ETA: disregard this comment, it’s completely wrong because of my poor knowledge of English.
I thought some more and don’t understand your point about factors vs dealbreakers. There’s no distinction. If including salary on my profile will make more women message me, then salary was a dealbreaker for those women. A factor that doesn’t make or break any deals has zero importance.
Let me see if I can rephrase usefully. (I suspect you just aren’t using the word “dealbreaker” conventionally.)
Imagine that people who look at your profile are scoring you, with some traits worth points of various amounts (positive or negative). If you’ve mentioned enough things that earn you points and left out enough things that cost you points, you may get scored high enough that you get a message. Leaving your income off might lose you points, but you could probably make it up in other areas. For instance, I’d estimate that the “point” cost I assign guys on OKC for leaving income blank can be approximately compensated for if they announce that they want to have children someday. The guy who leaves out income but wants kids does about as well with me as the guy who says he makes some modest amount of money and doesn’t mention children anywhere.
A dealbreaker is a different thing. It’s negative infinity points. It doesn’t matter what else you put on there if you also advertise a dealbreaker (there is no corresponding “plus infinity points” here) - it doesn’t offset or compensate for positive traits, it renders them irrelevant. For instance, I wouldn’t ever date a guy who smoked cigarettes. This doesn’t change even if he looks like Sean Maher and has every nice thing to say in the world about marriage and children and we have identical tastes in music and he lives a block away and he’s a vegetarian and we’re a 99% match according to our questions and every paragraph in his profile is a masterpiece of humor and insight—smoking gets him a big ewwww, and while I’ll wince as I close the tab, I will not message him unless it’s to tell him that I wish he’d quit.
If more women message you when you start advertising your income, some of them might be doing so because you removed a dealbreaker. I would expect far more of them to be doing so because you’ve crossed a point threshold.
Imagine that people who look at your profile are scoring you
I came across a profile once that had a scoring game in the “message me if” field. Specifically, it was a list of traits the author found desireable, numbered by powers of two, and an invitation to send him the sum of the traits which applied to the reader. I was pretty amused by that.
I think a better question is, how many knew enough to realize he was using an integer to encode a set, rather than doing a weighting with some things valued exponentially more than others...
A dealbreaker is something that on its own automatically rules someone out. A factor is something that swings the overall impression positively or negatively but is not on its own a deciding factor independent of other factors.
ETA: disregard this comment, it’s completely wrong because of my poor knowledge of English.
I thought some more and don’t understand your point about factors vs dealbreakers. There’s no distinction. If including salary on my profile will make more women message me, then salary was a dealbreaker for those women. A factor that doesn’t make or break any deals has zero importance.
Let me see if I can rephrase usefully. (I suspect you just aren’t using the word “dealbreaker” conventionally.)
Imagine that people who look at your profile are scoring you, with some traits worth points of various amounts (positive or negative). If you’ve mentioned enough things that earn you points and left out enough things that cost you points, you may get scored high enough that you get a message. Leaving your income off might lose you points, but you could probably make it up in other areas. For instance, I’d estimate that the “point” cost I assign guys on OKC for leaving income blank can be approximately compensated for if they announce that they want to have children someday. The guy who leaves out income but wants kids does about as well with me as the guy who says he makes some modest amount of money and doesn’t mention children anywhere.
A dealbreaker is a different thing. It’s negative infinity points. It doesn’t matter what else you put on there if you also advertise a dealbreaker (there is no corresponding “plus infinity points” here) - it doesn’t offset or compensate for positive traits, it renders them irrelevant. For instance, I wouldn’t ever date a guy who smoked cigarettes. This doesn’t change even if he looks like Sean Maher and has every nice thing to say in the world about marriage and children and we have identical tastes in music and he lives a block away and he’s a vegetarian and we’re a 99% match according to our questions and every paragraph in his profile is a masterpiece of humor and insight—smoking gets him a big ewwww, and while I’ll wince as I close the tab, I will not message him unless it’s to tell him that I wish he’d quit.
If more women message you when you start advertising your income, some of them might be doing so because you removed a dealbreaker. I would expect far more of them to be doing so because you’ve crossed a point threshold.
I came across a profile once that had a scoring game in the “message me if” field. Specifically, it was a list of traits the author found desireable, numbered by powers of two, and an invitation to send him the sum of the traits which applied to the reader. I was pretty amused by that.
I wonder how many potential matches know enough maths to realize why he used powers of two?
I suspect most of the ones who played the game at all.
I think a better question is, how many knew enough to realize he was using an integer to encode a set, rather than doing a weighting with some things valued exponentially more than others...
I want to marry that person!
Thanks. Sorry. I shoulda thought a little more before making that comment.
Please tell me you were just joking/making a point and you’ve never actually messaged a stranger on OkC solely to tell them to quit smoking. :-)
I’ve never actually done this, no.
A dealbreaker is something that on its own automatically rules someone out. A factor is something that swings the overall impression positively or negatively but is not on its own a deciding factor independent of other factors.