> Here's how it works: The doctor breaks the patients' femurs, or thigh bones, and inserts metal nails into them that can be adjusted. The nails are extended a tiny bit every day for three months with a magnetic remote control, GQ reported.
What could possibly go wrong? /s
Genuinely curious: has someone here gone through the procedure and care to share your experience? I'd imagine the 3 months must be hell, but won't it keep hurting even after when walking, running, or doing sports?
BusinessInsider is summarizing the https://www.gq.com/story/leg-lengthening article. I've read another first-person account of the procedure months ago, it's months of constant pain. As soon as you get used to the new millimeters there's the next procedure for the next millimeters. I wish I could find the older article, the guy said it was worth it but at the same time most of his close friends didn't even notice the height difference.
I look forward to scampering around the house on four sharpened bone legs like some kind of horror movie esque spider beast when I'm an old man - it will be an excellent way to terrify the grandchildren.
This is a fairly common procedure for children with different length legs to fix a limping gait. My sister had it done back in 5th grade. She has additional health issues, but once the lengthening process was over, I don't recall her complaining about pain from it.
Interestingly, it’s a much less risky procedure on Children, because all the soft tissue around the bones will adjust much more easily than in adults (who routinely lose movement range with this procedure). However, it’s rarely done on non-adults except for medical reasons.
I haven't done this particular bone surgery, but I had my jaws broken and moved forward (sleep apnea) - not painful at all if you have a good surgeon. And in this case, they're moving it bit-by-bit over a long period of time.
I imagine some physical therapy and you're all good - the nerves can stretch just fine.
Plus, if you know the risks, and you want to be taller - go for it. One life, spend it how you wish.
From what I have read, the little by little movement is what makes it excruciating. With jaw surgery, you break it and put it into its final place while under anesthesia. Then the healing starts immediately. With leg lengthening, you are slowly moving a break and this shifting/stretching the nerves. Not to mention there are lots of risks. I say you've only got one life to live, don't risk spending the rest of it limping around in pain for up to 3 inches of height.
What makes you think this is at all unique or related to the industry, other than being an industry that spits out more folks with $75k to burn than most others?
"A former Bumble product manager says that a majority of women on the platform tend to set a floor of 6 feet for men, which would limit their candidate pool to about 15% of the population."
I think that's hilarious. I have to admit to setting my filter to 175cm just to see if there were any tall women in my area. It wasn't a useful filter. But I did really enjoy briefly dating someone over 180cm, we both put everything in the kitchen up high etc. Plus no bending down to hug her.
But counter-anecdote: I visited an ex-gf the other day to borrow something from her new partner, and she actually commented "I forget how tall you are". And it wasn't a positive thing, it was quite explicitly "new boyfriend is my height and it's great". Albeit that's 1.5m vs 1.8m so it's quite a difference.
Maybe we need a rule like "half your age plus 7"... "no more than 10% height difference?"
Are you using US statistics to go with your conversion to US measurements?
In Australia we have several ethnic communities where the stats for stuff like height diverge noticeably from the national stats. So "immigrated from The Netherlands" as a category will be taller by a few percent, "immigrated from China" will be shorter and have greater sexual dimorphism.
I don't recall what site I was using before. I found one that let you specify country and 150cm is shorter than 99.99% of 30 year old males from Australia.
I am right on the margin at 183cm on a good day. IMO it's something short men should just lie about, in my (limited) experience women are dreadful at estimating height and just want "taller than me".
This seems like poor strategy for most women. Assuming an individual women is of average attractiveness but going after the most attractive guy they can land, it would be better to go after top 5% 5'11" guy with less competition than land a mid range 6'2" guy.
I wish I were a couple of inches shorter. Hardly any super tall person lives over 100 years old yet many shorter ones do (even after correcting for the height distribution at birth). The heart has to work harder for tall people and eventually it requires maintenance or it fails. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/
As someone who is 6' 4", I agree. Not that I'm complaining, but given the choice to pick my height, I'd opt for 6' 2". For pretty much all the reasons you mentioned but also because the world is built for people closer to average height. Think kitchen counters, plane/bus seats, stairwell ceiling clearance, etc. I'm relatively young but have back problems that I partially attribute to my height.
Huh? If you are short, then literally nothing else matters. Sure women take other (like social) cues to judge desirability, but short men are just not considered equal when it comes to physical attractiveness.
There's, as far as I know, no such analogous singular deal-breaker trait for women.
Unfortunately that is undoubtedly a deal breaker for the vast majority of women. It can be overcome to a certain extent with personality and income, but in an already extremely competitive dating market for men I can understand drastic measures.
