THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Aimless on 23 Jan 2014, 00:46
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It's like xkcd in real life:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/
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hack
*snort*
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'How to be an ass on a huge scale.'
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On the other hand, they're getting married :o
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To me this seems as bad as those professional pick-up artists and their games. This guy is just a bit smarter about it.
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With the exception that he used the data sincerely. Didn't string people along for the sex or anything.
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To me this seems as bad as those professional pick-up artists and their games. This guy is just a bit smarter about it.
Hmmm... I thought the story would be about something like that but was forced to re-evaluate after having read more about what he really did. Perhaps there's a diagnosis behind his actions (:o) but overall it sounds like what everyone does on OkCupid when looking for a partner, only ridiculously systematic and more purposeful. I can't really see any major parallells with the whole "seduction" movement given how those people often emphasize lying, tactical humiliation, the exploitation of insecurity and a thoroughly misogynistic perspective on love. In my eyes, this is xkcd :P
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...and I'm sure as soon as Randall Munroe hears about it, it will be!
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Yeah no I'd say this is hardly comparable to pick up artist stuff. Quite impressive really. Wish he'd rent out his data and scripts.
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Given that dating sites are often awash with men who will take the chance to date any woman, it's really clever of him to reverse the roles and tip the odds into his favour.
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(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dating_pools.png)
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To me this seems as bad as those professional pick-up artists and their games. This guy is just a bit smarter about it.
Maybe you just hate love.
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It's an honest profile, with all the work having been put into getting it in front of the right people.
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That's the important bit, there isn't any lying or deception involved.
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I think a good comparison would be to job hunting. He didn't lie on his resume, he just got it in front of as many of the right employers as he could and restructured it so that his best qualifications for each group was better highlighted. The dates were the in-person interviews, which he took seriously, and failed several before an offer hit the table that both parties were satisfied with.
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Yep. What he did was more... targeted marketing I think would be the term.
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The bottom line about the guy is this: the people who were matched up to him were always there but due to the extraneous questions skewing the results the true matchups were unable to be noticed until he took out those extraneous questions. He didn't deceive, manipulate, or falsify the results he simply got rid of what shouldn't have been involved in the calculations
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I wouldn't say "shouldn't have been". He catalogued the type of woman he's interested in and used duplicate accounts to find out what questions they found important - shifty, since ordinary users aren't supposed to be able to do this - and tailored his profile to appear desirable to those women, statistics-wise. It's really tricking OkCupid into telling those women "hey, this guy is exactly who you're looking for!" but whether they agree is not a given. If we continue the job interview analogy, he grouped potential employers into two categories and made a personalised resume for each of them, and is the only person ever recorded in doing so.
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Considering the girl he ended up with admitted to tailoring her own profile a little after reading his... yeah he's the only guy to go to this extent, but I know I tailor my profile a little bit every now and then. So it's hardly unheard of. It's the sheer scale and methodology that's impressive.
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The most important thing to remember is it just got them in the same room. Everything after that was done the old-fashioned way
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I had a former co-worker (married) who trolled OKC for all her little flings.
twas truly creepy to see. ....shudder...
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Dating can be like doing job interviews. You show off your strengths as often as possible.
The reason why most of his dates didn't go well was because there are so many factors in compatibility that he didn't account for. Personality is still distinct from most of the questions on the website. How you feel about things has very little to do with how often you speak of it or how much you want to talk about it with others--among other things.
In any case, I kinda feel like what he was doing was cheating. It's one thing to try to figure out what's important to other people--and it's another to completely ignore what's important to himself! While he answered the questions honestly, it annoys me that he only did questions that potentially compatible women were interested in. Doing stuff like that cuts his own personality out of the picture.
While there is a science to compatibility and to fishing out the people you want to spend time with out of a bunch of people, I think he took it too far. While his endeavor was ultimately successful, he also cut a lot of women out of his pool that he could have had a chance with but didn't include because they didn't fit his "list."
