Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant “The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn’t matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it).”
For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:
1) It doesn’t take orientation into consideration; that’s probably even (you “lose” the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can “subtract” gay men), but then in theory the gender ratio should be balanced overall too.
2) It doesn’t take polyamory into consideration. The OP didn’t sound like he was looking for a poly relationship, but a lot of guys are fine with it and, in my experience, poly women tend to have a lot of partners (anecdotally, I know at least as many poly women as poly men, but that probably varies by demographic and may be incorrect more generally anyhow). In any case, poly allows one person to “count” as several for the purposes of such ratios.
3) It doesn’t take into consideration relative quality. The women the OP is interested in meeting are unlikely to be interested in all those barely-literate men who spam every person marked “female” on the site. They are only competition (demand) in the sense that they clog mailboxes and make it hard to punch a signal through all the noise. There doesn’t seem to be a significant corresponding category of women wasting mens’ time and mailbox capacity, so the ratio is way more even than the raw numbers suggest.
I would count poly women having more partners than poly men as evidence in favor of gender ratios mattering. It suggests poly women are in higher demand than poly men. It’s possible poly men are less willing to be poly than poly women (therefore poly men are lower supply and poly women higher supply), but that doesn’t go too well with my prior of men generally desiring sex more than women on average.
On 3, yes, if the OP is a 10 because of his writing, or any other combination of factors, then he’ll be in high demand irregardless of the imbalance, but it’s not clear that the OP would be considered at the top of the pack by other women.
That’s not what I said. For different people there are different reasons why they don’t get into a relationship.
Dating sites provide an environment where the rules of the game are much clearer than in the normal dating world.
An intelligent person who’s good at writing but to shy to approach woman in “real life”, can actually interact with woman on a dating site. They get feedback on their actions.
I think guys on LW have a bunch of strengths that the average guy doesn’t have but they also have bunch of weaknesses. As a result it’s very useful to test different approaches to see whether another approach lines up better with one’s strengths.
A lot of women complain about very badly written messages. There are many cases where intelligent guy is going to be better than average at writing messages on dating websites but worse than average at actually asking out a women in “real life”.
The act of consciously thinking about how to present oneself in a profile is useful for a guy who never really thought about how to present himself.
Markets happen at the margin. Small imbalances between supply and demand can lead to large changes in price. Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off. The bottom half of guys are pretty much removed if everyone pairs off. This means the new bottom starts at average.
Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off.
What do you mean with “worse off”? That it’s easier for woman to find a date with a man on a dating website then for a man to find a date with a woman?
That’s obviously true.
On the other hand that tells us nothing about whether it’s a wise decision for a guy to sign up to a dating website. That has to compared to the other alternatives that the guy has.
I also don’t believe that “price” is a good construct to think about the dating “market”. People don’t pick life partners the way they buy cars. Paying a price would make it prostitution. That’s not the typical dating situation.
To get a romantic partner you have to successful do a “mating dance” that isn’t directly related about your value as a romantic partner. In different contexts that mating dance looks differently. Online dating makes that mating dance a bit different than the mating dance that happens when one hangs out with friends. It’s more explicit and that can help some people more than others.
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
Money is just a concept used to establish the relative value of two different objects. That we refuse to put a price on some things doesn’t mean those things don’t have a measurable relative value; it just usually means we’re less consistent about what that value is. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions. It couldn’t be, say, a billion dollars or we would eventually run out of money.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
It doesn’t have to equal a small improvement. It can also produce a larger improvement. The empiric fact that I know multiple guys for whom online dating produced a lot of value suggests that’s true.
. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions.
That’s true for some policy decisions made by bureaucrats. On the other hand it’s not true for a lot of decisions made by democratic parliaments.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
The fact that you can theoretically buy a woman for a price in no way implies that that’s the dynamic of the average dating interaction.
You make mistakes when you model decision making that doesn’t use price as a criteria with a straight market dynamic.
I agree that certain types of items are not readily traded for other things. It’s hard to buy time with money for instance. But if things have value then things have a price. That price can be measured in dollars normally, but it can also be measured in time or enjoyment or any of a number of other metrics. I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
Plenty of supply and demand models don’t use money as a criteria. Switching from dollars to minutes doesn’t change the dynamic. That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
Are you aware of the phrase “sacred values” in decision theory? Paying money a person money can make them less likely to accept an offer?
But that isn’t even everything because a mating dance is more complex than simply providing enjoyment or time or any such metric.
I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
I think that’s unlikely true given the unattributed Churchill quote that you used.
That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
The problem isn’t that it’s incomplete but that it’s bad because it leads to various mistakes for a person who wants to make good dating decisions.
Don’t be a hedgehog.
I’m not sure how being unable to exchange sacred values for money has anything to do with exchanges of sacred values. I’ve already explicitly stated I’m not talking about exchanges of money. I also wasn’t aware I’d quoted Churchill. If you mean the old story, Churchhill didn’t originate it.
