BBC Planet Earth - Birds of Paradise mating dance

There's a pretty good book by one of the OKC founders that goes into a lot of this data. [link] There's a bunch of good graphs and analysis in there (which matched my anecdotal experience of online dating). The takeaway for me - if you're a man looking for a woman and you're not in the top 5% of attractiveness for men (really top 2%) then online dating is a waste of your time and you're better off doing pretty much anything else. This is doubly true in skewed dating markets like the bay area (less so in favorable markets like NYC, DC). There's a lot of 'what you can't say' [0] in that book, sexual selection is skewed in lots of ways people pretend it isn't. I think it'd be better to acknowledge some of these things and consider it in an intellectual way - not so you can leverage it in some sleazy/misogynistic pick-up-artist way, but because understanding how it works helps you know how to behave/show confidence etc. Helps for the aspie-er among us where this doesn't come naturally (and is more important for men seeking women where for better or worse we have to be the ones to figure it out [1]). On a somewhat related note, this Ted Chiang short story explores some of this and is just generally great: [link] [0]: [link] [1]: [this video]

I think they're fighting an uphill battle because these incentives are sexual selection incentives. There's not much you can do to 'fix' them. I think what happens is that both sexes go through it and come out the other side. If they were lucky enough not to pair off with a bad mate early they can then choose more wisely. For a lot of men this means being unhappy and lonely in their 20s, for women it means being unhappy while sleeping around a lot in their 20s. Eventually people figure out what they want. I'm not sure an app can do much to fix that. Sexual selection's affect on behavior is a powerful thing: [this video]