That's the problem with a lot of people who are interested in dating! They have a list of everything that their significant other must be and then overlook equally good people with qualities that they hadn't even thought of. If you're too busy making a checklist of what you want, you miss out on a lot of good opportunities. To me, his efforts sound wasteful--and maybe kind of desperate.
There's a reason why OKCupid doesn't like data-harvesting. Going around the rules in such an extreme way speaks of a lack of regard for other people's privacy and not really playing fair.
However, I'm impressed by his dedication and know-how. But on the other hand, it's very possible that he could have met his now-fiancee without going through all of that. It sounds like a very fun project. But it also sounds like he went all "mad scientist" on this. And that's not necessarily a good thing.
All in all, I'm fascinated by his research--but I'm also disgusted by it.
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Since he answered all the questions honestly and told his now-fiancee about how he'd conducted his analysis, in my opinion it's a perfectly ok thing to do. I only find having a bot visiting peoples' profiles so that they then message you a little bit unfair. Also, I hope he didn't divert computing resources that were supposed to be used for actual research towards this private project, but I think the article only mentions him using his regular computers.
I find his analysis mathematically fascinating. But mostly it shows how bad the matching of the site is: The number of potential partners with good compatibility ratings should in my opinion not depend so strongly on which questions you answer - as it in his case obviously solely did, since both before and after his analysis he answered the questions truthfully. Maybe OKCupid should hire him to improve their algorithm.
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Honestly, for a while I thought this was his dissertation topic, or at least part of it. I'm still not sure it wasn't.
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While there is a science to compatibility and to fishing out the people you want to spend time with out of a bunch of people, I think he took it too far. While his endeavor was ultimately successful, he also cut a lot of women out of his pool that he could have had a chance with but didn't include because they didn't fit his "list."
That's the problem with a lot of people who are interested in dating! They have a list of everything that their significant other must be and then overlook equally good people with qualities that they hadn't even thought of. If you're too busy making a checklist of what you want, you miss out on a lot of good opportunities. To me, his efforts sound wasteful--and maybe kind of desperate.
His previous attempts at trying to contact women via OkCupid had a massive failure rate. Ultimately his 'list' never cut out anyone, it only ever got larger, because previously he wasn't being contacted at all by the women with whom he might have had a chance. You make it sound like he's a famous eligible bachelor who dismissed all the women who weren't worthy of him. :P
Now look at the result. All of his effort got him preferential treatment by the statistics of OkCupid, which got him more interested women than any other person on the site, and in a very short time he found a life partner. That sounds like the opposite of wasteful to me.
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What LTK said. One of the issues with OKCupid's standard methodology is that it actually does a pretty good job of dismissing people outright on the grounds of dumb bullshit that neither of you may actually care about very much in the big scheme of things. I see no reason to be disgusted over someone bypassing what amounts to an arbitrary filter that is haphazardly applied to the arbitrary process that is dating.
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At the same time, I can't put my finger on exactly what I find creepy about it, but it might be the fact that it almost seems like he didn't consider that the profiles belonged to actual human beings to begin with. If I found out the person I was dating chose me because he'd lumped me in with a bunch of women who had answered stupid questions similarly to myself, I'd be more than a little wary.
Also, that he answered all the questions honestly and ended up with such a different set of high matches (no one over 90% to begin with and then all of the sudden a massive amount of them) doesn't seem right to me. He even admitted to adjusting his answers accordingly with the 'this answer is mandatory with this group and slightly less important than that with the other group', how is that total honesty? No wonder he went on like a million dates before he found someone he clicked with.
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In some ways I see it as trusting his system to set him up on lots and lots of blind dates. In that way it's LESS advanced than standard online dating.
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He got the interview. Sure you go to 80 interviews and get told to fuck off for 79 of them, but you do what you have to do to get the interview in the first place. Eventually you'll get the RIGHT interview.
