“There are 729,500 single women my age in New York City. My picture and profile successfully filtered out 729,499 of them and left me with the one I was looking for.”
I know this is sort of meant as a joke, but I feel like one of the more interesting questions that could be addressed in an analysis like this is what percentage of the women in the dating pool could you actually have had a successful relationship with. How strong is your filter and how strong does it need to be? There’s a tension between trying to find/obtain the best of many possible good options, and trying to find the one of a handful of good options in a haystack of bad ones.
I’m somewhat amazed that you looked at 300 profiles, read 60 of them, and liked 20 of them enough to send them messages. Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote, and that’s not even taking into account the difference in difficulty between reading a profile and composing a message.
You make a big deal about the number of people available online, but in your previous article on soccer players you implied that the average had a much larger effect on the tails than the average did. If you’re really looking for mates in the tails of the distribution, and 1 in 729,500 is about 4.5 sigma event, then being involved in organizations whose members are much more like your ideal mate on average may be a better strategy than online dating.
leplen, thanks for the feedback. Here are my thoughts.
ChristianKI is correct that I looked at match percentage, but mostly I felt that I would learn about someone more from a quick chat than from their profile so I wasn’t limited to “perfectly written” profiles. Attractiveness is ultimately less important, but easier to judge.
I didn’t think of the “average vs. total” point, but I liked it. Let’s do the math: 1⁄729,500 is 4.68 sigma. If I was picking from a group that was a whole SD better, I would need to only meet a 3.68 sigma girl, that’s 1 in 8,900. I don’t know if I could think of a group that large and that much better in my life right now, the only thing that comes to mind is the student body of a large and excellent university. Your point would apply to a 20-year old undergrad at Columbia or NYU: they should look at other students before the rest of New York City.
Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote,
Not really as he likely prefiltered them by match percentage. The 300 profiles at which he looked are likely woman with a high match percentage and the match percentage more likely signals that they written values are the same as it signals meeting standards for appearance.
“There are 729,500 single women my age in New York City. My picture and profile successfully filtered out 729,499 of them and left me with the one I was looking for.”
I know this is sort of meant as a joke, but I feel like one of the more interesting questions that could be addressed in an analysis like this is what percentage of the women in the dating pool could you actually have had a successful relationship with. How strong is your filter and how strong does it need to be? There’s a tension between trying to find/obtain the best of many possible good options, and trying to find the one of a handful of good options in a haystack of bad ones.
I’m somewhat amazed that you looked at 300 profiles, read 60 of them, and liked 20 of them enough to send them messages. Only 1 in 5 potential matches met your standards for appearance, but 1 in 3 met your standards based on what they wrote, and that’s not even taking into account the difference in difficulty between reading a profile and composing a message.
You make a big deal about the number of people available online, but in your previous article on soccer players you implied that the average had a much larger effect on the tails than the average did. If you’re really looking for mates in the tails of the distribution, and 1 in 729,500 is about 4.5 sigma event, then being involved in organizations whose members are much more like your ideal mate on average may be a better strategy than online dating.
leplen, thanks for the feedback. Here are my thoughts.
ChristianKI is correct that I looked at match percentage, but mostly I felt that I would learn about someone more from a quick chat than from their profile so I wasn’t limited to “perfectly written” profiles. Attractiveness is ultimately less important, but easier to judge.
I didn’t think of the “average vs. total” point, but I liked it. Let’s do the math: 1⁄729,500 is 4.68 sigma. If I was picking from a group that was a whole SD better, I would need to only meet a 3.68 sigma girl, that’s 1 in 8,900. I don’t know if I could think of a group that large and that much better in my life right now, the only thing that comes to mind is the student body of a large and excellent university. Your point would apply to a 20-year old undergrad at Columbia or NYU: they should look at other students before the rest of New York City.
Not really as he likely prefiltered them by match percentage. The 300 profiles at which he looked are likely woman with a high match percentage and the match percentage more likely signals that they written values are the same as it signals meeting standards for appearance.