Semi-Annual Profile of the Week - July 11

I admit to slacking quite a on the dating profile of the week.  The time I've been devoting to my blog has mostly been spent on entries with real content and the POW has been left behind.

In order to make it up to my readers a bit, there are two profiles of the week, this time.  It made sense because they both fall into the same category.  See if you can recognize the theme.


Profile 1 is courtesy of Plenty of Fish user Sincerenow2118.

Seeking a male. Must be at least close to six feet tall or better. Please no out of state responses. If you are dating someone don't message me please. Must have your own place and vehicle. Must know How to treat a lady. No booty calls here.


Profile 2 comes from sannyjo3231, also on POF.

Made a few changes on my profile.. 
1st .. not your baby.. you have to earn that
2nd.. looking for fun means just that.. and for those of you that assume it means I want to **** your brains out..GET OVER YOURSELVES.
3rd.. I'm gonna leave this one open for now because I have a feeling I'm gonna need to update again.

And yes, those are their entire profiles.  Of course, the thing they have in common is bitching about who's been messaging them and sharing absolutely nothing about themselves.

Way to draw a man in with all of your fantastic qualities, ladies.  I'm certain I speak for most of the English speaking world when I say I'm baffled why you're single. 

Happy Dating, readers!

OKCupid's Value Proposition

When I began working on this entry, I reached out to OK Cupid, asking for generic information on their questions, personality algorithm, etc. but received no response.

While enduring the online dating process, I'd found each site to have its own set of positives and negatives; OKCupid was no different.  If you've never perused it, it's like other sites, in that users plug in their basics of age, height, body type, etc. and (on occasion) complete a few short essay sections on various topics.  However, its value proposition is that it generates a personality profile for each user, so you can quickly see how romantic, spiritual, kinky, adventurous, etc. someone is.   This is accomplished by the user completing questions, relating to religion, lifestyle, sex, dating, and so on.  Sort of a cut rate e-harmony, if you will.  In addition to providing your own answers, you may also select what response(s) you'll accept from potential mates.  Finally, you can weigh the question with respect to how important it is to you.  This allows OKC to determine how well you match with other respective users.  The more questions where your responses agree, the higher the match.  Surely, this is a good thing, right?  Knowing, before you even send an email, that the other person's religion and lifestyle are compatible with yours can only be positive, right?  Yes, it would be a great, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.

Example of an OKC question

To better understand why I think the system is less than effective, we'll begin by taking a look at my own OKC generated personality profile.

Most of us tend to disagree with chunks of any personality assessment they receive, but on certain traits, mine isn't even in the ballpark.  Those who know me will agree the top attributes are spot on, as are the calculations on spirituality and wholesomeness (or lack thereof).  So, those are accurate.  However,  right now, almost every woman I've dated (some of whom read this blog) is calling 'bullshit' on the conclusion that I'm less romantic and energetic.

It would be understandable for readers to think 'he's just mad because it figured out how lacking he is on things women find important'.  However, if you read on, it'll become clear that's not the case.





Anyway, as OKC failed to provide insight on how they calculate these traits, I resorted to searching their website for clues.  Something that touts their team of psychologists who've developed a patented algorithm, based upon years of scientific data.

However, the only reference to the process I could locate was this:


That's the best you could come up with?  You're claiming to have an understanding of each user's personality but can't even conjure a bullshit explanation to validate said claim?  If they can't come up with some plausible BS on how the system works, why would I have any confidence they're able to to draw meaningful conclusions about someone's personality?  Hell, it's a free site, so one gets what one pays for.

In order to be fair, and partially out of curiosity, I reviewed all 397 questions I'd answered, searching for those related to my energy level.  Surely I'd forgotten the ones pertaining to exercise, triathlons, or where I identified the sloth as my spirit animal.  Except there weren't any.  I couldn't identify one question that could be correlated to someone's energy level.  Which leads me to a question I asked of OKC - How is it decided which attribute(s) are associated with each question?  Some are obvious; the one above would provide an excellent indication of spirituality.  Others, looked at sideways, through squinty eyes could potentially be distantly associated with other traits.  Conversely, traits appear with no sort of substance to back them up, such as in my profile.  Keep those thoughts in mind when reading the additional questions below.

What bothers me most about an inaccurate personality profile is how it impacts the interest of potential partners on the site.  Again, I'll use mine as an example.  If you're a lovely lady looking for a partner who's warm, kind, and will make you feel loved, you'll close my profile in a hurry, once you see I'm cold and make roadkill look like the Energizer Bunny.  Surely, I'm not the only one whose cute little bar graph bears little resemblance to reality.

It seems clear the personality profile's accuracy is highly suspect, due to either the algorithm itself or the coding of questions.

As I mentioned earlier, OKC also calculates a percentage of how well users match each other.  According to the site, this is based solely on how your responses match up with those chosen as acceptable by the other user and is not influenced by users' respective personality profiles.  Seems pretty straightforward, right?  Hard to mess up 'do their answers line up or not', right?  As you'll see, much of the matching is inherently suspect as well.

Why is that?  Well, the first flaw affects both the personality profile as well as user matching.  That's poor wording of questions.

As they begin to answer questions, the first thing an observant OKC user will notice is that a large number of them center on absolutes and theoretical situations with no context.  Words such as 'always', 'never', 'anything', 'right', and 'wrong' are commonplace.  I highly doubt any of us live in a world of absolutes.  'Never' becomes 'very rarely' under the right circumstances.  And just because something is 'right' doesn't mean it's important enough for us to actually do.  You get the idea.

