[toomuchtodo]

We let people buy cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Should we not let them buy this dopamine hit also?

The reality of the situation is that the dating marketplace is wildly dysfunctional now [1] [2] [3], and with women empowered and educated, they don't date down like men do [4] (women want high status, high earning men, men want younger, attractive women who can provide kids, very broadly speaking; there are only so many high status, high earning men). So, you have an entire cohort of men, through no fault of their own, who don't want to compete in a Sisyphean effort to attract a potential partner because the odds are very high they will not meet a potentially unrealistic bar [5] [6]. Shouldn't they at least get some enjoyment out of this existence if they weren't lucky to have been born a few decades earlier?

Subthread where I talk about this ~2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430248 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429544 (thread "The rise of lonely, single men")

[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... ("Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study")

[2] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-g... ("Why women lose the dating game")

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-... ("Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner")

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... ("The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man")

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/20/americans-s... ("Americans see men as the financial providers, even as women’s contributions grow")

[6] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/from-swiping-t... ("From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships")

(TLDR: Macroeconomics and unrealistic expectations are causing a relationship market collapse, let people enjoy what they want vs screaming into the void about that which cannot be changed)

[x86x87]

Some may draw the conclusion that women have an easier time dating. They do not. They are competing for what they believe are "more desirable" men. Everyone loses.

AI is dangerous here IMHO because it's going to disconnect people even more from the possibility of having a meaningful connection/relationship with another human.

People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.

[seanmcdirmid]

There was an article last week about AI boyfriends being a thing now in China.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/13/asia-pacific/so...

I guess that women just aren’t so interested in porn as they are in companionship. That somehow men and women will tend to use AI differently?

[almatabata]

> I guess that women just aren’t so interested in porn as they are in companionship

Depends how you define porn. For example smut books are very popular among women, I think they are even the primary market for them. It is not that they are not interested in porn, they are just looking for a different type.

Note as well in reports women report using the AI boyfriend for sex as well ("Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had." from https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch...). They seem to also use the AI for sexual gratification, but they might not look for the same visual aspect and more as you say the emotional aspect.

[x86x87]

> It is not that they are not interested in porn, they are just looking for a different type.

amen to that. everyone has some sort of drive to reproduce that is hardwired into us.

[x86x87]

Hmmm. I think women are interested in sex as much as men are. Same goes for porn. It's something that's hardwired into every living thing.

[disqard]

> People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.

This is the key. We're aiming to make our lives as convenient and frictionless as possible -- and this is monotonically increasing. Technology enables us to essentially be shut-ins, like the hikikomori.

This is a fragmentation/rending of the social fabric on a massive scale, and we're seeing it happen in real time.

[toomuchtodo]

Indeed, but you have no leverage to tell people to put work in to meaningful relationships vs social media and superficial signaling. There is no solution one individual can solve this with, and there is no leverage at scale to make people be better to each other in this regard. The system will eventually fail, you can only do what you can for yourself and those you love and care about.

People have to want to care and do better, you cannot make them (in this domain). Pick those you invest your time and emotional energy in wisely, that's all you can do.

[x86x87]

There are things you can do. Usually given enough time you'll figure out what's going on and you'll adjust your expectations and manage to have mostly good interactions.

[toomuchtodo]

But who is adjusting their expectations? The data does not show women are and being willing to partner with men they don't currently believe to be suitable, and men adjusting their expectations is staying home, playing video games, and watching porn (which is entirely reasonable on their part, considering the landscape; if you can't win, why play?).

EDIT: @x86x87 We aren't disagreeing. The marketplace trajectory is already locked in due to the crystallization of ideas in this domain by market participants.

[x86x87]

Ultimately everyone has to regulate their own expectations.

If you're a woman and it's either prince charming or bust you're going to most likely end up alone. You decide what you want to do.

If you're a man and expect women to jump all over you when you're not taking care of yourself and cannot hold a conversation + don't want to improve to become more sexually attractive you're going to end up alone.

[lock-the-spock]

I feel like many people (men) here seem to live in a different planet than me. Women care so much less about wealth and looks than men think. Be a nice person, caring, reasonably fun to take with, ensure basic hygiene and carry your part of emotional and household duties and there are plenty of women out there who would be interested. But that also requires going out and meeting real women at work or in leisure environments they enjoy.

Honestly it is quite staggering how easy many fellow men find it to blame women for all supposed dating unfairness, but most do not even a basic own effort (or do so once and then give up when it doesn't work). Take care of yourself, have some hobbies and dare to talk to new people. And stop blaming others or the system or an amorphous and diverse group like women which make up more than 50% of the population for your own unhappiness.