I'm 5'3" and haven't needed to take 'drastic measures' to find women interested in me, both in real life and online. I would say that the majority of women 5'4" or under don't consider my height a dealbreaker, even if it's a disadvantage (which it definitely is). Yes, taller women are another story, but the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4".
So why does my experience differ with the conclusion you've drawn? My guess: I have a pretty good looking face, a reasonably fit body, and I'm a musician. In other words, height excluded, I'm above-average in attractiveness. And that's evidently enough to take away the whole dealbreaker thing, if it existed in the first place.
I know it's an n=1, but your statement is so profoundly certain that an n=1 is enough weaken it.
I can't upvote your comment enough. There is a lot of negativity in men that have a hard time dating. It's all the fault of some external thing that can't be fixed of course. While in reality, there are plenty of things you can do.
I would much rather be a physically unattractive guy than a physically unattractive woman. Women consider so many different traits that it's easier for guys to work on becoming attractive for women.
Face is a pretty big deal. If you have model looks - many women can overlook other attributes.
But again - should we use something that is innately genetic and unchangeable as a means for “compensating”?
You’re not even ripped. You just say reasonably fit - so I assume something barely above skinny fat. Your face (genetics) are doing you favors here a lot.
It also depends a lot on where you are and where you’re pulling women from. Personally - there’s not a single woman I know who would date a man who is 5’3”. Heck - most don’t even want to date a man under 5’10” and will only do such when someone in person sweeps them off their feet. (Relying on repeated forced interaction - they’ll never go on a date with them from OLD)
> Unfortunately that is undoubtedly a deal breaker for the vast majority of women.
Certainly in a speed dating or o stranger dating (e. g., online dating) environment, but maybe that's not your best game if that's what you are working with.
> but short men are just not considered equal when it comes to physical attractiveness.
Did a tall person write this? This is horse shit. If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in a bubble where this fallacy actually applies, get out quickly. Or if this is you, and you're under average height, I'd legitimately suggest seeking counseling to try and overcome the short supply of confidence, perhaps discover the reason why you're projecting this onto yourself. There is an immense supply of people and an incredible variety of tastes.
Clearly you don't follow popular trends. What's popular and desirable changes frequently, and sometimes many times in the course of a year. This includes physical appearances. Social change can happen overnight.
I don't know man. I'm significantly taller than a few of my friends who tick off every box that's commonly listed as ideal traits in male partners other than height and they struggle to get a single date while I have random women hit me up while I'm just out shopping.
There's a large amount of incredibly shallow men based on all the guys I've become friends or acquaintances with over the years, and I can only assume that women are just as capable of being shallow.
Anecdotal evidence is a tricky thing. I'm over 6 foot and was the last to be married among two social groups in two different states, the vast majority of my peers significantly shorter than myself. And I wouldn't consider myself to be a slouch or unattractive.
getting ripped takes time out of day and/or steroids, breaking your bones and 'automating' the bone lengthening with a remote control device is way more efficient. and they can still work on their sidehustles/startups.
"One software engineer told GQ he spent the first three months after his surgery alone in his apartment and ordered delivery food during that time to go from 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-9."
That does not sound easier than spending the same 3 months with ~4 hours of workouts a week (which is enough to get most untrained people into pretty solid shape lifting), never mind the other health benefits.
I don't really think efficiency is a particularly good argument here :P
I'd take a better, healthier life over any surgery to break your bones and be more "appealing" to whatever twisted dating pool criteria, If you want more confidence, work for it.
I doubt how much of this is journalists fantasizing about tech workers salaries and what they could be doing with it. They might even have say 1 anecdotal evidence they can point but it translates to "male tech workers... "
"Male tech worker contemplates funny sounding surgery" sounds better than "Male tech worker buys fancy car, gets tired of it, wonders if working late hours was worth it."
Interesting how it is either the recipient or broader social/cultural attitudes which are blamed, depending on the demographic the recipient belongs to.
“At every single workplace I’ve been in, there've been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person.” One disagreement at work led to a colleague snapping at him and rebutting, “Don’t be so sure of yourself, short man!"
I hope this is a joke. I'm a thin short man. I bet many women can beat me up if they wanted to. Yet, no one in my long working career remarked about my height.
I am sure this happens in "Good Ole Boys club" type workplaces.
You'd think tech wouldn't have these "old school" type of attitudes as part of the company culture, but you'd be wrong. I will say though, tech companies tend to have it concentrated more at the Exec level than the Engineer level.
