You might like this, which elaborates a really nice philosophy and applies it to dating.
I don’t think it’s central to your question, but I would discourage framing this as motivated by it being high impact. Any discomfort or life challenges whatsoever will reduce a person’s productivity; that doesn’t imply that all discomforts that EAs could face are top cause areas. Challenges in finding and maintaining relationships are a natural feature of life and not bugs that reduce our potential impact.
This kind of reasoning is also especially prone to motivated reasoning:
Justifying, in these cases, is also a way to get practice… in motivated reasoning. Why did you go to two parties last weekend? Maybe you just need two weekly parties to be happy enough to work. Why were you spending so much time trying to get an A in differential equations that you forgot to apply to that internship? Well, a top 5 PhD program requires a high GPA. These justifications could be true, but are they really why you did the thing?
I broadly disagree. If a large fraction of EAs are spending hours swiping, and there are tractable ways to reduce that, that could be really useful. This isn’t just a random challenge, it’s one of the largest productivity-draining ones we face. A lot of the challenges are features of our current environment. If you can scale a solution and create an innovative dating service then that has a good shot at being a billion-dollar company. If anything I think there is motivated reasoning against thinking about it too much because it can easily get controversial. Now, I do think the post is one of many off-topic posts for the forum (maybe an off-topic section can be created).
(Edit: I do also agree that many people engage in various levels of motivated reasoning when they ask “how can my career be of use” vs “how can I change careers”, and this may equally apply to anyone solving lifestyle issues for EAs as their meta cause area in a way that can become incestuously divorced from object-level problems. I don’t have a principled view on this other than maybe that if a problem really excites someone more than anything else they should probably work on that even if numbers say otherwise.)
Some companies have started video chat speed dating.
Yash Kanoria has some interesting game theory analysis of such platforms. I think such models need to be more explicit about modeling gender differences, which academic papers are less likely to do since such things can sometimes be controversial / non-PC.
I would discourage framing this as motivated by it being high impact.
I’m mostly sympathetic to your view, but I don’t think that sort of thing should always be discouraged/avoided categorically. I think a balance has to be found with that sort of thing. How to find that balance? I don’t know.
You might like this, which elaborates a really nice philosophy and applies it to dating.
I don’t think it’s central to your question, but I would discourage framing this as motivated by it being high impact. Any discomfort or life challenges whatsoever will reduce a person’s productivity; that doesn’t imply that all discomforts that EAs could face are top cause areas. Challenges in finding and maintaining relationships are a natural feature of life and not bugs that reduce our potential impact.
This kind of reasoning is also especially prone to motivated reasoning:
I broadly disagree. If a large fraction of EAs are spending hours swiping, and there are tractable ways to reduce that, that could be really useful. This isn’t just a random challenge, it’s one of the largest productivity-draining ones we face. A lot of the challenges are features of our current environment. If you can scale a solution and create an innovative dating service then that has a good shot at being a billion-dollar company. If anything I think there is motivated reasoning against thinking about it too much because it can easily get controversial. Now, I do think the post is one of many off-topic posts for the forum (maybe an off-topic section can be created).
(Edit: I do also agree that many people engage in various levels of motivated reasoning when they ask “how can my career be of use” vs “how can I change careers”, and this may equally apply to anyone solving lifestyle issues for EAs as their meta cause area in a way that can become incestuously divorced from object-level problems. I don’t have a principled view on this other than maybe that if a problem really excites someone more than anything else they should probably work on that even if numbers say otherwise.)
Some companies have started video chat speed dating.
Yash Kanoria has some interesting game theory analysis of such platforms. I think such models need to be more explicit about modeling gender differences, which academic papers are less likely to do since such things can sometimes be controversial / non-PC.
I’m mostly sympathetic to your view, but I don’t think that sort of thing should always be discouraged/avoided categorically. I think a balance has to be found with that sort of thing. How to find that balance? I don’t know.
Fair enough. I don’t actually think it’s a super high impact thing, I just needed an excuse to post it here. Otherwise would have seemed too random.
Come to think of it LessWrong would have been a better place to post.