[toomuchtodo]

I would encourage you to set aside your feelings, and instead consume the data and build your model from there. Observe what people do, not what they say ("revealed preference"). What does the data show us?

I believe I have provided robust citations throughout this thread, and am happy to consider any data you might have refuting those citations; your advice blatantly ignores the data. Certainly, from a dating perspective, hygiene, emotional health, and maximizing social opportunities is important. But you will still arrive at poor outcomes if counterparties are not interested in what you offer (which I address verbosely with links in thread). Expectations are cheap to have, and the cost is borne by the party who must jump through hoops to attempt to meet them.

If aggregate female expectations are beyond what a male population cohort can obtain, what do you expect of those men? They can either grind to meet a standard they will never meet, or opt out and seek their own happiness. Is it wrong to believe someone's expectations are unrealistic? I don't believe so, that is an opinion that can be held. I am happily partnered for over two decades, the advice I give to young men is simple: rapidly ascertain if a potential partner is worth your time and energy, and move on the moment you discover they're not. If you don't want a partner, or the effort is not worth the outcome, opt out and live your best life solo. That is all you can do. ~50% of first marriages fail, and the numbers get worse for second (67%) and third (73%) marriages. Most of this is luck anyway.

(I recommend "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Lies-Internet-About-Really/...)

[x86x87]

@toomuchtodo I think we are saying the same thing. Were we differ maybe a bit I read this correctly in how much agency one individual can have and how hard it is to swim against the current.

[amluto]

[1] says, in the abstract:

> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

This fails one of my heuristics for valid statistics: things that don’t deserve to be exactly equal are exactly equal.

We're supposed to believe that the women can be partitioned into groups A (bottom 22%) and B (top 78%). (I'll assume that this is well defined for the sake of argument.) And this study showed that the bottom 80% of men are competing for group A and that group B is competing for the top 20% of men? That is, group B is competing for exactly the set of men that, themselves, arent' competing for group A? That's a remarkable claim!

[lock-the-spock]

Fully agree, this is unscientific nonsense trying to model an incredibly hard to model thing. People seem to just Google papers that support their worldview without even bothering to read them.

[toomuchtodo]

More data (from arguably objective sources):

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findi... ("Pew Research: Key findings about online dating in the U.S.")

https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/07/singles-speed-dating-... ("APM Marketplace: Some singles are done with dating apps")

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2022.0367?j... ("Finding Intimacy Online: A Machine Learning Analysis of Predictors of Success")

> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.

https://www.wired.com/story/data-marriage-behavior-love-psyc... | https://archive.today/4nHbU ("Wired: People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science")

> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:

> someone tall (if a man), someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it), someone rich, someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man, someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma), and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)

Additional citations wrt dating market place dynamics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581620 (Dec 16, 2021) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710536 (Oct 14, 2016)

(I should probably just write a blog post putting all of this together and post that here, my apologies for the wall of text to build up context for this; there are no simple explanations for complex topics)

[yieldcrv]

the other side of this is that uneducated women cant reliably date up anymore and this is single handedly exacerbating inequality greater than capital consolidation and other socioeconomic factors

although it might currently masquerade as a cultural thing or a factor of the gender identity, men dated down out of necessity, by population alone.

find the study to corroborate that, this is the first generation where the middle on the higher rungs and the upper middle class actually has enough women in it to date and thats whats happening

entire dynasties of women that thought they could offer their presence alone, and finding out they only have choices with socioeconomic equals instead of higher

lower socioeconomic status groups of women are so vocal about their sex work or balking at questions of “what do they bring to the table” because they thought being available sexually and pleasant would open up a different path, but are just entertainment options. they basically have to be louder because they don’t know what’s going on, notably, this groups considers themselves empowered too, at least self identify as such.

[gedy]

> the other side of this is that uneducated women cant reliably date up anymore

That's not the case? If you are young and attractive woman, you'll have no problem dating up for the most part.

[yieldcrv]

I should clarify, the stats are for who is actually getting married by prior socioeconomic class.

And I’m considering everything else to be an entertainment option.

But the dating patterns corroborate the same view. Wealthy men picking younger and attractive women who offer nothing else have a population constriction too. There are far more poorer people than wealthy, its too small of a population for it to buck a trend further compounded by the newfound existence of women who are the first generation in their higher socioeconomic class.