Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm twitter.com

Related: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqzjzr893yv4o

182 points•rzk•about 16 hours ago•111 comments•

#x2f #app #govt #singapore #dating #stable #gale #shapley

111 comments

mlboss15 minutes ago

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.

missedthecue6 minutes ago

A very funny but evidence backed policy would be free GLP-1s for women. A recent study showed GLP-1 use resulted in a 29 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a woman finding a relationship. A woman converting to conservative Protestantism for comparison results in a 2.7 percentage point increase.

yieldcrv14 minutes ago

thats already the status quo in the US and it isn’t curbing a decline in marriage

abeppuabout 3 hours ago

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.

justonceokayabout 2 hours ago

Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships

missedthecueabout 1 hour ago

This is an extremely common sentiment I see online - that there is some conspiracy to keep people single to reduce subscription churn. I have run two dating apps (my own apps, not working for a company), and what I found through trial and error was that no matter how many levers you pull and tweaks you make, a lot of it is simply user-behavior problems, not a tech or product design problem. There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example. The reason someone's matches aren't committal is because they don't want to commit.

The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".

miki123211about 1 hour ago

I think what you should be doing as a dating app — much more so if a government one — is some kind of RL based on length of actual marriage.

At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.

missedthecueabout 1 hour ago

the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.

The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.

qprofyehabout 2 hours ago

The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.

drfloyd51about 2 hours ago

I don’t think you are legally bound to marry. And if it stops working, divorce before resentment.

aurareturnabout 1 hour ago

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.

rationalistabout 1 hour ago

Especially since populations are potentially in decline with fertility rates below replacement rates. It seems like an existential problem for the government if they want future taxpayers.

fluidcruft30 minutes ago

Governments shouldn't "want" anything. If people want more taxpayers, so be it.

kylehotchkiss21 minutes ago

o__O my url bar doesn’t currently say Reddit? This argument feels red pilled and not curious nor productive. Women have plenty of valid frustrations with the dating pool. I don’t live in SF but the last woman whom I talked to there told me many of y’all just have mattresses on the floor and like no bed frame. There are places to improve fellas

Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.

qihqiabout 2 hours ago

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.

dotcomaabout 1 hour ago

Is it necessarily so?

And doesn't something of the same kind happen in real-life, in some societies or countries or cities male-optimal and in others female-optimal ?

jb1991about 2 hours ago

The article also mentioned that, but I don’t understand it. Receivers are also making choices, so why do they end up with the worst match?

computably2 minutes ago

I left another comment with the minimal example, but intuitively:

- proposers descend from their 1st choice, while recipients ascend according to their offers; the outcome can't be recipient-biased, because recipients ascend only when proposers are forced to descend

- a matching is stable if each pair contains at least one party that cannot find a strictly better match

- in particular there are multiple distinct matchings, and if proposer-biased, recipients have no recourse to break the proposer-favored pairs

2muchcoffeemanabout 1 hour ago

Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.

Imagine A ranks X,Y,Z in that order B ranks Y,X,Z in that order C ranks X,Y,Z

X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.

A will propose to X and match. B will propose to Y and match. C will propose to X and get rejected. C will propose to Y and get rejected. C will propose to Z and match.

Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.

Edit: I think I fixed it.

jezzamonabout 2 hours ago

You have to accept the best offer you get, if there's someone that you would like, you only match with them if all their better options are exhausted.

lalaithionabout 2 hours ago

they could just swap the direction for each matching

ValentineCabout 2 hours ago

The pilot targeting only government workers reminds me a lot of Lee Kuan Yew's various eugenics policies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#In_Singapore

It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).

jojobas37 minutes ago

Positive eugenics never stopped and there's nothing wrong about it. Also there's nothing wrong with the government promoting the creation of stable families with children born before DS risk exceeds 1/100.

s1artibartfast5 minutes ago

I mean, it sucks if you're a taxpayer over 35 that wants to use the service, especially considering that DS is easy to screen for using modern tests of a mother's blood and Singapore has a reasonable abortion policy

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

111 comments

Related stories