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The traditional example of an application is dating to marry.

The number of 'applicants' isn't what matters, what matters is how many dates the subject can get in the amount of time they're willing to spend looking, this can be estimated reasonably well.

The part where you can't go back, well, it's more true than not.

I say it's the traditional example of an application, but I rather doubt people choose their spouses this way, nor that they should.

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My point is that the model assumes that you're starting with zero knowledge about the population when you start dating, that's why you need the burn-in phase where you reject everyone to get a good estimate. In reality, I'd think you'd have a pretty decent prior for the population parameters before you even start dating.

I'd disagree for the dating case; you know a lot about people, but you don't know what its like to spend 6 waking hours with someone every day for awhile until you try it, you don't know what the sex will be like, you don't know what being a whatever-in-law will be like. All things that have to be sampled over a period before you can build up a distribution.

Plus, for the dating especially, there's a lot of "je ne sais quoi" which requires sampling and can not be polled from the population at large.

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