Like Facebook, OKCupid slices and dices user data and several years ago they published a study on frequency of email responses between men and women, illustrated here:


How often men & women reply to email, according to attractiveness of the sender:

Men reply to women that are more and less attractive than themselves, so responses are proportional to attractiveness.

Women reply mostly to men ranked in the top 10-20%.  Even unattractive women tend to ignore the other 80% of men.  So this is a "free market" where 80% of women hook up with only 20% of all men.

Is it delusional for 80% of women to only settle for the top 20%? That means 60% end up with no match. I know there's biological reasons but have they been skewed by online dating? Skewed towards a self-destructive outcome?



Since 2006, I've noticed the Seattle job market is similar. 80% of the companies will only settle for the top 10% of applicants. Quite often I'll get a rejection for a position, only to see it reposted a few hours or days later. So not only was I unsuitable but the other 100 applicants were tossed out, too. I've seen some of these jobs circulated for over a year.

In a market like Seattle, I seriously doubt there's much statistical difference in successive groups of applicants, as average response size is 100+ people. So is that delusional? It suggests that 70% of employers have a self-image that's incongruent with reality, which leads us to hubris and the illusion of virtue.

Plus there's a ton of transaction loss as the market is churned over and over again, wasting everyone's time for very little gain. You'd think that a supergenius somewhere would notice.




Is it from the self-selection of our information society; are people conditioned by software (and software companies) into a delusional state via their ego? Or maybe dysfunctional incentives, as dating and recruiting companies have a vested interest in continuous churn.