Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Monday, December 02 2013 @ 06:51 am
Last modified on
If you haven't heard of TED (and what off-the-grid deserted island have you been living on, if you haven't?), TED is a global set of conferences owned by a private nonprofit foundation dedicated to showcasing "ideas worth spreading." Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates, countless Nobel Prize winners, and artists of all kinds.
Amy Webb, author of Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, took to the TED stage to tell the story of how she hacked online dating. After a bad date left her at a restaurant with a $1300 bill, she decided to game the online dating system by creating an algorithm of her own. Using dating sites as databases, she came up with 72 data points designed to identify her ideal partner. She prioritize the 72 points and devised a scoring system:
What she was attempting to quantify with serendipity. Most people take the "expect it when you least expect it" approach to love, but that wasn't enough for Amy Webb. She wanted to know the exact probability of finding her Mr. Right, and she knew her passion for data and numbers was the way to do it.
Of course, it wouldn't be a story if it was always smooth sailing. Webb began her online dating journey by copying lines from her resume and posting them into her online dating profile. I'm sure you can guess how that turned out: not well. The dating site's algorithm paired her with terrible matches that led to even worse dates. Some would give up then, but not Amy Webb.
She began collecting data points during her awful dates. She tracked things like awkward sexual remarks, bad vocabulary, and the number of times her dates attempted to high-five her. After gathering the data, she crunched the numbers and started making correlations.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that the algorithms on online dating sites weren't actually failing. They were doing exactly what they were designed to do: take user-generated information and match it with other user-generated information. The problem with Webb was that she'd put bad information - her resume - into the algorithm in the first place. "The real problem here," she explained[*1] to her TED audience, "is that while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't."
What was her solution? The answer will amaze you...
Related Article: Amy Webb Tells TED How She Hacked Online Dating (Part II)