That was immediately the thought I had. Most people, except absolute jackasses, won't throw around remarks like this unless the person pretty much had it coming.
I once heard that if you walk into any Big Tech company and want to figure out who the manager is, just look for the tallest, best-dressed man and you'll be right 90% of the time. This is, of course, apocryphal but I imagine there's some truth to it.
This is life in general. There is an awful lot of privilege associated for completely arbitrary characteristics over which individuals have absolutely no control. Work, dating, whatever. This applies to both men and women
.
The article doesn't really go into why people are seeking this procedure. It would be illuminating to see quantitatve data on this. Is it because of dating opportunities? Work? Something else?
Hiring practices are notoriously superficial. Ageism, sexism, racism (eg [1]), etc. Often these things are masked as "culture fit". HR will put lots of processes in place ostensibly to counteract bias but the net effect is really to shield the company with plausible deniability when it comes to bias against protected classes from individual interviewers and hiring managers.
It would be interesting to see how height fits into this. Height seems to be a mixed blessing in acting, for example. There are certainly some very successful shorter actors (eg Tom Cruise is 5'7").
I imagine there is some of in software engineering too. Height goes to confidence and confidence will sway interviewers more than any technical competence will.
Neither of them are short enough that I'd call them 'short'. Right around average height for all genders. A little below average for U.S. men, but in lots of other countries they'd be above average (racism is possibly an ingredient in this discrimination and subconscious bias enchilada)
I'd argue that "short" is subjective, and comparing them to the average height of white men only, when the original claim wasn't that they were "short for white, American men" is a symptom of a culture which considers whiteness, maleness, and American-ness, the defaults, and is worth critical examination.
I think there's no question it's subjective! But the quote was
'if you walk into any Big Tech company and want to figure out who the manager is, just look for the tallest, best-dressed man and you'll be right 90% of the time.'
whereas 'the managers' of some of the most successful big tech companies are short relative to people of similar backgrounds, let alone the tallest.
The comment I responded to was "Bezos is short, Zuckerberg is short, Gates is short"
If you had said they were unlikely to be the tallest person in the room, I would have wholeheartedly agreed. If you had said they were short by white male american standards I would have also agreed. If you had said they were short by standards of U.S. tech workers, I would have half-heartedly agreed (since there is good Asian representation in that demographic but men are overrepresented).
A few exceptional founders is not a representative sample set. A better example would be all of the department heads under them. Not to mention that Gates and Zuckerberg are not short.
There is a very interesting study that analyzed men and women height preference using a large speed-dating sample.
The results clearly showed that being taller increase men chances of getting a yes - no matter how tall you are, and no matter what the woman initially stated as their max ideal height!
Scroll through the charts below. The entire article is worth reading due to the solid methodology that removed most biases involved in these studies.
My favorite part (from a modern anthropological perspective) of this relationship is while there is a height/income relationship with men’s desirability, the amount of income a less attractive woman needs is an incredible multiple to be competitive with a more attractive woman. It speaks in market terms to the lizard brain of the species and what it values (not to mention that women primarily filter by physical attractiveness upfront when selecting but switch to warmth and other personality traits long term). It is the most raw, brutal marketplace experience imho.
Table 5.4 and 5.5 show that income is nearly a non-factor for men selecting women. It is not a differentiating variable that men factor in at all.
Whereas it is an easy lifehack for a less visually attractive man (5.4), or simply shorter man (5.5) to be selected by a woman, if they make more.
I don't get the impression anything has changed since that study in 2006. I don't even think the same study could be done now given how broken online dating services have become now.
A corollary of this, more related to this forum, is that this is a greater aspect of workplace gender and earning inequality than readjusting the workplace for women. Greater displacement of workers would occur if women were interested in having a lower earning man in subsidy, because many men would leave the workplace for that option. The option of unpaid household and emotional labor that is overrepresented by, and a predictable option for, women. The people interested in that role are probably a more even distribution across society.
> Really what we want to do is observe people’s choices directly which is why dating websites are so useful to us. Here’s an example. What if I have a hypothesis that when choosing a mate, men care more about their potential partner’s appearance than her income and women care more about her potential partner’s income than his appearance. Imagine the following experiment. A woman/man can choose between communicating with two people. One earns $60,000 a year and is more attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. The other earns X dollars per year and is less attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. Every other observable characteristic about these two people is identical. We can use the information that tells us who individuals choose to communicate with to determine what X would have to be in order to make a woman/man prefer the less attractive person.
