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  • It's funny how the govt in Singapore tries to control and subtly orchestrate everything. from (i) mandating the racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing; to (ii) only providing huge housing subsidies to couples while discriminating the singles, to (iii) giving out S$70k in baby bonuses (from birth to 17), and (iv) banning vaping while convincing citizens its not an infringement of civil liberties. I mean many policies are smart and I agree with many of them, but there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
  • It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.

    Applies to people as well in many developed societies.

  • To run gale shapley you need a fully ordered full list ranked by preference. If you have 10K people, asking every person to fully order a list of 10K items is not practical.

    Whatever they're running, it's not gale shapley.

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.

    Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.

    The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.

  • Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences (but they think they do), nor do the majority of preference categories actually matter.

    This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.

    “We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…

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