I’m sure you’re familiar with supply and demand. Can you expand on why you think it doesn’t apply to relationships?
Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant “The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn’t matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it).”
For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:
1) It doesn’t take orientation into consideration; that’s probably even (you “lose” the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can “subtract” gay men), but then in theory the gender ratio should be balanced overall too.
2) It doesn’t take polyamory into consideration. The OP didn’t sound like he was looking for a poly relationship, but a lot of guys are fine with it and, in my experience, poly women tend to have a lot of partners (anecdotally, I know at least as many poly women as poly men, but that probably varies by demographic and may be incorrect more generally anyhow). In any case, poly allows one person to “count” as several for the purposes of such ratios.
3) It doesn’t take into consideration relative quality. The women the OP is interested in meeting are unlikely to be interested in all those barely-literate men who spam every person marked “female” on the site. They are only competition (demand) in the sense that they clog mailboxes and make it hard to punch a signal through all the noise. There doesn’t seem to be a significant corresponding category of women wasting mens’ time and mailbox capacity, so the ratio is way more even than the raw numbers suggest.
I would count poly women having more partners than poly men as evidence in favor of gender ratios mattering. It suggests poly women are in higher demand than poly men. It’s possible poly men are less willing to be poly than poly women (therefore poly men are lower supply and poly women higher supply), but that doesn’t go too well with my prior of men generally desiring sex more than women on average.
On 3, yes, if the OP is a 10 because of his writing, or any other combination of factors, then he’ll be in high demand irregardless of the imbalance, but it’s not clear that the OP would be considered at the top of the pack by other women.
That’s not what I said. For different people there are different reasons why they don’t get into a relationship. Dating sites provide an environment where the rules of the game are much clearer than in the normal dating world.
An intelligent person who’s good at writing but to shy to approach woman in “real life”, can actually interact with woman on a dating site. They get feedback on their actions.
I think guys on LW have a bunch of strengths that the average guy doesn’t have but they also have bunch of weaknesses. As a result it’s very useful to test different approaches to see whether another approach lines up better with one’s strengths.
A lot of women complain about very badly written messages. There are many cases where intelligent guy is going to be better than average at writing messages on dating websites but worse than average at actually asking out a women in “real life”.
The act of consciously thinking about how to present oneself in a profile is useful for a guy who never really thought about how to present himself.
Markets happen at the margin. Small imbalances between supply and demand can lead to large changes in price. Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off. The bottom half of guys are pretty much removed if everyone pairs off. This means the new bottom starts at average.
What do you mean with “worse off”? That it’s easier for woman to find a date with a man on a dating website then for a man to find a date with a woman? That’s obviously true.
On the other hand that tells us nothing about whether it’s a wise decision for a guy to sign up to a dating website. That has to compared to the other alternatives that the guy has.
I also don’t believe that “price” is a good construct to think about the dating “market”. People don’t pick life partners the way they buy cars. Paying a price would make it prostitution.
That’s not the typical dating situation.
To get a romantic partner you have to successful do a “mating dance” that isn’t directly related about your value as a romantic partner. In different contexts that mating dance looks differently. Online dating makes that mating dance a bit different than the mating dance that happens when one hangs out with friends. It’s more explicit and that can help some people more than others.
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
Money is just a concept used to establish the relative value of two different objects. That we refuse to put a price on some things doesn’t mean those things don’t have a measurable relative value; it just usually means we’re less consistent about what that value is. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions. It couldn’t be, say, a billion dollars or we would eventually run out of money.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
It doesn’t have to equal a small improvement. It can also produce a larger improvement. The empiric fact that I know multiple guys for whom online dating produced a lot of value suggests that’s true.
That’s true for some policy decisions made by bureaucrats. On the other hand it’s not true for a lot of decisions made by democratic parliaments.
The fact that you can theoretically buy a woman for a price in no way implies that that’s the dynamic of the average dating interaction.
You make mistakes when you model decision making that doesn’t use price as a criteria with a straight market dynamic.
In regards to price and modeling:
I agree that certain types of items are not readily traded for other things. It’s hard to buy time with money for instance. But if things have value then things have a price. That price can be measured in dollars normally, but it can also be measured in time or enjoyment or any of a number of other metrics. I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
Plenty of supply and demand models don’t use money as a criteria. Switching from dollars to minutes doesn’t change the dynamic. That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
Are you aware of the phrase “sacred values” in decision theory? Paying money a person money can make them less likely to accept an offer?
But that isn’t even everything because a mating dance is more complex than simply providing enjoyment or time or any such metric.
I think that’s unlikely true given the unattributed Churchill quote that you used.
The problem isn’t that it’s incomplete but that it’s bad because it leads to various mistakes for a person who wants to make good dating decisions. Don’t be a hedgehog.
I’m not sure how being unable to exchange sacred values for money has anything to do with exchanges of sacred values. I’ve already explicitly stated I’m not talking about exchanges of money. I also wasn’t aware I’d quoted Churchill. If you mean the old story, Churchhill didn’t originate it.