You Have 33 Bits

All the work of dating is selection. If you don't do it, it will be done to you.

There are roughly 8 billion living humans. The end goal of dating is a romantic relationship with one of them. The process of going from 8 billion to 1 is primarily a process of discovery and selection.

Some people disagree. A lot of dating advice, in particular advice that’s aimed at men, promises to teach how to seduce any woman. It doesn’t. When untargeted seduction seems to work, it mostly does so not by transforming the other person’s disinterest into attraction but by selecting for interest. PUA antics broadcast that you’re looking to fuck tonight with no strings attached. This selects for the girl who happened to be at the dive bar looking for the same exact thing. If she wasn’t looking for it, reading her palm isn’t going to convert her.

You may also quibble that your dating pool isn’t actually 8 billion people. You’re right, it could be more. Men have married pillows, cellphones, and video game characters. Women have married snakes, chandeliers, and the Eiffel Tower, though the latter two are struggling to remain faithful to their spouses. There are 27,300 members between the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and r/MyGirlfriendIsAI subreddits, of which 99% are in the former.

But we have to draw a line somewhere. I drew it at living humans since, presumably, you are one as well. An important thing about discovery and selection is that it’s a mutual, reciprocal process. It’s a two-person game with a shared win condition.

8,000,000,000 sounds like a lot, but it’s merely 2³³. Anything that cuts the potential pool of partners by half is one bit of selection/discovery. You have, at most, 33 of those. That’s not a whole lot.

Conscious Spending

If your only dating avenue is an app, your dating pool is generally constrained to singles of one sex within a few years of your age and 5 miles of your location that happen to be using the same app. Even in a large city full of young people, these criteria define a group of 1,000-10,000 potential partners at most. This means that by confining yourself to the app, you have used up between 21-23 of your available bits before even considering the other person’s interest in you. You’re left with just 4-5 bits for anything else you might care about, from personality to life goals to sexual compatibility.

If you’re not careful, 33 bits go by really fast.

You still have to start somewhere, and sex/age/status seem like obvious criteria. But how obvious exactly? Does “single” include “single but not looking to date” or “in the process of separation”? What exactly is the incompatibility you worry about with people far from your ideal age range, and how flexible are you about those? Does “attracted to women” mean that you’re more attracted to Hunter Schafer or Mia Lesnar or exactly the same to both?

The first step towards spending your bits wisely is to spend them consciously, as a deliberate decision. Other people have their own definitions of who’s a woman and who’s too old for you. You get more bang per bit by determining for yourself what exactly your criteria are.

Mimetic Bits Are Expensive

The most expensive things to spend bits on are traits that everyone else wants that don’t also select for their interest in you.

A common tragic example is women who set height filters of 6’0” and up on apps. Only 15% of American men are 6’0” or taller. On an app with height filters, each of them has 3-4 times as many women to choose from as a guy of average height, and they’re not particularly impressed by the fact that a girl cares about height so much. The woman’s effective dating pool is limited to 5% of what it was.

A height-agnostic woman picking from a pool of 20 men could select based on looks, intelligence, devotion, industriousness, sociability, skill in bed… But only 1 of those 20 is both over 6’ and has her as his first choice. Setting a height filter spends 4-5 bits, close to a girl’s entire budget after filtering A/S/L. It gets her a guy who’s tall and nothing else.

The heigh-filtering girl pays a much larger cost than short men. 5’5” guys get two-thirds as many responses on apps as 6’0” guys. They message a slightly smaller pool of women to start with (for example, they probably exclude women who are both attractive and very tall), but not one that’s 20 times smaller. Being in the bottom 10% of height only costs a man 1-2 bits of selection, while hard filters on the top 15% costs a woman 4-5 bits.

A lot of women don’t even care about height that much. They just have too many potential matches and want to limit the pool to reduce choice anxiety. Since apps don’t let you filter on “will be a caring and loyal husband” but only on height, they filter on height. It feels like a free step in the direction of narrowing down their dating pool. Like mobile games and casino drinks, the free bits cost the most.

The Best Bits are Complementarities

The big problem with male height is that almost all women want taller guys, often because other women do. It’s a mimetic desire, the kind that locks you into zero-sum competitions that devour all your slack and every bit of selection you have. The best bits to spend are the opposite: your unique desires that match your unique proposition.

The knowledgeable mansplainer and the enthusiastic learner. The meticulous planner and the easygoing traveler who loves surprises. The avid cook and the foodie who does dishes. The top and the bottom.

Complementarities are the buy-one-get-one of selection: if you find someone with the trait you like, you get someone who likes you more in the bargain.

