Singapore's Government Dating App Runs on a Nobel Prize-Winning Algorithm

I know there's a cold-start problem for adding a new competitor to dating apps, but I wish one would show up. Maybe I'm naive, but I think I would like this. To be fair, I think Hinge is already pretty good. Not sure why it feels so much better than Tinder.

So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.

On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:

- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?

- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?

- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?

The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.

Yeah, so, who are the proposers and who are the receivers?

Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.

There is a very simple solution to the problem. Just add a tax to single people and childless couples or reverse give huge tax break to married and couple with kids.

In past the motive for marriage was sex and companionship which was frowned in society if out of wedlock. Now it is not frowned upon. The old constraint is gone and we need to add new constraints if we want to solve the problem.

Maybe part of the solution for any country dealing with low marriage rate is to ban all private dating apps and only government issued apps are allowed.

Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.

Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?

The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.

Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.

Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.

Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.

Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.