← Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
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Jim (Business Owner)
This is Jim.
- [00:59]
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Hello.
- [01:00]
Jim (Business Owner)
Jim started advertising with iHeartRadio way back in April and now I have customers out the door. And this is Sarah.
- [01:07]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
Hi.
- [01:07]
Jim (Business Owner)
She started putting a portion of her marketing dollars in podcasting back in June.
- [01:12]
Chase Business Advertiser
Business is booming. That's why I'm working on a Saturday.
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Jim (Business Owner)
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- [01:35]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
Pushkin Chris McKinley popped open a second window on his desktop computer and checked for messages from OkCupid. Oh dear, oh dear. Yet again, his favourite online dating website was offering tumbleweed. That didn't seem right. Chris was a catch. He was smart. A degree in Chinese, a masters in mathematics, and he was nearly through a PhD in data science. Which was why he was sitting in front of a computer screen in a cramped cubicle in a deserted open plan office at UCLA's Mathematics Sciences Building at 3 o' clock in the morning. He was handsome, blue eyes, six feet tall, slim, rugged good looks and tousled hair. He was interesting. He liked art, loved music, had even spent a few years making a living as a professional blackjack player. But now, June 2012, he was in his early 30s, about to complete a highly marketable PhD and Chris was ready to settle down and commit to a serious relationship. He was lovable. He knew computers, so why couldn't the computer find him love? With a sigh, Chris shut the OkCupid window and switched off the computer. Then he switched off the desk lamp too, letting darkness wash over the fifth floor of the UCLA building, just as he did every night. He rolled out his foam sleeping mat under his desk, stretched himself out and waited for sleep to come. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. The COVID of Science and Invention magazine, 1924, shows what is at first glance nothing more than a cliched clinch between a loving couple. He, tall, muscular, clean cut with a striped tie, blue waistcoat and crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled above the elbow. She, rosy cheeks, dark hair in a flapper cut red jacket and fashionable red cap, wrapped in his strong arms and gazing helplessly up at his chiseled features. And then you notice the equipment. A wristband, armband, vacuum pumps and hoses. Spool after spool of ticker tape, glass tubes, little brass engines, the works. All somehow attached to our dashing hero. Presumably to see what exactly her adoring gaze and soft embrace is doing to his vital signs. Goodness me. The promise that the latest technology will find you love is not a new one. Perhaps that's no surprise. Looking for love can be frightening, disheartening, even tortuous. So of course, there's no shortage of people promising that they can make the course of true love run smooth. But can they? Let's find out what else Science and Invention magazine, 1924 has to offer us. The magazine's publisher, Hugo Gernsback, has written a feature article arguing that it's vital to put science to work. Helping improve the quality of marital matches. He describes four tests of compatibility. The first one uses the equipment depicted on the COVID Gernsbach describes his and hers electrodes to allow an electrical sphygmograph to record their pulses. A chest mounted chain measures breathing. Gernsbach explains. Around the chest of each is a chain which is secured to a piece of spring covered by a rubber hose. One end of the tube, thus formed is sealed. The other connects to a manometer and also to a tambour equipped with a stylus. The stylus leaves a record on a moving paper tape showing the rate of respiration. It's like a seismograph for the earthquake that is love. Because surely there can be no better evidence of physical attraction than the quickening of a pulse and the heaving of a bosom. And Gernsbach contends the single most important element for a successful marriage is physical attraction. Okay, what else? There's the sympathy test. This uses the same equipment as the physical attraction test. But instead of canoodling with her bow, the lady watches him go through an unpleasant experience, such as having blood drawn again. If she becomes excited, short of breath, tense muscles, then she's sympathetic to him. And this is a sign of a good Match. The position should then be reversed, of course, to check that when she is in discomfort, he is sufficiently sympathetic too. It gets better. Let's talk about the body odour test. One of the prospective couple is placed into an enormous glass capsule with a hose emerging from it. The other