My highlights:
Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes. Exploitation involves choosing the best-available option based on exploration. The problem of dating thus lies in finding and settling on a protocol that enables an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation.
Marriage is a “seedbed” of prosocial behavior. It teaches to care for another apart from yourself and to prioritize long-term collective well-being outside of short-term ones. The dating outcomes of billions of individuals hence determine the collective political and social commons that constitute our society. Dysfunctional dating protocols have a profound ability to negatively impact the long-term progression of society.
The fact that arranged marriages skipped the dating process was seen as advantageous. Derisking sexual relationships enabled more choice–exploration–in dating markets. Courtship and dating. Public venues made women feel safe to go on such exploratory dates. Dating to emphasize self-development. Romantic fulfillment. Serial monogamy, people breaking up much more frequently in search of better relationships. Still, most people settled down into marriage eventually.
The mass adoption of online dating apps has not only eroded incentives to switch from explore to exploit mode, it has made exploration itself boring and dysfunctional.
Successfully matching people at the first attempt is not an ideal business outcome.
Attempts to subvert swipe-based protocols all suffer from insufficient market liquidity.
Even when an opening message or dating profile bio is successful at driving engagement yet nonspecific enough to attract a broad net of leads, it mimetically spreads across the ecosystem. Flattening–sacrificing your dynamic identity in order to fit with the “flat” nature of digital dating apps.
Dating apps seem to foster the boring, cynical engagement that critical algorithm scholars have argued is a central feature of data-driven capitalism.
It is likely that early-day OKCupid came close to achieving a peak of harmony between exploration and exploitation. Unfortunately succumbed to the pressures of monetization and scale.
Aligned with the goals of data-driven capitalism: seeking sexual validation and collecting many speculative sexual futures–at the expense of actually finding a viable relationship. They form an entrenched protocol monopoly despite being entirely dysfunctional on both exploration and exploitation.
The dating-app industry is an example of how a monopoly interest can push a protocol on the masses while simultaneously disavowing their responsibility for it. If one company can get enough market share, they implicitly force the others to adopt the same protocol because enough people come to believe that this is just how dating is. They retool their dating desires, standards, and behaviors to fit what the protocol offers.
One of the primary goals of the blockchain sector is to make principal-agent problems legible by having transparently designed smart contracts serve as agents in place of businesses, people, or platforms. Protocolized markets more free and just could restore economic rationality to dating.
Your AI bots could also go on a trial “blind date” with one another. If the AI bots find themselves compatible, they could use zero-knowledge cryptography to transmit the stamp-of-approval to you.