I totally agree with High Treason that one should meet immediately, in theory. In theory, I would want to meet everybody immediately, unless they are severely and hopelessly uninteresting (I find that most people on the dating sites are at least to some extent interesting).

The desire to meet everybody immediately, in theory, is not motivated by interest. It is motivated by the general understanding I have developed to date in regards to how we get information about other people. The sources of information about other people are the sound of their voice, looks, mannerisms, quirks, the way they smile, their insecurities, wisdom, how animated versus subdued they are, and the rest of the delightful mess that makes humans so endearing and charming even when bizarre. Most of those sources of information do not get transferred over chat, which makes a strong case for meeting everybody remotely interesting immediately, and to avoid wasting time. That, in theory. In practice, there is no time. So it is all an issue of time. If it were not the issue of time, I would meet all those scores and scores of people immediately, because most of them do appear at least remotely interesting to me, so I would see no point in discriminating against any man by not meeting him immediately. But there are just so many of them that I find it hard to decide whom to meet, and as I try to come back to this issue, from time to time (in my mind), I realize that any sort of approach I take towards filtering the list down would amount to my being arbitrary, and since I do not want to be arbitrary, I have decided to stop responding to select messages until I either have enough time to go through them all, or, come up with a filtering mechanism that is not arbitrary. The reason I wrote about persistence is this:

- I was thinking of, say, waiting for a few more months, and then trying to see if I can download the OKCupid inbox into a comma separated file, dump it into either excel or google drive spreadsheets, assign the persistence score inside the spreadsheet (most messages from the same sender=highest persistence score), and sort the spreadsheet by/on the persistence score in the descending order, from highest to lowest. Then, I would start messaging from the top, from people with highest persistence score and down the list. To me, this approach is valid because it is not arbitrary, and my main problem with OKC is that I am trying to find an approach that is not arbitrary. To me, the persistence score makes sense because persistence may be a proxy for motivation. Apparently, for some other women and men, persistence is not a proxy for motivation, but is a reflection of desperation. On this we will agree to disagree.

I still have to find out if OKCupid offers the capability to export the inbox into a comma separated file which would be the preferred file format for me to deal with OKCupid, since I like the ability to slice and dice data, in general.