Sphygmograph Be Damned: The Science of Love

Pushkin. Chris McKinley popped open a second window on his desktop computer and checked for messages from ok Cupid. Oh dear, Oh dear, Yet again, his favorite online dating website was offering tumbleweed. That didn't seem right. Chris was a catch. He was smart, a degree in Chinese, a master's 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 and a deserted open plan office at UCLA's Mathematics Sciences Building at three 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 twenty twelve, he was in his early thirties, 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 ok Cupid 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 cover of Science and Invention Magazine nineteen twenty four 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 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 nineteen twenty four 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 cover. Gernsback describes his and hers electrodes to allow an electrical shigmagraph to record their pulses. A chest mounted chain measures breathing. Gernsback 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 monometer and also to a tambore equipped with a stylus. The stylus leaves a record on a moving paper tape. 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 gurns back content. 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 this comfort, he is sufficiently sympathetic too.

It gets better. Let's talk about the body odor 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 shigmograph 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 a pines that in all probability, more marriages are destroyed by body odors than any other reason, and who can prove him wrong. The last scientific test

is simplicity itself. While a 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.

Gurns Back 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? Gurns back ads. Through certain fundamentals which can easily be ascertained, one 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 odor, 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 two 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 ok cupid 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 matches profile and think, hmmm, 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 okay cupid step one figure out why the site wasn't delivering many matches. That meant he'd have to revert engineer the algorithm, figure out what variables it was using to make its recommendations. This wasn't easy. Ok Cupid 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 one to five scale.

Most people only answered a few of these questions, but Chris wanted to master okay Cupid, so he had to figure out which were the most important questions and which were the most popular answers. And okay Cupid 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 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 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 it wouldn't get banned, and sent them into battle cautionary tales will be back after the break. 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 nineteen sixty six written by his mother at Mount Holyoke College to his father at Harvard University. Dan had never asked his parents how they had 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 stainles 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 questioned aire contact personality Preference inventory. Dan called his father to ask what on earth he was looking at. His father was slightly puzzled, Oh, yeah, can you know him? 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. Mister and missus Slater were indeed introduced in nineteen sixty six 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 nineteen sixties, 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 organization, Compatibility Research Ink. How much Hugo Gernsback had asked back in nineteen twenty four would people give to know whether they were compatible? Compatibility Research Ink charged three dollars about thirty dollars 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 and 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 one suggest a movie instead, two move in on your roommate's date, Three go through with a date that make excuses and leave early, or four 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 sound a bit like Okay Cupid, you might be right.

Oka Cupid, which was founded in two thousand and four, 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 Tar, 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. They're high, tor 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 Tar'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 pick of the ladies who signed up. Ok Cupid 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 twenty fourteen, ok Cupid published the results of a few experiments that 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 not ziety percent 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 Card's 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 nineteen sixties, 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 twenty first 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 six million answers from twenty thousand women. Then he deployed a machine learning algorithm called k modes, designed to group data into clusters.

Kevin Paulson, who wrote about McKinley for Wired magazine, described the algorithm as clumping data like the colored 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. Ah. McKinley wanted a soul mate. 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 thirties. There were designers and editors.

The other were a little more punk and a little younger, tattooed, musicians, free spirited. He thought it'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 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 Adonis profile, and he gave himself a little extra help. Okay, Cupid 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 one thousand, forty one year olds. On Tuesday, it would visit one thousand and forty year olds. Two weeks later it would get to the twenty seven 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, unrolled his sleeping mat, and went to sleep. And 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. His hero profiles were a ninety nine percent match with dozens and dozens of local women, and ninety percent compatible with more than ten thousand of his fellow Los Angelinos. 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 Carpai

dm man cautionary tales will returned after a break. 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 later than they used to, Millennials born in the nineteen nineties which less likely to have had any sexual partners between their eighteenth birthday and their early twenties than were jen xers born in the nineteen sixties, and American adults in general were having sex nine fewer times per year in the early twenty tens than the late nineteen nineties, 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 twenty twenty six approaches, it's still much the most popular dating app. And maybe Tinder in twenty twenty six feels a bit like Chris McKinley after hacking ok Cupid in twenty twelve. There's just no end to the number of possible matches, which should help, right. Maybe not.

About twenty five 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 love lawn 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 analog 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 one to nine. They made beautiful

eight by ten 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 agonizing choice two handmade prints labors 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 prince they relinquished were going to be mailed out to England that afternoon.

The other half were told that the prince wouldn't be sent off for a few days, and the experiment who would call them beforehand to double check. They didn't want to change their mind. Instinctively, they'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 summarized the findings this way. People who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can 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 gernsback rhetorically asked how much would people give to know that they were compatible?

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 by the end of the walk, so was Chris. Date three was Allison. She was cool. They met in a bar in Korea Town. He drank too much Korean beer and woke up in his cubicle with a terrible hangover. He messaged her. She didn't right 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. Thirty first dates past, fifty first dates, seventy five. I'm not sure how many of us have managed seventy five first dates in our entire lives, and how I haven't. But Chris's cleverness with okay Cupid 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 Carneman, 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 this. 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. The 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 okay Cupid 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, equipped the BBC host Hannah Frye, while Wired's headline was how a math genius hacked okay Cupid to find true love. It seems that we can't quite shake off the idea that science and technology they're 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's brilliant hack had delivered eighty seven 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 had had eighty seven dates with eighty seven 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 eighty eighth date proved that his system worked. In the end, not at all. According to the algorithm, Christine wasn't in his top ten thousand matches.

They only matched because she searched on pretty much the only information he hadn't tweaked one hundred and eighty centimeters tall, blue eyes near UCLA. You didn't find me, she says, I found you. The artist, not the maths genius made the match. Shig McGrath 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 these 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 dot com slash Cautionary Club enjoy. Nigel Blundell's book The

World's Greatest Mistakes describes another case from the late nineteen seventies. 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'd 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. Fifty years ago, transatlantic telephone calls weren't cheap. The phone bill was, in today's terms, about ten thousand dollars. For a full list of sources, see Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.

It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal wise Bender. Dafh Haffrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Massa Munroe, Jamal Westman and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira 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, add 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 dot com slash Cautionary Club. That's Patreon, p A, t R e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club.

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