I celebrate this. Two people found love and are getting married. I think it's great. He answered all questions truthfully but let the code determine the weight of each answer. It's not like he wasn't giving honest answers. And yes, he created two profiles, but then deleted one. He wasn't sure which group of women he'd match up with best. I guess you see this as fundamentally dishonest but I think the couple says it best:

“People are much more complicated than their profiles,” she says. “So the way we met was kind of superficial, but everything that happened after is not superficial at all. It’s been cultivated through a lot of work.”

“It’s not like, we matched and therefore we have a great relationship,” McKinlay agrees. “It was just a mechanism to put us in the same room."

Yes, but he ONLY answered those specific questions that were deemed important to his target audience. The fact that he answered these honestly is great, but he left out the set of questions that was important to him which would give him differing results and be more honest for his date. Also, weighting is somewhat important, by having an algorithm maximize this defeats the purpose.

Yes, if the point was to get two people in a room I could possibly go with that argument, but he could've spent a fraction of the time answering questions and then following up with people and end up in the same room. This feels like a rube golderberg machine for a date.

In any case I'm of course happy for him, but it rubs me the wrong way that this lying, manipulation, and outright disregard for the other users is being celebrated.

The article did not mention anything about skipping questions that were important to him; it specifically said that he had originally been picking questions "more or less" at random.

You're also assuming that the set of questions he had algorithmically selected did not overlap with the questions that were important to him. This seems unlikely.

The only dishonesty here is that by (presumably) determining the breadth and detail of his answers by order of importance to the cluster, he is in effect answering the questions /as if/ they are as important to him as they are to the average representative of that cluster. But if everyone else was also answering the questions "more or less" at random anyway ("He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user"), this doesn't seem so bad (and is probably why his algorithm gave him so many failed dates, since the relevant questions wouldn't have been answered).

Honestly all he did was make himself way more visible. You'd probably get a good amount of dates by making a sign and sitting in Central Park too. Sure, it's a bit distateful, but no less manipulative than that (and much more clever).

Well, he did answer questions before but with thousands upon thousands to choose from it would be pure chance that he would answer the same ones as the type of women he was interested in. Is it wrong when a person does something they wouldn't normally do to get noticed? For example, is asking for directions when you're not really lost to strike up a conversation "lying and manipulation"? Literally, I suppose it is but I hope dating sites learn from him. The point should be to get more people together to have more chances for "success".

Not completely true. You can find someone you're interested in and then click on "She cares about" and that will list all her public questions that she cares about, he can then answer those.

My general concern is that manipulating of the data in this way essentially lowers the value of the data in general and thus becomes a cycle resulting in the actual features of the site being no longer useful.

Oh, my take was that he exposed how the data keeps people apart. The number of matches is greatly determined by which questions you answer instead of the actual content of the responses. I suppose I understand why they do it though, since the system would feel useless if you had hundreds of people (in a big city) that were a 99% match. It provides people with a sort of false selectivity.

That's the part that burns me. There could be people you have matching answers for 1000 of the 3000 questions, but the way OKC sets its system up, the system would never surface them. Considering that this is a site conceived by mathematicians, I think that they have set this system to provide people with a false sense of fine-tuning but in reality, it keeps most of the matches you could find away from you. Sounds like a scheme to keep people use your dating site rather than helping people actually find a date.

It's online dating. It means nothing until you're in the room with the other person. I don't see where your anger at this is coming from...

I agree, but it's nice to have something real to filter on to save yourself from having to be in the room with the other person in the first place. I don't know if I'm angry, so much as concerned that tactics like these will spread and further erode the OkCupid data set essentially making it less useful for everybody.

There is nothing particularly deep about the OkCupid data set. It is a representation of one slice, one instance, of culture. At most, it shows how a certain subset of people represent themselves to potential dates.

And, on that note, exploiting the game has a strong tradition elsewhere too. Expecting that the data set is not already corrupted beyond recognition by people trying to manipulate their data to get ahead is silly.

You're right that under the assumption that the OkCupid algorithms actually work, the best strategy is to just answer the questions honestly. If they don't really work all that well, just gaming it to give good results would be a rational strategy.

Yeah he shouldn't be getting married now, he should be following the ToS of some website.

