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 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.