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While I think this was cool simply by virtue of being unique and impressive, I have reservations about his method in principle because I don't think that it is, in the end, more than a cool way to facilitate getting a large number of blind dates very quickly by exploiting his targets' faith in OkCupid's selection/matching process. Loli hit the nail on the head:
While there is a science to compatibility and to fishing out the people you want to spend time with out of a bunch of people, I think he took it too far. While his endeavor was ultimately successful, he also cut a lot of women out of his pool that he could have had a chance with but didn't include because they didn't fit his "list."
That's the problem with a lot of people who are interested in dating! They have a list of everything that their significant other must be and then overlook equally good people with qualities that they hadn't even thought of. If you're too busy making a checklist of what you want, you miss out on a lot of good opportunities.
There's nothing to say that his selection gave him what he really wants or needs--in fact, most of the dates were not even remotely promising--and nothing to say that the one he's ended up with is somehow the "best of the best" for him. Of course, that just puts him in the same position as everyone else and I guess any woman who can say yes to such a doofus must love him enough for their relationship to have a decent shot ;)
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I am sorely tempted to create a new profile using my own photos and just make my answers into total douchebaggery and see what happens.
One of my friends has been on there for a few weeks now and has been regaling me with the awful questions she gets from people, and it is dismally pathetic at times.
One of them said 'random question lol, do you think I'm fit?'
That is not a random question. You are on a dating website. You message people you want to date. Asking if you are fit (cute/sexy in American parlance) is directly related to dating, on a dating website. A 'random question lol' would be 'do you think a porcupine could beat a lion in a fight?'.
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Clearly not. The porcupine's quills wouldn't do any major damage to the lion. It would just get him angry.
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Still be a pretty random question though, amirite?
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Now I feel like I should write a random question generator in Mathematica to generate random questions for Okcupid. Maybe if I get bored at the lab later today.
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Actually, that might be even more interesting than douchebag profile. Just message people with randomly generated questions and see what, if any, reaction it gets.
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I think this ought to be a wake up call for OK Cupid ore than anything. They should have been doing something like this to begin with.
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What, making it possible to see what other people answered before you answered the same question yourself? This guy was actually looking for a girlfriend, but that seems like a really easy way of lying about yourself to get into someone's pants if you ask me.
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What, making it possible to see what other people answered before you answered the same question yourself? This guy was actually looking for a girlfriend, but that seems like a really easy way of lying about yourself to get into someone's pants if you ask me.
I mean, OK Cupid was supposed to find some likely matches for this guy and the woman he ended up with, but they failed. He made the system get the results it was supposed to. Yeah, his methods are worrying and in the hands of a manipulative bastard could probably be abused, but he only manipulated a system.
He didn't lie, he just told the truth in the most effective way.
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What I wonder is how different his answers were to begin with. Sure, he said he hadn't answered the right questions, but like... it doesn't take very long to do that, just don't skip lots of questions and you're fine since the questions rated as the most popular and useful ones tend to come first. When I had a profile, I answered tons of questions, hardly skipping any an I had several 90% and higher matches, and I live in a much smaller place than him. If his questions were honest in both his first 'regular' attempt and in the later, more calculated attempts, how come the results were so extremely different? He must have changed a lot of stuff around, and I have a hard time seeing anyone staying unbiased in their favour when you know what the other people are looking for.
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From what I read, it wasn't the answers that were what he manipulated, but the "weight" of his answers.
Think of it like this: he likes A, B, D, and X. However, he found through his research that women (in his "area") had more likes of D and A than B and X. So, he adjusted his profile to emphasize D and A, while still being honest about B and X.
He wasn't lying. He was trying to make connections from an altruistic POV. "What factors about me do you like?" Is essentially what he was doing.
From there, he just had to make connections.
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(http://www.asofterworld.com/clean/vortex.jpg)
Incredibly fitting given the topic.