The destruction of OkCupid by Match Group looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.
OkCupid used to be the best place to match diverse people.
They crowdsourced thousands of multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter:
- Which answers you accept
- How important each is to you
- Your answer for the other side of the match equation
- Voluntary explanation
The match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex. “Friendship” contained ethics and communication style, so it also worked for business partnerships.
Then Match Group bought it.
For a while they let it be, but then they:
- Removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- Removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- Removed keyword search - no more finding niche interests not included in the questions, like “furry”
- Removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- Deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- Deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- Deleted all accumulated likes, which were the best matching people around the world with maximal couple/friend/sex partner potential except, for example, location for now. They broke the profile links, so bookmarks became useless.
- They delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, they have a temporary problem, such as life situation
- They police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer healthcare insurance CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing (for months) “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
With how much of dating happens over these apps, it’s crazy how much damage Match Group could make if they deliberately wanted to.
You could deliberately match everyone with only the worst possible matches, hide the gokd ones so no one has kids.
They could practice Eugenics breeding some master race.
They could empower sex offenders.
etc.
There is zero oversight or transparency. They could do all of these things already or more and we would have no idea.
You could probably destroy civilization by having that much control over the dating market.
Not that they are doing that, but I’m just saying, that’s a HUGE moral hazard.
If they got access to the DNA data that many companies collect to analyse heritage and health, the eugenics could work well.
By “work well” you mean damage society
If they’d choose to do dysgenics, sure. Why though? Making a slave race?
Eugenics could be used ethically to improve humanity
Improving humans via new eugenics by transhumanists is compatible with human rights.
We allow natural mutation to produce illness and other problems. Why not design babies?
Gene editing will be cheap and widespread. What laws produce ethical results? Should personal eugenics be a human right? How about parental eugenics? Which baby designs are ethical? Don’t say the current natural ones, because many of them are unhappy.
Misplacing the blame
Genocidal people having used eugenics as an excuse for mass murder doesn’t make eugenics itself bad. Blaming eugenics does nothing to prevent further genocide with excuses. Hate does genocide, the various excuses do not.
(Similarly, over-optimistic fools slamming one version of communism on a whole country without prototyping different versions in villages first, crashing the whole country, doesn’t make communism itself bad. Blaming communism does nothing to prevent foolhardy mistakes in societal change. Development should be nimble, prototypes should be cheap.)
We don’t ban money because it’s used to hurt people - we regulate dangerous stuff to protect human rights. Or, should regulate.
Eugenics works on animals:
Dogs have better social skills than wolves = eugenics.
Some dogs have trouble breathing = dysgenics.
Stray dogs in the wilderness are worse hunters than wolves = dysgenics in that environment.
Humans could be better:
Humans could be designed to work well in their lives:
(can even be done by trading babies, without gene editing)
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Humanity could be better:
Humanity could be designed to work well in its evolution:
Separate the human kinds from incompatibles
Echo chambers (countries, languages, professions) are cultures protecting their own environment from incompatible cultures. When a group of people demands seemingly absurd laws, they should be allowed to apply those laws to all volunteers, babies being non-volunteers with universal rights. At least personal eugenics should be legal, like body modification is now. Ear piercing is a modification some abhor.
Transhumans and conservatives need to stay away from each other, and current technology could help: phones could navigate people, routing incompatibles around like oil and water. On shared ground, weirdos would always happen to be on the other side of the street. Train cars and elevators filled with groups of people approximately their own kind. All cars good looking on every commute, timed just right for people’s tastes. On the web, OkCupid and Quora used to be good at that, matching tastes and interests.
Do the opposite of what the for-profit sensationalist media does, smearing the wildest progressive stunts in the conservative’s face, because rage sells, anger is addictive. The blame is mistakenly placed on the depicted, not the media breaking people’s boundaries by pushing incompatible people into knowledge of each other.
TIL Match Group = The Bene Gesserit