Everyone is playing the secretary problem. If you're popular, you have to turn down a lot of candidates before you try to find one that's in whatever you measure to be in your league (better than all the ones you saw previously, but I wonder how many people are really going with that). If you're on an app, that's a lot of people.

At the same time, there's a bunch of people who aren't so popular who are now done checking a short queue of candidates, and willing to go with whoever shows up next above their bar.

But those people are still busy rejecting everyone in a seemingly infinite line of suitors. So we have a problem getting people to match.

Add to this that the sexes are not distributed the same way. There's a few ultra hot guys who will never not have a date, and there's a more even number of hot women who the less hot guys are waiting on.

If you're speed dating or doing any other real-world dating, your queues are a lot shorter. You will feel like your idea of the market is set much sooner, and you can start picking out a candidate.

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krackers 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe we need to spread the word about the optimal stopping rule [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

	▲	0x264 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The secretary problem is a bad way to formalise the problem of dating and the stopping rule doesn't work in that context, for a very simple reason. The secretary problem is a solution to the problem of having to make repeated choices. In essence it's a solution to the problem of having to choose a secretary every morning for the day. You can even say it's a solution to the problem of a computer process spending a few seconds consuming an infinite stream at the top of every hour for the next hour. It's not a solution to the problem of making a (hopefully) unique choice.

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KolibriFly 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's less "maybe someone better is one swipe away" and more "this is who's here tonight"