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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3941 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How a Math Genius 'Hacked' OkCupid to find True Love

Well, I don't entirely disagree with you but it sounds like you're being dismissive of the whole story because it makes you angry.

    He picked out the 500 questions that were most popular with both clusters. He’d already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn’t want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he’d let his computer figure out how much importance to assign each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive boosting to derive the best weightings.

So, he did answer questions honestly, he just let the computer decide which ones to answer and how high to mark their importance. One thing to note is that people on OkC decide which questions to answer all the time based on which questions the people they're interested in have answered. Is what he's doing really all that much different than this? To me, it seems like the same thing, he just took it to the next level.

Another thing to note is that it worked for him - he's now engaged to someone he met by doing this. He told her about his "hacking" on their first date. (See the last ~12 or so paragraphs.) So clearly he didn't have to fake any compatibility upon meeting.