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Comment by mattnewport | Hacker News Reader

Really this doesn't go far enough. Why are we allowing people to discriminate at all when it comes to intimate relationships? What about factors like personality, physical appearance, marital status, age, gender or political opinions? Really dating apps should just randomly assign you someone to have sex with and refuse to give you more matches until you provide evidence you have done so. Given people might be unwilling to comply with these directives it probably needs to be enforced by the state, at gunpoint if necessary, for us to achieve the unbiased utopia that all right thinking people must want.

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We're now in such a crazy world that it took me far too long to realize you were being sarcastic.

Dating really is the one place where it's fine to be as discriminating as you like. It's really no one else's business as to what constitutes one's notion of attractiveness.

What a joke. What's more likely

  1. The world has gone mad - a claim made by people of every political group, essentially constantly, and about every single kind of political issue.
  2. You are too willing to buy into satire if it makes you feel good.

I don't think it's outlandish to say that the political arena has changed a lot since ~2014, for a number of reasons.

Not sure what the point of this false dichotomy is. You realize I was agreeing with the parent commenter, right?

That's not what's outlandish. What's outlandish is suggesting that you fail to recognize satire because somehow discourse has become so ridiculous that reality is indistinguishable from fiction.

You have something like this in the novel “We”, from 1920: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel).

This is basically the premise of Brave New World, you are really not supposed to turn down people (within your own caste) for sex there. This is helped by the fact that everyone is approximately equally attractive through selective breeding.

it's fascinating that this [satirical] comment is the top post while the article itself has simultaneously made the front page. like the comment above alludes to, this article is absurd, yet, there seem to be many who take it seriously (presumably the researchers studying "queer hci", whatever that is)?

I 100% disagree with the original article but upvoted it because I think it's important that people see that there exists attempts to push platforms to manipulate their users for ideological reasons. It's good to shine the flashlight under the rock.

yes, no doubt many upvoted it for exactly that reason. my fear is that the publicity works to further legitimize it

I don't think it needs to be legitimized with the general audience to be implemented. The more people that see this, the less likely it is to come to fruition. These types of programs don't get pushed through due to popular request. They get snuck through the back door based solely on the political motivations of employees and outside activists.

Absurd but also predicted, no? I am sure I recall people joking here on HN about how de-"biased" dating sites would surely arrive at some point soon, and here we are.

Bear in mind this comes from the same school of thought that brought us "air conditioning is sexist":

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/air-conditioning-offi...

If anything I find myself agreeing with that author in a strict logical sense: if there are two temps that are comfortable and it's set to the colder one for men, you can argue that's sexist by the dictionary definition, albeit also practical. But it's still kind of absurd.

Researchers also got unhappy that an AI trained on bulk text learned doctors are usually men and nurses are usually women. Their solution wasn't to try and encourage more men into nursing and vice-versa, but rather, to edit the AI so it believed in equal outcomes.

The thing is that both viewpoints are basically worthwhile [0]. But this "algorithmic" optimization based around being ahead of individuals needs to choose one uniform "correct" framework for everybody, forcing these disagreements front and center. It used to be that people could go their own ways with live and let live, with change happening at a gristly organic boundary - eg an older generation pressuring a newer generation to conform to their biases / newer generation individually choosing to defy or follow. Now we've got these centralized companies putting themselves in the position of "knowing best", and given that the thing they're really optimizing for is their own bottom line, we know they're going to get it wrong.

[0] I've only read the abstract of the article, so I can't tell if its authors step over the line into unreasonableness. But I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, as there is a novel issue here.

edit: Oh jeeze. It seems my "benefit of the doubt" was wholly undeserved. I still stand by my general point, but in relation to some imaginary article where the authors explored users' mild preferences being extrapolated into much stricter "filter bubbles". These stakes of choosing "one true answer" are really bringing the tripe out, as well as fueling the reactions to it.

Close, except there should be no need for dating apps. When it is time to increase the herd, your Provider should select a mate for you.

Shhh, that's the improvement they roll out after a few years of the Mandatory Anti-Discrimination (MAD) dating system. The people will welcome it with open arms.

Flying too high my man.

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