person, still attached to the electrical sphygmograph and the other paraphernalia to monitor their physical response, takes the attachment at the end of the hose, places it over their nose and takes a big sniff. Maybe they catch a whiff of armpit or bad breath. More likely there's nothing to smell but damp rubber hose. No matter. If the aroma doesn't provoke an adverse physical reaction that is supposed to be a good sign. Gernsback opines that in all probability more marriages are destroyed by body odours than any other reason. And who can prove him wrong? The last scientific test is simplicity itself. While the couple's vital signs are being recorded, one of the experimental team walks into the room and fires a gun into the air. If only one of the couple shows physiological symptoms of being startled or upset, that's fine. But if both of them panic, that's a bad result. Someone has to keep cool in a stressful situation, Gernsbach explains. So far, so ridiculous. But Gernsback's explanation for all this nonsense seems strikingly contemporary. How much would the average man or woman give to know beforehand if his or her prospective married life is to be success or failure? Asks Gernsback, who was at the time three years into his second of three marriages. At present, marriage is a lottery. It seems impossible to predict beforehand how your prospective mate will turn out in the future. These days we might speak of relationships rather than marriages, but the promise is familiar. Through the miracle of the latest technology, the labyrinth of love can be easily navigated. And there's a clue in the way he phrases the matter. How much would the average man or woman give to know? Or to put it another way, how much could we charge to tell them through certain fundamentals which can easily be ascertained. 11 can be reasonably certain as to one's choice. There are certain basic tests which can be made today and which will give one a reasonable assurance of married happiness. You won't find many takers today for watching your partner having blood taken or putting them in a capsule to harvest their body odour, or for checking their reaction to having a gun go off without warning. These century old tests seem ridiculous. But will future generations look back at today's multi billion dollar business of online dating and conclude that the joke is on us. There are 2 million women in Los Angeles, and most of them didn't know that Chris McKinley relied on the UCLA gym for its shower facilities and slept in a cubicle. So why couldn't he get a girlfriend? McKinley found that OkCupid was only suggesting a match once every few days, and that just wasn't a deep enough pool of people to have much success. He'd look at the new match's profile and think, maybe not for me. Or sometimes a girl would come along and he'd think, she's perfect. But then, Chris explained, there's these many kind of emotional cycles of, like, you know, hope and disappointment, like thinking, oh, wow, this person seems really cool. And then, of course, you know, you write them and they don't write you back. We do know Chris. We do know. But Chris was a computer guy. And as a man who once made money counting cards at the blackjack tables of Vegas, he was perfectly comfortable with looking for a little edge. And so he decided to hack OkCupid. Step one, figure out why the site wasn't delivering many matches. That meant he'd have to reverse engineer the algorithm, figure out what variables it was using to make its recommendations. This wasn't easy. OkCupid made its matching recommendations on the basis of how people had answered various questions about themselves and their preferences. But there were hundreds of questions, maybe thousands of questions. Anything from do you like the taste of beer? To how important is religion or God in your life? As well as an answer, people would also record what answers they'd find acceptable from a mate and how important the question was on a 1 to 5 scale. Most people only answered a few of these questions. But Chris wanted to Master OkCupid. So he had to figure out which were the most important questions and which were the most popular answers. And OkCupid wasn't saying. Except there was a little quirk on the site. If your questions and your answers were a perfect match for someone, you'd be shown their profile when you logged in. So all Chris had to do was create thousands and thousands of different profiles, each with different answers, each revealing a different woman's profile. Then look at each of them and try to figure out what sort of women seem to answer what sort of questions. Put like that, it sounds impossible unless you're relaxed about bending the rules and are in the final months of a PhD in computer science, Chris created an army of bots, programmed them to simulate the clicking and typing behavior of humans. They wouldn't get banned and sent them into battle. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.
