree that it is increasingly difficult to be masculine. I agree with those critiques. I am only commenting specifically on the alleged problems with dating apps and "complaint" apps like the Tea thingymajiger.
Very hard to meet women in the real world. People don't really go out anymore (especially the type of introverted women that readers of this Substack would be into) and even when they do go out, they aren't approachable---they might be talking to their friends or have their heads buried in their phones, headphones in. And even if they are out and approachable, everyone's social skills have atrophied terribly during COVID---especially in the younger generations that are in their prime dating age. So it's hard to strike up a lively conversation, assess chemistry, and then transition to getting a date set up.
It is a good advice to be a decent person, but young people aren't suddenly en masse all terrible people. It's almost unbelievable how much social reality has changed in the past fifteen years.
Understood, and I don't disagree. I had a very difficult time with this in the early 2000s, and I know things have only gotten worse. Still, as frustrating as it is, there still really isn't a better way than to get out and try to meet people in the real world.
Perhaps in addition to Market Failures, and the Government Failures our author points to, a third category of Social Norm Failures is needed.
As Arnold likes to point out, attempts to minimize market failures will tend to bring about government failures. What are the causal relationships between market and government, on the one hand, and social norm failures on the other?
Perhaps the only solution is to define success as the peace of mind that comes from the self-satisfaction in knowing that you did everything—within the limits of your ability—to become the very best that you are capable of becoming, while understanding that the universe and our place in it is a dynamic and constantly changing process, with competing and cooperating orders—including but perhaps not limited to designed and emergent types.
Life is a process full of possibilities, constraints, and trade-offs. Can we design a rating system to help us succeed at the game of life—that optimizes for peace of mind?
I've begun to think that the natural female tendency towards selectivity has been intensified by both the dynamics of dating apps and the massive, cheap attention which is now available online.
Combine that with an attitude of feminine privilege (in the sense that women get many allowances and bonuses... and men get many risks and costs) and we have a very unfortunate romantic situation.
I feel pretty sure that older people are unaware of HOW unfortunate it is.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-a-womans-duty-to-choose-well
Nothing about a dating gossip app theoretically should cater just to women. But if they let men on the app gossiping about women, it would take ten minutes before people realized the whole concept is pretty creepy..
Each sex has reasonable expectations of what a dating app (or any forum where similar info is exchanged) should do, which will "creep out" a lot of people of the other sex. Thus it makes sense that such forums should be not just segregated, but completely separate.
This is an area in which government regulation will likely ruin everything, by making it illegal to express "bigoted" views and/or to keep out the other sex, possibly with two- (or more) tier "justice" backing it up. In particular, any limits on anonymity will ruin everything. Any "carefully engineered, state backed" monopoly app must be defeated, even if the only way to defeat it is to move dating back off the net.
I expect dating app reviews will eventually settle down, and customers will eventually settle down, and society will adjust to reading between the lines and ignoring the outliers. I'm no customer, and can't imagine being a customer. Maybe they are so normal for the younguns that they can't imagine dating without an app. Doesn't seem like fun to me; the fun was meeting people with no expectations and being surprised.
I wonder if this contributes to the social and political polarization I see today, because people only meet people they already agree with. I can't recall dating anyone whose political views I already knew, and it seldom came up in the first few dates. Or maybe I have cause and effect reversed.
I've been reading people hope for dating app improvement for a decade, but it never arrives. The forces which keep the current frustrating equilibrium in place are both fundamental to the nature of the romantic matching market and robust, and the people who might be in the best position to make positive reforms are not incentivized to do so. In general a lot of internet-enabled social functions go through a kind of life cycle. The start is a wild west full of lots of competition and innovation and a kind of 'innocence', where developers don't have to worry yet about squeezing every possible dime out of the service, and where users' naivete really often correlates with vibes of sincerity and authenticity and before everything gets analyzed to death by everyone for the ideal cynical and quasi-fraudulent moves in strategic optimization, and so which people will look back on as a kind of "golden age". Then various parties start working on understanding and gaming the system, and everybody else has to follow suit in a normative race to the bottom, with "don't hate the player, hate the game" rationalizing which are individually beneficial but collectively harmful. And then people hope there might be some way back to the lost golden age, but there isn't, we're stuck here, this is how we live now, because the players can't get back their innocence like they can't get back their virginity.
Yes. OKCupid is never coming back. Now that everyone understands how datings apps are "supposed" to work, you will never have the same level of sincerity and trust necessary for an OKCupid dating experience to happen. The only way online dating can possibly work is if you have a carefully engineered, state-backed solution that can make competitors illegal and *carefully* design the app to avoid all the race from the bottom dynamics. Even then, I'm skeptical that it's possible (and any solution that starts with "carefully-engineered, state-backed...." is doomed to fail anyways).
