This seems like a misapplication of the concept of efficiency. The reason that a $20 bill on the ground is surprising is that a single competent agent would be enough to remove it from the world. Similarly, the reason that the efficient market hypothesis is a good approximation isn’t that everyone who invests in the stock market is rational; instead, it’s that a few highly informed individuals working full time are doing a great job at using up inefficiencies, which causes them to go away.
For every example that you pick, it’s certainly true that some people are taking advantage of it (some people are using PhotoFeeler, some people have read Mate, etc), but there’s no reason why this would translate into the advantages going away, or would automatically lead to everyone in the dating scene doing it. (Indeed, if someone is highly successful at dating, they’re more likely to disappear from the dating scene than to stay in it.) Thus, it’s highly disanalogous to efficient markets.
My main point is that humans are frequently unstrategic and bad, absent a lot of time investment and/or selection effects, so there’s no particular reason to expect them to be great at dating. It may be true that they’re even worse at dating than we would expect, but to draw that conclusion, the relevant comparisons are other things that lay people do in their spare time (ryan_b mentions job search, which seems like a good comparison), while theories assuming perfect rationality are unlikely to be useful.
(Another reason that humans are sometimes good at things is when they were highly useful for reproduction in the ancestral environment. While finding a mate was certainly useful, all of the mentioned examples concern things that have only become relevant during the past few hundred years, so it’s not surprising that we’re not optimised to make use of them.)
This seems like a misapplication of the concept of efficiency. The reason that a $20 bill on the ground is surprising is that a single competent agent would be enough to remove it from the world. Similarly, the reason that the efficient market hypothesis is a good approximation isn’t that everyone who invests in the stock market is rational; instead, it’s that a few highly informed individuals working full time are doing a great job at using up inefficiencies, which causes them to go away.
For every example that you pick, it’s certainly true that some people are taking advantage of it (some people are using PhotoFeeler, some people have read Mate, etc), but there’s no reason why this would translate into the advantages going away, or would automatically lead to everyone in the dating scene doing it. (Indeed, if someone is highly successful at dating, they’re more likely to disappear from the dating scene than to stay in it.) Thus, it’s highly disanalogous to efficient markets.
My main point is that humans are frequently unstrategic and bad, absent a lot of time investment and/or selection effects, so there’s no particular reason to expect them to be great at dating. It may be true that they’re even worse at dating than we would expect, but to draw that conclusion, the relevant comparisons are other things that lay people do in their spare time (ryan_b mentions job search, which seems like a good comparison), while theories assuming perfect rationality are unlikely to be useful.
(Another reason that humans are sometimes good at things is when they were highly useful for reproduction in the ancestral environment. While finding a mate was certainly useful, all of the mentioned examples concern things that have only become relevant during the past few hundred years, so it’s not surprising that we’re not optimised to make use of them.)