- [14:31]
iHeart Advertising Representative
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- [15:32]
CarMax Advertiser
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- [16:31]
Odoo Advertiser
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- [17:35]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
Nearly half a century after the event, Dan Slater received a package from his father. It contained a stack of old letters and postcards from 1966, written by his mother at Mount Holyoke College to his father at Harvard University. Dan had never asked his parents how they'd met. The letters revealed the secret. In one note, his mother wrote, thank you, you old mathematically minded can't mind your own business. Mass production postcard instigating work of art in stainless steel computer thank you. Who writes a thank you note to a computer, then sends it to her boyfriend. Further down the pile was a questionnaire Contact Personality Preference Inventory. Dan called his father to ask what on earth he was looking at. His father was slightly puzzled. Oh yeah, didn't you know? Your mother and I met through a computer dating service. These days they're all over the Internet. They certainly are. But such dating services are older than you might think. Mr. And Mrs. Slater were indeed introduced in 1966 by an IBM supercomputer on the basis of their answers to questionnaires. And something must have gone well, because otherwise Dan Slater wouldn't exist. In the mid-1960s, some young Harvard students found themselves drinking and keeping each other company on a Saturday night, having failed to persuade any women to spend the evening with them. The dating scene was tough. They agreed there were two ways to meet girls, blind dates or parties. But blind dates were a lottery and parties were awkward. The friends agreed there had to be a better way to get a date. And so they set up an impressive sounding organisation, Compatibility Research Inc. How much, Hugo Gernsbach had asked back in 1924, would people give to know whether they were compatible? Compatibility Research Inc charged $3, about $30 in today's terms. Hopeful singles would then fill out a questionnaire. There were simple numerical questions. Age, height, grade point average. This was Harvard, after all. There were less quantifiable queries. Do you believe in a God who answers Prayer is extensive sexual activity in preparation for marriage, part of growing up. There were even little scenarios with multiple choice responses. If you were set up with a blind date for A dance, but the person was, quote, embarrassingly unattractive. Would you 1 suggest a movie instead? 2 move in on your roommate's date 3 go through with the date but make excuses and leave early or 4 be very friendly at the risk of being backed into a second date. What exactly the computer was supposed to make of all this is unclear, but the founders of Compatibility Research Inc. Were clearly having fun. The answers would be converted into a punch card and the all knowing computer, an IBM mainframe the size of a bus would do the rest. If you think that all sounds a bit like OkCupid, you might be right. OkCupid, which was founded in 2004 also by Harvard students, also promised to use questionnaires to find the perfectly compatible couple. You can see why people found this plausible. One of Compatibility Inc. S founders later recalled that the computer just gave the whole exercise a sense of scientific legitimacy. But the truth was much simpler. Jeff Tarr, one of the founders, admitted much later, the first thing we did was to make sure they were in the same area. Mostly girls wanted to go out with boys who were the same age or older, their height or taller, the same religion. So after we had these cuts, then we just kind of randomly matched them. That's it. So much for compatibility research. The IBM computer did what computers do very easily found a match for zip code, religion, age and height. Further sorting was usually unnecessary, and the implication of Jeff Tarr's account is that most of the questions were there purely for effect. According to Dan Slater's book Love in the Time of Algorithms, the founders of Compatibility Research were planning to take first pic of the ladies who signed up. OkCupid had many more customers and many more questions to work with than compatibility research, but it's not clear that their matching algorithm really worked any better. In the summer of 2014, OkCupid published the results of a few experiments it had been running on the site's users. One of these experiments deployed a kind of placebo matching algorithm. Users were told that they were 90% compatible, whatever that means, even though the computer estimated they were barely compatible at all. Others were told the same story about their high level of compatibility, except that the computer actually believed it. The result of the