
Is Romantic Desire Predictable? Machine Learning Applied to Initial Attraction - kolbe
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28853645?dopt=Abstract
======
tunesmith
It's also so timing-dependent. My wife and I are not sure we would have been
attracted to each other if we had met during quite a few other times in our
past lives. There have to be some factors about a person that are about timing
and emotional state, beyond simply just being single and available.

EDIT: "past lives" refers to the past of each of our lives, not reincarnation.
:-)

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make3
... They should run convnets on pictures on the subjects, would be much more
accurate, I'm sure. Speed dating is a first impressions thing. Physical
attractiveness is huge, I'm sure. I don't know if the convnet would have time
to learn what attractiveness means, but that's more of a technical (albeit
important) detail. Meta learning (including transfer learning) and more data
could help a lot with this

~~~
thanatropism
But we don't see in the same way photographic cameras see. We have a very
narrow field of vision and compensate for it by constant eye motion. Vision is
never static. And vision is only part of the attraction equation -- there's so
much we smell without consciously articulating...

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gt_
Good point. Maybe this 'scope' could eventually be handled with another layer
to predict eye trace. It would require a lot of eye tracking data. I used to
be a film editor and I think this might be similar to how composition
influences cut techniques. I think this sort of thing is pretictable in
context of film editing but that we don't have enough words to describe it.

Example: When cutting a scene with a lot of people eyes, you can really push
the limits because of the high likelyhood that the audience will have a
certain amount of focus on some eyes.

~~~
thanatropism
Separate, less tangential reply.

I think what could really help computer vision is not as much emulating human
eye tracking as it is understanding images as short durations rather than
instantaneous shots. The point is that during the eye's saccade reality is
always changing.

Think of how close-distance flirting works: you can't use your stereo vision
to focus on both her eyes at once -- you have to alternate ever so slightly,
occasionally meet her eyes focusing on yours and then lose them. All of this
happens automatically -- our visual perception of the situation is
intrinsically dynamic.

Of course, here we're getting close to Henri Bergson's ideas about time and
duration and Hubert Dreyfus' reading of Heidegger as a theoretician of
situated existence. This is the same Hubert Dreyfus who told Simon, Minsky,
etc. in the 50s they didn't have a chess computer yet and has recently passed
away as a skeptic of automated cars.

Did you notice self-driving cars are slowly disappearing as a near-term
possibility? We still haven't figured it out -- we're trying to teach
computers with frozen cases (MNIST, Imagenet, etc.) when the real problem is
training them on actual situations.

They don't need to emulate humans at all. They just need to exist in the same
precise sense we exist. Computing power will keep increasing and I assume so
will "deep learning" optimizers, but we need to figure out how to give
computers a Dasein.

~~~
visarga
> we're trying to teach computers with frozen cases (MNIST, Imagenet, etc.)
> when the real problem is training them on actual situations

They are training AI agents on simulators, which are dynamic datasets as
opposed to ImageNet which is a "frozen" dataset).

> we need to figure out how to give computers a Dasein.

Google and the whole AI community have been hard on the Reinforcement Learning
bangdown. RL is based on situating an agent in the environment (real world or
sim) where it learns to interact and achieve goals. That's situated AI.

My intuition is that simulators are key to the next AI phase - where a neural
net would be like a scientist creating new hypothesis and experiments, and the
simulator would be like a lab, testing out those ideas (simulation + MC search
+ neural nets)

~~~
thanatropism
> My intuition is that simulators are key to the next AI phase

I hope so. Reinforcement learning and apprenticeship learning (inverse RL
where the machine watches a human dealing with the problem) are probably the
ground zero before which everything will look like toys and Kaggle problems.

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damnfine
This is just a log way of saying we are looking at the wrong metrics. Good on
them for publishing a 'negative' finding, and not clawing for some trivial
clickbait casualty for attention.

~~~
komali2
I mean, I'd start at the very question - romantic desire? I mean, were they
testing against likelihood for partners to make out? Go home and sleep
together? Go on second dates? Admit mild attraction but not instigate further
action? Date a whole lot and eventually break up? Or marry?

The things people look for in a partner to go home with for the night are
different from the things people find "just generally attractive" (oh he's
hot) which are different from the things people find good for long-term
dating. I mean, obviously, but my point is the layer of complexity doesn't
just start at "different things that cause attraction."

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chirau
Here is the full paper:
[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617714580)

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luckyt
> Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating
> event for a 4-min speed date

I wonder if the results would be different if the participants got to know
each other better. In 4 minutes you're not going to know your partner very
well, and any judgment would probably be based entirely on physical
attraction.

