Chris McKinlay is a good looking, smart student at UCLA, but he can’t seem to get a girlfriend. He’s a computing expert, so why not use his technology prowess to supercharge his search for a soulmate? He starts building an army of bots and unleashes them into the world of online dating. Chris’ search for love leads him to some unexpected places, and it might be teaching us all the wrong lessons about love.
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Further reading
On Chris McKinlay, the two essential sources are Kevin Poulsen’s feature article for Wired Magazine March 2014 “Hack OkCupid, acquire love. This guy did” and Hannah Fry’s BBC podcast Uncharted: Love Bytes supplemented by How To Get a Date with Data This Valentine’s Day by Zoe Kleinman
The history of Compatibility Research Inc is told in Love In The Time of Algorithms by Dan Slater (also published under the title A Million First Dates) and a FiveThirtyEight short documentary.
The description of scientific matchmaking in the 1920s is from Matt Novak in Smithsonian Magazine.
Dan Gilbert’s research with Jane Ebert is “Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2002; he also describes the work in his TED talk.
OK Cupid’s research on placebo matching is Christian Rudder “We Experiment on Human Beings!” archived here.
Daniel Kahneman’s book is Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Research on the “sex recession” includes:
Finer LB, Philbin JM. Trends in ages at key reproductive transitions in the United States, 1951-2010. Womens Health Issues. 2014 May-Jun;24(3):e271-9. doi: 10.1016/j.whi.2014.02.002.
Twenge JM, Sherman RA, Wells BE. Sexual Inactivity During Young Adulthood Is More Common Among U.S. Millennials and iGen: Age, Period, and Cohort Effects on Having No Sexual Partners After Age 18. Arch Sex Behav. 2017 Feb;46(2):433-440. doi: 10.1007/s10508-016-0798-z.
Stephanie Stacey How We Fell Out of Love with Dating Apps Financial Times Dec 24 2024
