Thread: Lying about age
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Old Dec 17, 2014, 08:54 PM
hamster-bamster hamster-bamster is offline
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Location: Northern California
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Quote:
Originally Posted by s4ndm4n2006 View Post
I would just ask. it makes no sense whatsoever. wtf is 2 yrs anyway? How does anyone gain anything by claiming to be a "whopping" 2 yrs younger? I don't understand anyone lying about their age in any case but for 2 yrs difference it makes even less sense.
2 yrs lying actually is perfectly understandable in the context of dating sites, much more so than 10 age lying, because their function is discrete - it is not continuous 30 years, 31 years, 32 years, ... 97 years, but discrete. It is a bit like US taxes - the function is not continuous from bracket to bracket. Within a bracket it is but from one to another it is not. I do not know how the algorithm works, plus, I know that it is proprietary to each site so the matching function may differ from site to site, and possibly within a bracket there is continuity - say if you are 40 and you say that you are interested in women ages 30 to 45, maybe women 38-42 would be likelier matches than women from 30 to 32 and from 43 to 45 - no idea, but just the way the user interface is designed, there are brackets so what do you do? If you are 40 and the lower bracket is [30-39], I do not see why you would not put 39. But then you laugh at yourself in the presence of a date after a glass of wine and tell her all of the above. Most everybody would understand this reasoning if it were presented honestly, straightforwardly, and with a touch of self-deprecation.

Brackets are everywhere - in qualifying for benefits, food stamps, reduced or free school lunches, sliding scale clinics - but if somebody lies on an application for benefits to get preferential treatment, he is deceiving taxpayers, which is not fair to them. If somebody deceives a matching algorithm on a dating site, taxpayers do not have to pick up his slack, so I do not see why this would be such a transgression. If a man ADDED to his age to qualify for Social Security (if it were possible), that would be a true transgression. A crime, basically - willful and intentional gaming of the system. But a dating site is not the Social Security Administration...