~~~
colmvp
I've done speed dating twice. Within a few minutes you can usually tell
whether or not you'd even want to go on a first date because while physical
attraction is one thing, so is having a conversation. I've certainly struggled
to talk to a few women who quite frankly have very little in common with me or
who could barely muster a few words throughout the conversation. That was
enough to basically not want to ever go on a first date with them.

~~~
welkeikd
It's a tricky issue. There's lots of studies showing that people form pretty
meaningful impressions quickly, as you're saying, and I think speed dating
captures some of that.

On the other hand, there's lots of evidence suggesting that the things they
were measuring are important for things like long-term relationship survival,
etc. There's also studies showing that these "thin slices", while accurate,
are not as accurate as what you'd get from intimate long-term knowledge of
someone.

This isn't anything astonishing, but I have difficulty interpreting this as
much more than "things like personality and attitudes are not very predictive
of your superficial attractions to potential partners." I don't mean
"superficial" dismissively, I just mean it in the sense of "not based on very
much information."

Another way of looking at it is: how _could_ you predict attraction in that
time frame based on longer-term, deeper-seated attributes, when that kind of
timeframe doesn't allow for assessment of those sorts of things? It's one
prediction, but I doubt if you stepped back and came at it without knowledge
of this study, that you'd make that prediction. I certainly wouldn't (I'm
trying to imagine me predicting my relationships from the first 4 minutes--
sure, I'd be able to guess pretty well who I _definitely wasn 't_ attracted
to, and maybe who I was _definitely was_ attracted to, but beyond that?
pbfbfbtttt...)

I wasn't able to predict my most meaningful relationships from a month or so
of being around them, sometimes on daily bases. Looking back at them, I might
have had some kind of subconscious reaction I wasn't able to process, but I
wasn't aware of what it meant at the time, which renders it useless.

~~~
visarga
What looks amazing from the outside might be quite stressful from the inside,
and vice-versa. I think we aren't able to predict a relationship before we
experience it because each person adapts to the other, and the result is
undetermined before the process starts. A person becomes changed in a
relation, we can't predict even how we are going to be, let alone the
significant other. That has been my experience - I'm rather pessimistic at
dating services being able to match people up. It's more of a game of chance.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Astute observations.

However, do dating services ever do consistently better than chance (whatever
chance means in such situations)? Plenty of Fish IIRC used to publish lots of
stats.

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NegativeLatency
Last sentence of the abstract:

> These results suggest that compatibility elements of human mating are
> challenging to predict before two people meet.

~~~
kolbe
That's a pretty generous definition of "suggest." Could be that they aren't
studying the right metrics before meeting.

~~~
danblick
Exactly. It's possible there are other features that would have more
predictive power, they just haven't figured out how to quantify them. The
title of the paper could be, "We're still not very good at describing what
makes people attractive."

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pavement
Judging a book by its cover, maybe... but personality is a huge, _huge_
component of romance, and simple questionnaires, even with free-form, essay-
style text responses, are unlikely to reveal enough to predict anything by
survey alone.

Arranged marriages certainly seem to permit a capacity for arbitrary pairings,
but when you consider the hereditary aspects behind an arranged marriage,
where parents are choosing for children, the reality is that a parent's
approximate attraction to someone they select for their children, even by
proxy through that someone's parents, will probably land closer to what their
children would intuitively approach on their own, than random chance.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
An arranged marriage is going to be a social and economic positive to at least
on party and neutral or positive to the other.

A marriage is less likely to fail when it causes enough upsides to be worth
the downsides.

People don't like the concept of trophy wives, gold diggers and strategic
marriages because the pros and cons each side brings to the table are
incredibly dissimilar in nature and the perceived value of them is highly
subjective so to most people they look like a bad deal for at least one party.
On the other hand only two people have to think it's a good deal for it to
work out.

~~~
mannykannot
I don't think we can necessarily assume that an arranged marriage is positive-
to-neutral for both members of the couple, however. Parents may act in their
own best interests or those of other members of the family, even if they tell
themselves they are putting their child's interests first. Practices like
dowries, and issues of gender inequality and the socio-economic status of
families and clans, further cloud the issue.

Which is not to say that leaving it up to the kids themselves is always
successful...

~~~
roceasta
So parents pick suitors and daughters have the power of veto. That way parents
filter out bad boy thugs (who may damage her face) and those of lower
economic/social classes (who may reduce her to penury). Daughter filters out
people she finds _repulsive_. The traditional model as I understand it.

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searine
This explains tinder's success.

Cut the "matching", just use first impressions as the primary filter.

Though, this raises all sorts of new problems in the romantic ecosystem.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Exit strategies aren't just for startups.

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trapperkeeper74
If they find anything, they oughta not publish and start a science-based
dating site. ;)

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otakucode
Yes it is predictable. Based upon the immunohistological complex of the
participants. You won't find anything but red herrings otherwise.

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EGreg
Two exact same people can meet in different circumstances and either fall in
love or not.