Yeah, I feel like all he did in the end is find a way of getting a lot of people interested in his profile (by tweaking the score so that it would be as close as 100% as possible) and then go on a lot of dates.The real issue here is probably the asymmetry in male/female messages and requests rates on OkCupid...

I always thought that the messaging asymmetry on dating sites was purely a reflection of the real-world asymmetry of dating, where females will almost never initiate a flirt sequence themselves. The universal expectation is that it is the role of the male to manifest interest in, and worthiness of, the female. Not that I agree with this, but it would be difficult not to observe it.

I remember reading somewhere that there were actually more female users of these dating sites. So the difference would be purely one of behavioral habits.

Thinking about it, I can't think of a single animal species where the female is the one seeking out the males. Then again, evolutionary analogies are very un-PC around here.

> females will almost never initiate a flirt sequence themselves

POTENTIAL ROMANTIC PARTNER DETECTED

FEMALE FLIRT SEQUENCE INITIATED

EXCEPTION: HUMAN EMOTION FOUND

ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

OKCupid's demographics skew male nearly 2:1, actually [1].

1: https://www.quantcast.com/okcupid.com#!demo

That being said, OkCupid has a HUGE male-seeking-male population (from anecdotal evidence, larger than it's women-seeking-women population).

"females will almost never initiate a flirt sequence themselves"

Maybe they don't with YOU.

I agree with you, I probably shouldn't have said "on OkCupid". This is far from the root issue, but it's also hard not to fall into uninteresting generalizations, like "the real issue here is the objectification of women in the western civilization" or "the real issue here is the place of woman in society".

    Thinking about it, I can't think of a single animal species where the female is the one seeking out the males.

I couldn't find anything either after a (quick) Google search, so you might be right about that. But it doesn't mean that we are bound to act forever the same, and I think that it's not the case in some (nordic?) countries (although it might be an urban legend, maybe someone can chime in with real world data / observations).

Sarah Hrdy (by way of Darwin) has another perspective:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

(See also tymero's comment below, and): http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111222124528AA...

As for females initiating courtship in human populations -- I don't think it's just a nordic thing, I think it's an equality thing. I'm sure you'll find (sub)cultures most places where women are more active -- and I'm guessing that on balance those are (sub)cultures that are in general more gender-equal.

But, as I've lived (and dated, pitiful as my exploits are) mostly in Norway -- I might be biased :-)

As a general rule, women don't "hit on" men here in Sweden either. Like everywhere else, they indicate interest in more subtle ways - sometimes unconsciously. The male who is able to pick up on (and then follow up on) these cues is the male who scores.

Also, the "slutty northern European women" stereotype just comes from the way they behave abroad, when they lose some inhibitions since nobody from back home is around to pass judgment on them.

> females will almost never initiate a flirt sequence

It's the opposite. In environments like parties and bars women subtly initiate most interactions. They maneuver closer and do the glance thing.

They do, but men don't notice that. Men initiate conversation regardless, or women go home wondering why no one responded to their cues.

> or women go home wondering why no one responded to their cues

Same reason they ignore certain men - lack of attraction.

Women generally don't go up to men and start talking or flirting. Glancing/maneuvering isn't overt initiation.

There's no analogue to that in online dating though.

except for intentionally visiting their profile multiple times until they notice and message you first which works in pretty much the same way as glancing, only with added bit of creepiness compound but hey. works anyway! might have learned this from personal experience, can't confirm.

For species where there's an asymmetry in the parental investment, one of the sexes --the one with the smallest investment-- competes, while the other sex chooses. Thanks a lot Darwin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_choice#Male_mate_choice.2F...

He said that he answered the questions honestly and didn't lie on his profile. It was merely a matter of exploiting OKCupid's algorithms to get himself recommended to women he liked. And he was quite successful; How many men get 20 unsolicited messages a day or easily get 88 dates with attractive women.

You suggest he should just trust OKCupid's algorithms to find people, but that's assuming that their algorithms are good in the first place, and that there isn't much competition from other men doing the same thing.

What's wrong with managing questions? Sure, there are maybe 5-10 questions I would actually care about, and 10-20 questions that might be somewhat helpful to define my personality, but the rest are quite optional.

And when you don't care much, you can near-randomly pick an answer that turns out to be disliked by someone, and turn noise into a negative signal. So why answer that at all?