experiment. What the computer actually thought didn't matter much. What mattered was that users were told they were a good match. That assurance was perfectly effective at promoting an extended online chat. Compatibility was a placebo. Believing that you were compatible was extremely helpful. Actual compatibility, according to the algorithm, didn't add much extra. Did computer dating via punch cards work sure, up to a point. Dan Slater exists after all. A computer dating service succeeded in introducing his parents to each other in the 1960s and they succeeded in getting married and producing Dan. Then again, Dan's parents divorced when he was three years old. So if you're going to give the old mathematically minded can't mind your own business mass production Postcard instigating work of art in stainless steel computer a grade it's hard to go much higher than a B minus. Back in the 21st century, computer whiz and former card counter Chris McKinley had many more potential dates, a much more powerful algorithm to work with and an army of dating bots on his side. Surely he couldn't fail. McKinley's bots harvested data on 6 million answers from 20,000 women. Then he deployed a machine learning algorithm called K modes, designed to group data into clusters. Kevin Poulson, who wrote about McKinley for Wired magazine, described the algorithm as clumping data like the coloured wax in a lava lamp. With fine tuning, he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a single glob. Soon enough, McKinley had identified some potential globs. There were seven distinct types of women who the computer reckoned had some potential for matching. With him sifting through each cluster of women, McKinley disagreed. One group of women were highly religious. Not a good match. Another group was full of women who were new to online dating and looking for a fling. Uh, McKinley wanted a soulmate. These women over here were too old. Those women over there were too young. But there were two globs full of women with appealing qualities. One group were professional creatives in their 30s. They were designers and editors. The other were a little more punk and a little younger. Tattooed musicians, free spirited. He thought he'd take a chance on both. But Chris had barely begun to solve his problem because now he had to design the perfect profile. Or actually, two different perfect profiles, one for each cluster. His dream was was that when one of those women logged on, no matter what exactly she searched for or how exactly she answered the questions, the computer would have a single top recommendation. Have you considered a date with Chris McKinley? Of course. Chris had exactly the data he needed to construct his own Adonis profile. And he gave himself a little extra help. OkCupid members get a notification when someone views their profile page. So Chris simply programmed another bot to patiently visit every woman who matched. On Monday, the bot would swing past 1,041 year olds. On Tuesday, it would visit 1,040 year olds. Two weeks later, it would get to the 27 year olds and then it would begin the cycle again. But would all this really work? His PhD had taken a back seat while he deployed all his computational chops to the problem of getting a girlfriend. Was he just fooling himself? Feeling slightly silly, Chris loaded up his superhero profiles, let his bot off the leash, unroll his sleeping mat, and went to sleep. When he woke up, he recalls, that's the point at which events started to take their own course. And I think I stopped really being in control of this. Chris found himself drowning in flirtatious messages. I haven't until now come across anyone with such winning numbers, writes one woman. Also, something about a rugged man who's really good with numbers. Thought I'd say hi. All of these messages came from exactly the kind of woman Chris had already decided he was keen to meet. He his hero Profiles were a 99% match with dozens and dozens of local women and 90% compatible with more than 10,000 of his fellow Los Angelenos. Every few minutes a new message came in. I wasn't really prepared to sort through all the kind of human consequences, he recalled. And again, Carpe diem, man. Cautionary Tales will return after the break.
- [30:08]
iHeart Advertising Representative
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers are into true crime, sports, comedy, culture, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. And all this reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula. The number of consumers who hear your message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for you. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart streaming radio and podcasting. Let us show you at iheartadvertising.com that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844 iHeart. One more time, call 844-844 iHEART and get podcasting working for you.