If anyone has a subscription to YouTube Red I would recommend watching this
episode from many years ago:

[https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q](https://youtu.be/EMeW6hSiZ6Q)

~~~
AjithAntony
> YouTube Red

FWIW, I have YouTube Red, and this video says I need to buy a $150 season to
watch it.

If anyone has hulu, here's a link

Star Trek: Voyager S4 E22 Unforgettable
[https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0](https://www.hulu.com/watch/441748#i0,p20,s4,d0)

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musashizak
We live in strange days! Really we can think that desire is predictable and
measurable? The right question shoud be how much we dont know of the human
nature?

~~~
coldtea
> _Really we can think that desire is predictable and measurable?_

We don't have to think of it philosophically.

If researchers can train some ML algorithm to predict it, then it is
predictable, end of story.

If not, it's open (it could still be predictable and they couldn't come with
the right algorithm, or it could just be too fuzzy, or even impossible to
measure).

That said, if we drop it from "love" to simple "desire", then most of it
should be fairly predictable and measurable with very small margin of error.

Humans are not that much of unique snowflakes as they say. In a given culture,
the majority of the population will converge a lot in what they find
attractive and what they don't -- this has been studied before.

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zxcvvcxz
Alright, who's ready to learn some uncomfortable truths? Background: for fun I
used to help friends improve their standing in dating, and now I am turning
this into a side business focused on increasing men's success rates for online
dating. To great effect btw.

> Matchmaking companies and theoretical perspectives on close relationships
> suggest that initial attraction is, to some extent, a product of two
> people's self-reported traits and preferences.

Right from the first sentence, I can tell the results are going to be awful.

Here's the truth: appearance is significantly more important than anything
else. I mean the face, the headshot from the chest and up, the body. But
mostly the face. This is for both male and female attractiveness. The rest of
one's "profile", their traits and preferences, just make for conversation
topics unless there's something so polar opposite that it becomes a deal-
breaker. I.e. in my research these are "threshold factors" not continuous
variables for correlation.

> Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating
> event for a 4-min speed date. Random forests models predicted 4% to 18% of
> actor variance and 7% to 27% of partner variance; crucially, however, they
> were unable to predict relationship variance using any combination of traits
> and preferences reported before the dates.

And there are the poor results, as I expected.

We are shallow. Or so it seems. But we are actually incredibly complex
processing machines. I can tell your levels of strength, aggression,
trustworthiness, and intelligence fairly decently from looking at your face. I
can also tell what your diet is like, how healthy you are.

Maybe not explicitly, but subconsciously. And women are amazing at this (we're
better at looking at breasts and hip-to-waist ratios). Here's an interesting
video getting into some of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc)

So how do I literally 10x a man's results in terms of his OkCupid profile? In
terms of measured message responses received, and dates achieved?

I get them in shape. I fix their diet. I cut them to <12% bodyfat while adding
pounds of lean muscle. I increase their testosterone levels as much as
naturally possible over a 90 day period to start (that's my basic service).
And then I take proper photos -- men, don't ever use a smartphone for a
headshot. Smartphones have terrible focal lengths, lengthening your faces and
making you look more feminine. Since it slims the face, I suspect a lot of
social media heavy women are letting themselves gain weight because in their
selfie photos (taken from a slightly inclined angle, no less) they look
significantly slimmer.

I don't change shit in what they write on their profiles. Because that pretty
much doesn't matter. Believe me, I've experimented. But the hardcore truth is
that you need to look more masculine, unless you can show through photos that
you're a multimillionaire. And even that I wouldn't recommend as being your
main attraction asset (but it does work).

Maybe I should release some independent studies sometime, I have some great
datasets :)

Edit - nice downvotes but no rebuttals. Happy to have a discussion, these kind
of things bothered me to no end as someone who wanted to bank on being a
software engineer with a good personality in order to get dates.

~~~
sevenfive
Focal lengths slimming the face / tilting the scales towards heavier women
(pun intended) is an interesting theory.

But natural T increase? This sets off my quack-o-meter.

~~~
zxcvvcxz
I've read so many studies that show how diet and exercise and vitamin
supplementation can boost your natural T levels (still within the natural
range, though). And sleep of course. I encourage you to search around the web.

What's kind of scary is that the natural range is so large - like 300 - 1000
ng/dl for testosterone, but you will literally feel like a different person if
you fix all of the above factors properly and go from say 350 to 600. And
living in that higher T state for months and years at a time, you will start
to look different as well (generally in a good way for men).

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Zardoz84
So, then the aromantics ?

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hprotagonist
Betteridge's Law: No, romantic desire is not predictable.

~~~
EGreg
Feynman would be happy that negative results like these are published!

~~~
hprotagonist
that's true. I am, as well. Just remarking that the title _is_ predictable
(and a little clickbait-y).

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breischl
Sarcastic tl;dr... Nerds try to use computers to get a date. Surprisingly, it
doesn't work.

