It strikes me that it is much more plausible to argue that the dating market suffers from market failure through information asymmetry, market power and high search costs than to argue the same about economic activity. Yet although people search high and low to find (often non-existent) market failures to justify economic interventions, interventions in the dating market are greeted with near-uniform hostlility. I predict that, outside of LessWrong, your proposal will generate a high “Ick” factor as a taboo violation. “Rationality-based online dating will set you up with scientifically-chosen dates...” this is likely to be an anti-selling point to most users.
Obviously you’d take a different angle with the marketing.
Off the cuff, I’d pitch it as a hands-off dating site. You just install a persistent app on your phone that pushes a notification when it finds a good match. No website to navigate, no profile to fill, no message queue to manage.
Perhaps market it to busy professionals. Finance professionals may be a good target to start marketing to. (busy, high-status, analytical)
There would need to be some way to deal with the privacy issues though.
This might be a reason to start it out as a nice thing. Though, the problem is finding a niche that likes this proposal and has a decent gender ratio (or enough people interested in dates of the same gender).
Now that I think about it, existing dating sites do try to advertise themselves as being better because of their algorithm. If that advertising works, maybe the ick factor isn’t that strong?
It strikes me that it is much more plausible to argue that the dating market suffers from market failure through information asymmetry, market power and high search costs than to argue the same about economic activity. Yet although people search high and low to find (often non-existent) market failures to justify economic interventions, interventions in the dating market are greeted with near-uniform hostlility. I predict that, outside of LessWrong, your proposal will generate a high “Ick” factor as a taboo violation. “Rationality-based online dating will set you up with scientifically-chosen dates...” this is likely to be an anti-selling point to most users.
Obviously you’d take a different angle with the marketing.
Off the cuff, I’d pitch it as a hands-off dating site. You just install a persistent app on your phone that pushes a notification when it finds a good match. No website to navigate, no profile to fill, no message queue to manage.
Perhaps market it to busy professionals. Finance professionals may be a good target to start marketing to. (busy, high-status, analytical)
There would need to be some way to deal with the privacy issues though.
This might be a reason to start it out as a nice thing. Though, the problem is finding a niche that likes this proposal and has a decent gender ratio (or enough people interested in dates of the same gender).
Now that I think about it, existing dating sites do try to advertise themselves as being better because of their algorithm. If that advertising works, maybe the ick factor isn’t that strong?