- [31:08]
CarMax Advertiser
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- [32:08]
Odoo Advertiser
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- [33:10]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
Here is a puzzle. Sex between consenting adults has never been less taboo. And yet somehow people are having less and less sex. Americans are having their first sexual experiences less later than they used to. Millennials born in the 1990s were much less likely to have had any sexual partners between their 18th birthday and their early 20s than were Gen Xers born in the 1960s. And American adults in general were having sex nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s than the late 1990s, partly for the very obvious reason that people had become less likely to have a long term sexual partner. Let's allow that to sink in for a moment. We're in a sex recession partly because people are just less likely to have a spouse or a steady girlfriend or boyfriend. And yet the most powerful dating technologies ever designed are sitting in our pockets. What is going on? No doubt there are many factors that help to explain the sex recession, but let's focus on one maybe these dating apps just aren't very good. Tinder has been losing users, but as Valentine's Day 2026 approaches, it's still much the most popular dating app. And Maybe Tinder in 2026 feels a bit like Chris McKinley after hacking OkCupid in 2012. There's just no end to the number of possible matches. Which should help, right? Maybe not about 25 years ago, the psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert conducted an experiment that seems to be about photography, but actually points at a deep contradiction between what lovelorn singles want and what online dating companies give them. Gilbert and Ebert recruited Harvard students for a photography course, pretending to be conducting a study of teaching methods. The students were given hours of training and an analogue camera and told to make a dozen photographs that meaningfully captured their time at Harvard. Then they spent supervised time in the darkroom making a contact sheet and were asked to evaluate each photograph. How much did they like each composition? On a scale of 1 to 9, they made beautiful 8 by 10 inch glossy prints of two of the negatives. Then came the experiment. All the students were told that the teaching project which had sponsored all this training needed to keep one of the prints on file for their records. Back at headquarters in England, the student could keep the other print as a memento. So which one would they like to keep and which would be shipped to the archive in England? An agonising choice Two handmade prints, Labours of Love, originally designed to be meaningful. Which one would go and which would stay? Half of the students chosen at random were told that the prints they relinquished were going to be mailed out to England that afternoon. The other half were told that the prints wouldn't be sent off for a few days and the experimenter would call them beforehand to double check. They didn't want to change, change their mind instinctively. You'd think it would be nice to have the option to switch, or at the very least that it would do no harm. Wrong. It's much better to have a now or never choice and try to make the best of it. Dan Gilbert summarised the findings this People who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never, never change their mind, like it a lot. And people who are deliberating should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one. Maybe I left the good one. Well, says Gilbert, those people have destroyed their joy by pondering their choices over and over again. They don't like their picture. The implications of this study for online dating are devastating. Dating apps seem to offer infinite romantic riches. Endless scrolling, endless swipes, endless choice. Endless opportunities to ghost somebody and dive back into the dating pool. But if Gilbert and Ebert are right, there is no better way to ensure that you're unsatisfied with the romantic prospect in front of you than to know that another date is only a click away. And one more thing. Hugo Gernsbank rhetorically asked. How much would people give to know that they were compatible? He had it backwards. This is a monthly subscription we're talking about. People don't pay to find the love of their life. They pay to keep looking. If they succeed, that's when the subscription revenues dry up. Thankfully for the dating companies, success doesn't seem to be all that likely. Chris McKinley took a shower in the UCLA gym and drove across town for date number one lunch with Sheila. He was scared. Lunch went nowhere. Neither he nor Sheila were feeling it. His second date was a walk with a blog editor. She was feeling low, and by the end of the walk, so was Chris. Date three was Alison. She was cool. They met in a bar in Koreatown. He drank too much Korean beer and woke up in his cubicle with a terrible hangover. He messaged her. She didn't write back. Chris didn't not have a good time. He got invited to some crazy parties. He had romantic walks along the canals of the Venice district. But as the dates piled up, Chris started to seek out shortcuts. No elaborate plans. No concerts or movies. No drinking. Grab lunch or coffee. Focus on her and get to know her a bit. Cut it off fast when it's not working. No driving across town. Keep it local. He was exhausted, and he was also struggling to keep track. All these girls had been picked by the algorithm from the same cluster. He might meet three or four on a single weekend. Sometimes he'd take two different women to the same place on the same day. It was hard to keep them distinct in his mind. They were all similar, at least superficially. And if all you're doing is getting coffee, then you're never going to get past those surface impressions. 