Here's an excellent example of the absolute world of OKC questions.

Perhaps my less adventurous side is showing, but I think trying anything once is pretty dumb.  Because anything includes eating blowfish at a restaurant where the chef  decided to give it a go (google eating blowfish and you'll understand).  Anything includes activities prefaced by 'hold my beer'.  And so on.  Having traveled around the globe numerous times, I've become very open to new experiences, however, fugu fish at Denny's isn't one of them.  Therefore, I chose 'not for me' as my answer to the question.  Once that choice was made, my 'less adventurous' trait grew larger.  Seriously, I checked before and after and the bar moved.

Had the question been centered on how open you were to new experiences in food, travel, sport, etc., my answer would have been quite different.

Why are so many of the questions garbage?  Because one of the site's key source for them is its users.  I know this because I dated someone who wrote several that the site used.  One thing I didn't ask her was who determines how answers to those questions are interpreted and what personality traits they're associated with.  We know it's not a team of psychologists.  Clearly this is an issue, as I noted previously.

The question above provides another example of asking the wrong question.  The answer is an easy one for me.  I firmly don't believe it's a requirement to communicate daily.  That doesn't mean I don't communicate daily, because I typically do; I want to hear my partner's voice and connect.  A much better question would have asked how frequently you typically communicate with your partner.  There's another question which pertains to being generous with gifts and such, but the question asked whether it was an obligation.  Some people don't have the means or opportunity to do either for the ones they love.  I'm fortunate enough that I can do those things, yet I still don't consider it an obligation.  There's nothing special about complying with an obligation.  There are so many questions that could be of value, if only they asked about the user's typical behavior.   

You may be thinking I'm taking the questions too literally; that I should consider the intent of each one.  To that, I'd say I answer the questions as they're asked and don't have the energy (ZING!) or interest to try to interpret each one.  As someone who's involved in market research, where each question gets reviewed multiple times before seeing the light of day, I have an issue with studies where questions seem to be thrown in without any proofreading whatsoever.  

Now that the dead horse has been properly beaten, we can move on to the final issue with the survey; users' ability to specify what answer(s) they find acceptable from other members.

The following are all questions / responses pulled from real profiles; my response is on the bottom and an active female user's on the top.  Red indicates an unacceptable answer from the party whose response is in that color.  These are all representative of trends I've encountered and not outliars.  

These first two are poster children for why users shouldn't be able to choose acceptable responses from others.  In both cases, my willingness or lack thereof to date quiet people or those outside my race wasn't acceptable to them.

Why would she care who I dated, if it wasn't her?  Is she a racist?  Does she feel the need to enforce her beliefs on others?  Or is her ability to utilize logic on par with a newt?  Let's face it, those are the only potential reasons for her to answer in this manner.





Here's another example:  

Aside from my nitpicking the wording and grammar of the question, I'm left to wonder why you care whether or not I want my mate to 'smell good'.  If I want to date the worst smelling woman in the world, what business is that of yours?

My responses appear in red 90% of the time with this pair of questions as well.

Most users take issue with my willingness to sleep with someone on the first date or satisfy a partner's desire to play out a rape fantasy.  It's not as though 'you' are expected to do these things.  Just because you don't have a rape fantasy doesn't mean other women shouldn't.  In fact, I've met....never mind.  

Here are two interrelated questions that leave me befuddled.  Both questions are from the same woman's profile, although again, I see these responses from multiple users.  Basically, what you're saying is you've got an issue with me dating you.  Think about it. 

Finally, a few that flat out mystify me.

You don't eat in bed, but it's important I do?    Were this question in the sex section, I could understand where there might be some ambiguity.  I've been amazed by how frequently agreeing with a user is unacceptable to them.

Some have strong opinions in the oddest places.  Fuck, how did I get this one wrong?  Again, not uncommon.

This is probably my favorite example to support my point.  This woman doesn't know what a safeword is, yet she apparently takes issue that I do.  Either you're lying, and know what a safeword is, or just a special kind of stupid.  

I could go on, because other people's responses truly are the gifts that keep on giving.  The entertainment value is the only reason I still have a profile on the site (although I'll kill it shortly after this article goes live).  My lack of energy and romance insure I'm ignored anyway.  Again, my point here is each time someone chooses poorly, it drives their matching percentages down versus those who don't provide those sorts of responses.  I've seen more than one profile stating not to contact them if they don't match by x% or greater, so there are folks that rely on that feature.  A feature that's driven to inaccuracy by badly worded questions and some rather odd folks.

To summarize, we've established both OKC's personality profiles and matching figures can be less than accurate, due to highly suspect algorithms, poor wording of questions, and user error.  Despite that, you might be surprised I consider some of the questions to bring value, when considering whether to interact with a particular person.  So long as you focus on basic, unambiguous questions individually, and ignore others' acceptable answers, one can quickly determine compatibility on religion, sex, lifestyle, and a few other aspects.  These are often the areas where incompatibility is fatal to a relationship, anyway.

As always, I welcome feedback from my readers, both positive and not so much.  

For those who have clicked over from OKC (I've hotlinked to this entry in my profile), I genuinely want your feedback on any of what I've written.  If I'm so obtuse as to not understand, please edify me; explain the error of my ways.  Or just call me a jackass, like some other readers.  Feel free to use the comments section or email me at theinsightfulbachelor@gmail.com.