Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

Thing I Don’t Understand At All

sinesalvatorem:

The number of people who scored over 500 points on the quiz about compatibility with me and live near me (or visit here often) and said that they do in fact want to go out with me is somehow SIGNIFICANTLY GREATER than the number of people who have actually asked me out.

HOW

LITERALLY HOW

Honestly, it would be most reasonable if everyone who said they wanted to date me immediately filled out the actually-going-on-a-date-with-me form that was linked at the end. You only have to answer three questions, compared to having just answered dozens. It doesn’t require that you be in the Bay Area at the moment or fit any other criteria. It doesn’t even commit you to a time, so you can ask to schedule a date in a year when you’re done.

Basically, there’s next to no reason someone who wanted to do this wouldn’t just press the button that makes it possible.

And yet, the vast majority didn’t.

OK, fine, lowering the bar: People who do expect to be able to physically go out with me in the near future. Maybe people who don’t have high expectations thus feel like they’re getting insufficient expected value from answering three questions. (Despite the fact that >90% of those surveyed said they liked surveys, and this seems like the most likely result in survey history.)

In that case, if only Bay people who want to go out with me are counted, we find that…

…it’s still only a minority who respond to the form (even assuming that everyone who filled out the dating form also filled out the quiz). The fuck?

OK, I’ll lower the bar even further. Maybe the people who wanted to go on a date with me changed their minds if they got low scores, because they thought it meant we wouldn’t work out. Because they took a joke quiz that literally told you “don’t talk about the weather” before asking you your temperature preferences seriously. But OK.

And let’s be really strict. Let’s say that anyone who didn’t get as high as “soulmates” shuffled away feeling rejected. For some reason. Even though The 500+ tier is miles above what was actually described as the lower bound for a “good match”. Whatever.

(We’ll also ignore the fact that the distribution of people who filled out the form before the quiz should be equal to the distribution of people who want to date me on the quiz, instead of being bunched at the top. And that only 3 responses came post-survey. We can discount a lot here and still find the same result.)

Even if you make every reasonable and unreasonable adjustment in the book, it still comes out the same: More people (say that they) want to date me, can date me, and have every reason to think they’d do a good job of dating me… Than will actually bother to click the button that makes it possible. Somehow.

(Should I have made one of the questions “Are you actually willing to press the buttons that make this possible?” for 500 points - because that is a shockingly low yet unclearable bar.)

In conclusion… I have no conclusion, actually. All my post-game analysis comes to naught. I simply do not and cannot understand this. It’s the same level on which I don’t comprehend people who turn down free stuff that they actually want. I can’t even fit this into the lesbian sheep theory, because I can’t imagine being this unwilling to act while still being able to turn on your computer.

All I can say is that the world is mad and I’m honestly kind of tired of its shit.

phi-of-two said: Observation: The survey doesn’t ask whether the survey-taker is currently in a monogamous relationship, or has an incompatible sexual orientation. If any one of those things are true of a person, it is unlikely that they would want to go on a date with you, even if you’re otherwise very compatible.

This is why my analysis about whether something is wrong solely counts people who say they want to go out with me. I would expect this to only include people who, y’know, want to go out with me. Whether because single or because poly. If one is monogamous, they should probably not be saying they want to go on a date with someone else.



  1. nextworldover said: i did not notice any links at the end of the survey? this is the first i am hearing of the “actually going on a date with you” form
  2. sadtoot said: some people are answering the survey and lying or trying to guess what they think the perfect score is. “lives in near/bay area” is an obvious correct answer, so most of these not-truthful respondents will cluster on that answer.
  3. helicoidcyme said: (theres also the slow collapse of confidence visible in my “meet up” survey response but i dont think most people took those in sequence so thats probably not useful data)
  4. helicoidcyme said: i had actually expected a post by now (afternoon 5/14) adjusting the scoring tiers, and am a little surprised to find this post instead. also, i strongly suspect that a lower score would have been less intimidating/easier to take seriously, and i would have been more likely to follow up on it
  5. helicoidcyme said: i am not and cannot reasonably be in the bay area any time soon, so i got discounted early, but perhaps it would help to know that my 530 was vastly higher than i expected, and my immediate response was to look for reasons it was wrong? i do not alieve (perhaps do not even believe) that you would like to date me; i am instead fairly convinced that your quiz was wrongly scored/a joke/some other explanation.
  6. sinesalvatorem reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:
    This is a fair point and I did not consider that. I assumed everyone would answer a “Do you want X?” question on a...
  7. spiralingintocontrol said: like “sometimes when trivial things go wrong I want to launch myself into the sun” vs “when trivial things go wrong I want to fix them in a calm and reasonable manner”
  8. spiralingintocontrol said: like, there are different meanings of the word “want.” there’s “I have an urge to do this thing / this thing sounds nice for at least one reason” and there’s “I think doing this thing would be a good idea for me to do, on balance” and maybe people meant the former when you thought they meant the latter.
  9. aconiteherbalist said: It’s easy to be bold on the internet (especially tumblr) and it’s difficult to be bold in person. Maybe it’s worth differentiating the “id love the idea of going on a date with you sometime and somewhere in the undefined future” vs “I’d love to go on a date with you this week/month/tomorrow.” because both can be lumped under the “I’d love to go on a date” idea. Also the term dating carries a lot of baggage for people which may inhibit them as well?
  10. kechpaja said: Have you compared against the respondents’ answers to the “am I a lesbian sheep?” question specifically? It would be possible to get a pretty high score on the quiz and still respond “yes” to that.
  11. your-url-is-problematic said: tbh I took the quiz to see how I would score despite that I live on a different continent :(
  12. phi-of-two said: And yeah, it seems like basically everyone who interacts with your blog is poly. But there’s probably some regression to the mean among the lurkers. I base this mostly on the fact that I am a mono lurker
  13. phi-of-two said: Observation: The survey doesn’t ask whether the survey-taker is currently in a monogamous relationship, or has an incompatible sexual orientation. If any one of those things are true of a person, it is unlikely that they would want to go on a date with you, even if you’re otherwise very compatible.
  14. tchtchtchtchtch said: Like of course it’s scarier to ask someone out than to fill out a survey with the explicit disclaimer “this does not count as asking me out”!
  15. brin-bellway said: It might depend on how you define “can go out with you”. Consider, for example, someone who would like to date you, lives in the Bay Area, but is extremely busy.
  16. tchtchtchtchtch said: It can be really hard to actually believe that a Cool Person would actually want to interact with me. I would expect this to be the explanation.
  17. not-a-lizard said: But even so, I doubt that accounts for the entire difference, and yeah that sucks. :(
  18. be-kind-become-kind said: inertia’s a bitch :/
  19. not-a-lizard said: theory: those people like surveys so much (and/or were so confused by the weird scoring errors) that they took it multiple times and inflated the numbers. (I personally took it twice.)