I guess I wasn't very clear. I just mean that people's mental baselines will gradually put less and less stock in dating app reviews.
For instance, I've learned that Amazon 5 star reviews are sometimes useful, sometimes not, but the best reviews are the 1- and 2-star reviews; if they are all about shipping delays, or wrong size, or other such immaterial matters, then the product is probably pretty good.
Or short one line reviews -- "Arrived on time and works as expected" -- are irrelevant.
I expect that most dating reviews will end up the same. "Talks too much", "ugly shirt", who cares? Just noise. "Filthy car" probably more important. Looking for one night stands has different criteria than long term potential mates. I believe people will adjust and tune out 90% of the reviews.
“Because male-female relationships are so tense to begin with“
Huh? Is it really that bad out there?
It is. My job exposes me to a high-turnover pool of colleagues in the prime matching cohorts, with their adventures and travails being a frequent subject in their office chatter, and their complaints track perfectly with the general airing of grievances about it one can find in the relevant online forums. It's bad out there, very hard to meet and match (and to stay in the most productive mindset about it), and the situation has been deteriorating for a long time.
Thank you! But, please help me to understand the *why*. Why is it so difficult to pair up? Like the low income folks could teach an upper level course on getting things done.
Unfortunately, the matter is both very complicated and very much overdetermined by a combination of multiple important modern trends, and thus there is no way to explain the causes in a manner that would be appropriately succinct for a sub-comment tangent to the original blog post. Not to mention the fact that the explanations rely on some aspects of human nature which remain effectively taboo for public discussion, as of course is true in every culture throughout history and which one should expect given topics that touch directly on primal matters of concern like reproduction.
But as to your claim about the relevant knowhow of "low income folks", a quick reply would be that their example for instruction has no value to those who don't want to do things that way.
Yeah, but the lower income folks don’t seem to be any less happy and could actually be happier overall as far as we know. Maybe it’s just me, but the UMC folks are probably overthinking things as they are prone to do with their neuroticism. That’s where a university level course taught by the “baby mama” crowd might be useful.
Maybe i'm not very observant but restaurants sabotaging other restaurants with bad reviews doesn't seem like a big issue in practice. I suspect the problem is much worse in a dating context because it taps into emotions so much more primitive and powerful than the desire to boost margins by .2% or whatever and those emotions are completely validated in the context of a social media platform predicated on connecting women with bad dating experiences. There is no good accountability mechanism because while it's in line with human nature to punish a greedy corporation no one wants to question a woman's lived experience. Sample sizes are small and the damage of an accusation on character are hard to reverse. It's not as easy as trying the french fries and realizing they're not so bad.
After writing this I realize that the problem with analogy is even more fundamental than this, though I think many of the features I mentioned are valid.
The two things are completely different because it's not men sabotaging other men to outcompete each other on the Tea app, it's women sabotaging men as they soothe hurt feelings and amplify misunderstandings, to say nothing of outright revenge. You could modify the analogy to say that restaurant customers might have incentive to write false reviews sometimes to get perks or something but I think the two are still just not very similar.
I was going to comment that the metaphor was flawed due to misalignment of who the competitors are in this context.
The issue with the dating app is almost exactly the inverse of the rating of goods/services. With goods and services most people in the US seem to give 5/5 stars for “pretty good, didn’t kill me”, ie giving overly high scores. With dating it will be 0/5 for the same outcome due to emotional issues. The trouble is that the negative reviews are far more damaging for dating, and far more potential downside to falsely report.
Every relationship a person ever has ends except one.* That leaves X women leaving a relationship on a mixed note at best (and if they gave a green flag it wouldn’t mean very much anyway) against one woman who’s married to you at which point the app is irrelevant. It’s not really possible to have lots of satisfied customers.
*Actually should say that if you’re lucky things don’t end with one.
Exactly, dating markets are structured to have many returns and rejections, as it were. Especially an issue since it isn't a one sided buyer to good/service market, but a matching market where either side can end it. That basically guarantees one side is going to have bad feelings about it, even if it is was perfectly fine and normal.
Back in Usenet and uucp days, I found there was a newsgroup dedicated to prostitute reviews. It was an interesting deep dive for an hour or so. They were quite clinical, multiple ratings for each prostitute in more categories than I thought existed, and seemed to take a lot of pride in trying to be objective with few 0s or 1s or 5s.
It would have been interesting to find a john-review newsgroup, but I doubt many prostitutes knew about Usenet and uucp. I don't know if it ever migrated to the Internet, and I wonder how well it would cope with a sudden influx of more amateurish reviewers.