Ted Talk: Amy Webb How I Hacked Online Dating

I don't know if this was posted before but I've just run across it - the clock is ticking, her family's riding her to get with the program ("I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already."), she's been ditched again and it's against her timetable, or more accurately the pressure she's under. The odds are against her :

"So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 30 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to have that happen for a while before we can get engaged. And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 35, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. So that wasn't going to work.

If my strategy was to least-expect my way into true love, then the variable that I had to deal with was serendipity. In short, I was trying to figure out, well, what's the probability of my finding Mr. Right? ...(various limination criteria)... So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia.

In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already."

Hilarity ensues (including getting stuck with a $1,000+ dinner tab after the guy bolts) and she eventually finds herself someone of course...

"these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? Do you like horror films or romance films? I'm not looking for a pen pal. I'm looking for a husband. Right? So there's a certain amount of superficiality in that data."

So she finds out what sort of profile men click on by creating a whole raft of false accounts...male accounts:

"So I created 10 fake male profiles. Now, before I lose all of you -- (Laughter) -- understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. I really was just scraping their data. But I didn't want everybody's data. I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry. (Laughter)"

"When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. So I didn't reach out to any woman first. I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? What I was trying to get at here was that I figured in person, I would be just as competitive as a (competitor). I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online."

Edit: When I ran into this, at first I also admired Amy's methodology - very direct, quantitative and to the point; obviously so since it got her what she was after. What came to disappoint me as I thought about it was the motivation - being pushed by her family's timetable rather than something of her own, and the lengths that she was willing to go to to satisfy them rather than herself...if she could tell the difference.

This is something that doesn't get discussed much in RP so I thought I'd throw it out and see what sticks.

If RP is about rejecting societal programming towards "blue pill" situations, where would this leave her? I'd say using clever means, but to a profoundly unoriginal, programmed end.