30 first dates passed. 50 first dates. 75. I'm not sure how many of us have managed 75 first dates in our entire lives. I know I haven't. But Chris's cleverness with OkCupid had produced only three second dates and just one third date. Chris had optimized the heck out of online dating and then out of dating in real life. He'd had quite a ride. But one thing he didn't have was a girlfriend. The late Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow, offered many pearls of wisdom in his life. But one that's particularly stuck with me is when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. That may be the reason that algorithmic matching appealed to Chris and appeals to many other people. The question Chris was facing was, could I be happy with this woman for years, maybe for the rest of my life, and could she be happy with me? That's a hard question, and it's not a question a computer armed with some questionnaire results could reasonably help with. But here's an easier question. Do we say we like the same bands and the same books and have similar attitudes to religion and to sex and to beer? A computer can help you with that for sure. And perhaps you won't notice the substitution. Chris was just about ready to shut down the bots and cancel his account. And then he received a message from Christine Tien Wang. She was an artist and an activist, ambitious, confident, direct. Like him, she was a grad student at ucla. They met at the campus sculpture garden, then went for sushi. There was a spark right from the start, Chris confessed to his love. Hacking. Dark and cynical, thought Christine. I like it. Two weeks later, they both closed their OkCupid accounts. When Wired magazine reported on the story a year after that first date, they were able to share the happy news that Chris had proposed and Christine had said yes. A decade after that, the BBC returned to the story. Chris and Christine were still together, still blissfully happy. Love really is a numbers game, quipped the BBC host, Hannah Fry, while Wired's headline was How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love. It seems that we can't quite shake off the idea that science and technology are going to solve romance for us. But I'm not sure that's the lesson I draw from this cautionary tale. Before meeting Christine, Chris, brilliant hack, had delivered 87 first dates, none of which went anywhere significant and most of which went nowhere at all. That's an astonishingly low hit rate. If he'd had 87 dates with 87 people randomly chosen from the Los Angeles telephone directory. I'm not sure he could really have done any worse. Ah, but you might say the 88th date proved that his system worked in the end. Not at all. According to the algorithm, Christine wasn't in his top 10,000 matches. They only matched because she searched on pretty much the only information he hadn't tweaked 180cm tall, blue eyes, near UCLA. You didn't find me, she says. I found you. The artist, not the maths. Genius made the match be damned. Maybe romance will always be an art, not a science. If you haven't had enough of amorous accidents to really get you in the Valentine spirit, there is a whole additional episode over on the Patreon feed for members of our Cautionary club, where I tell a collection of the shorter stories I found over the years. Here's a quick clip and if you want to hear the rest, just head over to patreon.com cautionary club. Enjoy. Nigel Blundell's book The World's Greatest Mistakes describes another case from the late 1970s. An airline pilot had a wife in one city and a girlfriend in another. The girlfriend was ensconced in his flat in London. As it happens, we try not to be too judgmental here on Cautionary Tales, but I am sorry to report that I hold this gentleman in low regard since after a few months he decided that his mistress was surplus to requirements and he evicted her, giving her a couple of days to move out while he departed on a series of long distance flights. When the cad returned, he found that his girlfriend, ex girlfriend was gone and the apartment was spotless. There was just one thing out of place, the telephone receiver. When he picked it up and placed it to his ear, he heard only the sound of an American voice endlessly announcing the time. She'd dialed the speaking clock in Washington, D.C. before she made her exit it 50 years ago, transatlantic telephone calls weren't cheap. The phone bill was, in Today's terms, about $10,000. For a full list of sources, see Tim Harford. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Gutridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Macea Munro, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us and if you want to hear it ad free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode and members only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club to sign up, head to patreon.com cautionaryclub that's patreon P A T R E O N.com cautionary club.
- [49:58]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
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- [50:13]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
What do you have to lose?
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Mint Mobile Advertiser
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- [50:27]
Tim Harford (Narrator)
See Terms it's football season and now you can get anything you need for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost. Almost anything. You can't get a running back, but baby back ribs. Yes, Uber Eats official on demand food delivery partner of the NFL who doesn't.
- [50:44]
iHeart Podcast Host
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