Here’s an example in my own marriage:

I’m rarely indecisive; my wife, Terese, is rarely underprepared. I take on the many tasks that require swift action, like catching a cockroach or settling a bill dispute. If the problem requires diligent research and preparation, it ends up in Terese’s domain.

Neither of us would have explicitly listed decisiveness or diligence on our list of traits to filter for before we met each other. But we both recognized how we complemented each other once we actually spent time together. The easiest way to select partners who harmonize with your strengths and weaknesses is, as always, to just be your differentiated self consistently.

Do the Hard Bits First

Even if you’re not on the apps, only superficial traits are easy to explicitly select for. All the things that really matter for a relationship — personality, character, shared values — require time and effort to discover.

Let’s say that you’re a woman whose main criteria for a husband is that he’s fully self-accepting, attuned, and skillfully curious. You’re aware that this is a rare combination; perhaps only 1 in 1000 men meets your standard. So you write a public date-me survey that tries to measure self-acceptance and curiosity, and open the top of the funnel to thousands of men. You pick the few that score highest on your criteria, and go on dates with them. None of them turn out to be self-accepting and curious.

The problem is that a multiple choice self-report survey isn’t a powerful enough tool to find the 1 in 1000 outlier on a profound, spiritual quality. This doesn’t mean that this strategy is hopeless. But if the best-designed survey can only spot guys in the top 10%, it might take 100 dates to find the guy. And then you better be sure that you optimize for spotting curiosity and self-acceptance on first dates — your hardest selection criterion warrants most of your efforts.

There are two other ways to filter for hard-to-select traits without going on dozens of dates. The first is to be the sort of person who is maximally attractive to someone with the qualities you seek. Do self-accepting, curious men only date someone like them? Or perhaps they like a woman who’s ambitious and driven, even if lack of self-acceptance is part of her drive? I don’t actually know, but if I wanted to date someone like that it’s the first thing I’d try to find out.

The other multiplier of your selection power is outsourcing it: find communities that pre-select people for the attributes you want. For Aella, this could mean mindfulness meditation communities, authentic relating circles, dance and contact improv gatherings. Another approach is to think who among your friends is closest to the ideal of the quality you want, and see who they spend their time with and where. Persistent associations offer a stronger signal than one-off events; any deep trait take a good while to demonstrate and discern.

Communities often filter on many bits at once. Church attendance selects not just for religious belief, but also attitudes towards family, sobriety, and conflict resolution. Endurance sports select for fitness, but also conscientiousness, goal-orientation, and social class. If you don’t want the whole package, make sure to find the hardest bits first, the qualities that are more rare and take longer to prove.

A girl complained to me once how hard it is to find men that are both intellectually rigorous and muscular. I suggested she go loiter by the Jacob Falkovich lifting bench at the rationalist gym. Rationalism is slightly anticorrelated with musculature, but it selects strongly for intellectual rigor. It’s much easier to spot big biceps among a nerd crowd than to start philosophical debates with everyone at the strongman gym.

Discovery Mindset

Here’s Visa on selection:

twice as many people wanna date me? sounds like upside to me

half as many people wanna date me? sounds like upside to me

If twice as many people want to date you, you have one more bit of selection to use. If half as many, that means that you’ve successfully used it.

And Chris Lakin, in Flirting isn’t about convincing:

my favorite mindset for flirting is that it’s predetermined: either you’re already compatible with the other person, or you’re already incompatible. flirting isn’t “convincing” the other person to like you, it’s revealing

When this mindset is accessible, the concepts of “flirting well”, “fumbling”, and “success” start to feel funny and even meaningless.

If you’re trying to convince or change the other person, you’re almost certain to fail every time you try. If your goal instead is to find out whether they could be a good partner for you, you’ll succeed in doing so.

Selection is hard work, but the effort is spent before you go on dates. You introspect on what you want to spend your precious bits on, align yourself with the search, and find communities that do some filtering for you. When you actually go out and meet someone, all that’s left is to be yourself and have fun.

Most people don’t do this work of selection. Some guys just swipe right on everyone and think the work begins only when the date happens. Some girls wait for a soulmate, without any clear idea who or what that is. They still go on dates, though often not very good ones. Selection still happens whether you do it on purpose or let it happen to you.

You select dates with the city you live in and how you dress and where you spend your time. You select by having weird hobbies or being too hot. You select by being approachable or hard to get, by approaching in person or retreating to the apps. You select by complimenting a girl’s dress or negging her philosophy essay.

In the end, everyone gets the dates they deserve select for.