Basically: I don’t blame founders or companies for following their incentive gradients, I blame individuals/society for being unwilling to assign reasonable prices to important goods.
I think the bad-ness of dating apps is downstream of poor norms around impact attribution for matches made. Even though relationships and marriages are extremely valuable, individual people are not in the habit of paying that to anyone.
Like, $100k or a year’s salary seems like a very cheap value to assign to your life partner. If dating apps could rely on that size of payment when they succeed, then I think there could be enough funding for something at least a good small business. But I’ve never heard of anyone actually paying anywhere near that. (myself included—though I paid a retroactive $1k payment to the person who organized the conference I met my wife at)
I think keeper.ai tries to solve this with large bounties on dating/marriages, it’s one of the things I wish we pushed for more on Manifold Love. It seems possible to build one for the niche of “the ea/rat community”; Manifold Love, the checkboxes thing, dating docs got pretty good adoption for not that much execution.
(Also: be the change! I think building out OKC is one of the easiest “hello world” software projects one could imagine, Claude could definitely make a passable version in a day. Then you’ll discover a bunch of hard stuff around getting users, but it sure could be a good exercise.)
Mm I think it’s hard to get optimal credit allocation, but easy to get half-baked allocation, or just see that it’s directionally way too low? Like sure, maybe it’s unclear whether Hinge deserves 1% or 10% or ~100% of the credit but like, at a $100k valuation of a marriage, one should be excited to pay $1k to a dating app.
Like, I think matchmaking is very similarly shaped to the problem of recruiting employees, but there corporations are more locally rational about spending money than individuals, and can do things like pay $10k referral bonuses, or offer external recruiters 20% of their referee’s first year salary.
I’ve started writing a small research paper on this, using mathematical framework, and understood that I had long conflated Shapley values with ROSE values. Here’s what I found, having corrected that error.
ROSE bargaining satisfies Efficiency, Pareto Optimality, Symmetry*, Maximin Dominance and Linearity—a bunch of important desiderata. Shapley values, on other hand, don’t satisfy Maximin Dominance so someone might unilaterally reject cooperation; I’ll explore ROSE equilibrium below.
Subjects: people and services for finding partners.
By Proposition 8.2, ROSE value remains same if moves transferring money within game are discarded. Thus, we can assume no money transfers.
By Proposition 11.3, ROSE value for dating service is equal or greater than its maximin.
By Proposition 12.2, ROSE value for dating service is equal or less than its maximum attainable value.
There’s generally one move for a person to maximize their utility: use the dating service with highest probability of success (or expected relationship quality) available.
There are generally two moves for a service: to launch or not to launch. First involves some intrinsic motivation and feeling of goodness minus running costs, the second option has value of zero exactly.
For a large service, running costs (including moderation) exceed much realistic motivation. Therefore, maximum and maximin values for it are both zero.
From (7), (3) and (4), ROSE value for large dating service is zero.
Therefore, total money transfers to a large dating service equal its total costs.
So, why yes or why no?
By the way, Shapley values suggest paying a significant sum! Given value of a relationship of $10K (can be scaled), and four options for finding partners (0:p0=0.03 -- self-search, α:pα=0.09 -- friend’s help, β:pβ=0.10 -- dating sites, γ:pγ=0.70 -- the specialized project suggested up the comments), the Shapley-fair price per success would be respectively $550, $650 and $4400.
P.S. I’m explicitly not open to discussing what price I’d be cheerful to pay to service which would help to build relationships. In this thread, I’m more interested in whether there are new decision theory developments which would find maximin-satisfying equilibria closer to Shapley one.
I don’t think one can coherently value marriage 20 times as much as than a saved life ($5k as GiveWell says)? Indeed there is more emotional attachment to a person who’s your partner (i.e. who you are emotionally attached to) than to a random human in the world, but surely not that much?
And if a marriage is valued at $10k, then the credit assignment 1%/10% would make the allocation $100/$1000 - and it seems that people really want to round the former towards zero
I mean, it’s obviously very dependent on your personal finance situation but I’m using $100k as an order of magnitude proxy for “about a years salary”. I think it’s very coherent to give up a year of marginal salary in exchange for finding the love of your life, rather than like $10k or ~1mo salary.
Of course, the world is full of mispricings, and currently you can save a life for something like $5k. I think these are both good trades to make, and most people should have a portfolio that consists of both “life partners” and “impact from lives saved” and crucially not put all their investment into just one or the other.
Basically: I don’t blame founders or companies for following their incentive gradients, I blame individuals/society for being unwilling to assign reasonable prices to important goods.
