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as a (nerdy) girl who just got on the dating apps in SF, im getting flooded with interest and im now stressed out by all the people i could meet. i got something like 15 hinge matches and 10 from feeld today, about 20% make it past my preliminary filter but that's still a lot of ppl to be talking to concurrently!
so many future filtering steps, this is just the start of the funnel; there are ppl im more excited to meet but oftentimes im ambivalent. it's getting to the point where im scheduling dates ~a week out and declining dates to go to house parties etc. to hangout with friends, bc for now friends > finding someone to date. what's the optimal filtering strategy to be doing here, how should you schedule ppl to exit the market as early as possible without hurting other's feelings unnecessarily (or filtering too aggressively and making false negatives)??
Pretty simple:
- Just drop half (or more) of all candidates based on whatever criteria you want, even if it’s just intuition / feeling.
- Schedule a 15 minute call (tell them explicitly it’ll be 15 minutes so it’s easy to end it) before commiting to meeting in person. Use the information from the call to drop even more candidates.
- If there are still too many candidates you can repeat step 1, but this time top-down. Say you want 2 dates this month, so you take your top 2 candidates and reach out to them. Rinse and repeat until you get 2 dates.
dropping another half seems tempting, but I'm afraid I'll be more likely to be overaggressive in filtering and have too many false negatives perhaps. But the probability of each person working out is just so low that maybe it's fine? Not sure about the math on this, I could be wrong
The 15-min call is a good idea, will start implementing, thanks!
If you end up finding that all of the dates you end up having are bad then you can consider the possibility that maybe your filtering isn’t good. But until then it’s likely fine.
Or you can literally flip a coin for each person to avoid bias.
1Not having played this side of it so can't say I've tried this, but I'd try putting something in your bio that solicits useful filtering info at the start, like "if you ping me or we match, please start by telling me/answering...", and try to find a prompt there that's informative for what you're looking for. It might be as dumb as reading comprehension or more like "what kind of relationship are you hoping for?" or "life values". But I would iterate on it. An unintuitive thing to do would be then to also proceed further with people who give answers you don't like much, to see if you're getting false negatives because the early screen is bad.
Another idea is to put in your bio stuff that matters to/about you (that's important) but would dissuade suitors and let them filter themselves out earlier.
My personal favorite filter is writing though. You might not get many takers but "link to me to your blog" is a way to get a lot more info about someone.
1damn being homeschooled the whole way (we didn't do co-ops either) really meant that I didn't catch any of the typical diseases that kids get like scarlet fever and mono until grad school. Still haven't caught HFM or chicken-pox and I don't look forward to that. There might be some argument made for getting these diseases at a later stage in life creates more suffering because your time is more valuable + weird complications can occur the older you are. Anyways, just wanted to rant a bit; this isn't an argument against homeschooling.
I got the vaccine (2 doses) for it as a kid but it's only demonstrated to last 10-20 years, and I'm now past the 20-year mark. I'm now seeing claims of a lifetime but can't find studies.
even if the $100k h1b fee change will be struck down by the court, opening the overton window on making legal immigration more uncertain is bad especially if the US wants researchers/academics, who are often very risk-averse.
also top people often have more options, so they are more likely to leave the US on the margin as well