I think the bad-ness of dating apps is downstream of poor norms around impact attribution for matches made. Even though relationships and marriages are extremely valuable, individual people are not in the habit of paying that to anyone.
Like, $100k or a year’s salary seems like a very cheap value to assign to your life partner. If dating apps could rely on that size of payment when they succeed, then I think there could be enough funding for something at least a good small business. But I’ve never heard of anyone actually paying anywhere near that. (myself included—though I paid a retroactive $1k payment to the person who organized the conference I met my wife at)
I think keeper.ai tries to solve this with large bounties on dating/marriages, it’s one of the things I wish we pushed for more on Manifold Love. It seems possible to build one for the niche of “the ea/rat community”; Manifold Love, the checkboxes thing, dating docs got pretty good adoption for not that much execution.
(Also: be the change! I think building out OKC is one of the easiest “hello world” software projects one could imagine, Claude could definitely make a passable version in a day. Then you’ll discover a bunch of hard stuff around getting users, but it sure could be a good exercise.)
I think the credit assignment is legit hard, rather than just being a case of bad norms. Do you disagree?
Mm I think it’s hard to get optimal credit allocation, but easy to get half-baked allocation, or just see that it’s directionally way too low? Like sure, maybe it’s unclear whether Hinge deserves 1% or 10% or ~100% of the credit but like, at a $100k valuation of a marriage, one should be excited to pay $1k to a dating app.
Like, I think matchmaking is very similarly shaped to the problem of recruiting employees, but there corporations are more locally rational about spending money than individuals, and can do things like pay $10k referral bonuses, or offer external recruiters 20% of their referee’s first year salary.
(Expensive) Matchmaking services already exist—what’s your reading on why they’re not more popular?
I’ve started writing a small research paper on this, using mathematical framework, and understood that I had long conflated Shapley values with ROSE values. Here’s what I found, having corrected that error.
ROSE bargaining satisfies Efficiency, Pareto Optimality, Symmetry*, Maximin Dominance and Linearity—a bunch of important desiderata. Shapley values, on other hand, don’t satisfy Maximin Dominance so someone might unilaterally reject cooperation; I’ll explore ROSE equilibrium below.
Subjects: people and services for finding partners.
By Proposition 8.2, ROSE value remains same if moves transferring money within game are discarded. Thus, we can assume no money transfers.
By Proposition 11.3, ROSE value for dating service is equal or greater than its maximin.
By Proposition 12.2, ROSE value for dating service is equal or less than its maximum attainable value.
There’s generally one move for a person to maximize their utility: use the dating service with highest probability of success (or expected relationship quality) available.
There are generally two moves for a service: to launch or not to launch. First involves some intrinsic motivation and feeling of goodness minus running costs, the second option has value of zero exactly.
For a large service, running costs (including moderation) exceed much realistic motivation. Therefore, maximum and maximin values for it are both zero.
From (7), (3) and (4), ROSE value for large dating service is zero.
Therefore, total money transfers to a large dating service equal its total costs.
So, why yes or why no?
By the way, Shapley values suggest paying a significant sum! Given value of a relationship of $10K (can be scaled), and four options for finding partners (0:p0=0.03 -- self-search, α:pα=0.09 -- friend’s help, β:pβ=0.10 -- dating sites, γ:pγ=0.70 -- the specialized project suggested up the comments), the Shapley-fair price per success would be respectively $550, $650 and $4400.
P.S. I’m explicitly not open to discussing what price I’d be cheerful to pay to service which would help to build relationships. In this thread, I’m more interested in whether there are new decision theory developments which would find maximin-satisfying equilibria closer to Shapley one.
I don’t think one can coherently value marriage 20 times as much as than a saved life ($5k as GiveWell says)? Indeed there is more emotional attachment to a person who’s your partner (i.e. who you are emotionally attached to) than to a random human in the world, but surely not that much?
And if a marriage is valued at $10k, then the credit assignment 1%/10% would make the allocation $100/$1000 - and it seems that people really want to round the former towards zero
I mean, it’s obviously very dependent on your personal finance situation but I’m using $100k as an order of magnitude proxy for “about a years salary”. I think it’s very coherent to give up a year of marginal salary in exchange for finding the love of your life, rather than like $10k or ~1mo salary.
Of course, the world is full of mispricings, and currently you can save a life for something like $5k. I think these are both good trades to make, and most people should have a portfolio that consists of both “life partners” and “impact from lives saved” and crucially not put all their investment into just one or the other.
I wonder what the lifetime spend on dating apps is. I expect that for most people who ever pay it’s >$100