> Researchers have done this and find that for men there is no amount of income that the woman in the bottom ten percent in terms of appearance can earn to make men prefer her over women in the top 10 percent. That is, looks really matter to men relative to income. For women though, if the man in the bottom ten percent in terms of looks earns more than $248,500, they will prefer him over the more attractive guy earning $60,000. My students often interpret this result as saying that women really care about money, but that is not what it says at all—$186,000 is a huge difference in income. If women didn’t care about looks and only cared about money, the figure would be much, much lower. This says that despite the impression that on the marriage market women really care about income, the evidence suggest that they also care about looks. They just care about income too.
interesting article, there is so much more to illuminate from that than just scrutinizing women's choices with curiosity and disdain, I think it is also illuminating to look at what men learn:
the intimidatingly attractive woman has the same social anxieties as the woman in the bottom ten percent. the person that's beautiful on the outside, is also beautiful on the inside, despite many woman in the bottom ten percent relying on the "inner beauty" becoming their whole identity and sales pitch. the income isn't interesting and barely a factor at all, the marketable skills to potentially generate income aren't that interesting (but a common interest might be), the education to potentially generate income isn't that interesting serving only to change the social circle to meet potentially stable partners with economic prowess. so its deduces to men continuing to just try for the more visually/sexually attractive person.
Hopefully the developers, should they have kids, feed their kids lots and lots of milk and steak for dinner as often as possible so they don't have to troubled by their height.
I've been having my teeth gently massaged straight by steel, for what feels like my whole life. The pain is so constant I've become desensitized to it, but if I stop to feel it's always there. I know it's torturing me on a subconscious level.
As a short guy, I'm grateful to be gay and in a large city in the West. My experience is that most gay men are very relaxed about my height; if it even comes up they just say "oh yeah, major short king energy" and move on.
I believe this. A lot gets said about the standards that people of each gender have, especially when it comes to the standards that good-looking people have, but most people of any background are normal people looking for basically compatible partners, with particularly picky people being a highly visible minority.
The problem is that ceteris paribus, tall people do have an advantage in the aggregate, and "short king energy" is about having the requisite physical traits (ex. facial hair, body hair, muscles), confidence, and compelling personality to make the cetera not be paria.
I also think part of the problem is A) that dating, especially on apps, places physical appearance front and center when it comes to getting your foot in the door to talk to people, and B) a lot of other people are instinctively judgmental about certain dynamics in heterosexual dating, especially when shorter/younger/less successful/less dominant men date taller/older/more successful/more dominant women, and homosexual dating is comparatively a blank slate in terms of how your friend group/family will perceive it.
About a decade ago, there was a huge scandal with the Chinese diplomatic core having strict height limits for girls, so there was (is?) a huge market for illegal operations to get taller. But this being China, the underground docs would often screw the operation up, leaving the poor girls with a bad limp for the rest of their lives.
Seems like this is only going to help attract less intelligent women, because the smart ones will know their offspring won’t be getting genetics for height with someone who is artificially tall. Full speed ahead toward idiocracy.
How would they know? Are you divulging the fact that your height is the result of a procedure on the first date? Also are we assuming that women prefer tall men because they want tall children, not because tallness is just an attractive trait? Why would women choose to engage in casual sex with a tall man if their whole goal is to have tall children? Also how does this lead towards idiocracy? If the less intelligent women are sleeping with tech workers, and more intelligent women are sleeping with naturally tall men, then wouldn't we see the offspring of the tech bros + less intelligent women have average intelligence, while the smarter women are having taller, smarter children?
There are so many assumptions being made here. I want to know what the conditions in this hypothetical world are. It sounds fascinating.
That favours wealth over intelligence, or vice versa. So it's a value judgement - are we better off with more children to wealthy parents or to tall parents?
I was making the underlying assumption that wealth has some correlation with intelligence (for someone who made money in tech at least)
Tech bros need money to get height gainz -> must pass tech interviews/bring a product to market -> intelligence
But also there is probably a correlation between height and wealth as well. Either way I don't think that it's anyone's place to determine who should reproduce.
They might get lucky with that one. A good number of children are taller than both of their parents. I've seen plenty of such examples irl (outside of my own family).
Not by much, maybe an inch or two (exceptions exist though). I am taller than my taller parent (dad) by an inch. My dad is taller than his dad (the taller parent) by about 3 inches.
Given that such a surgery adds up to 3 inches in height, things could work out just fine. It isn't like this surgery tranforms 5'1 people into 6'1 people.
Early enough in your career it probably makes financial sense. According to the guardian, who probably re-produced the figures according to someone else, a 6'0 man will make £100k more over his career than a man who's 5'4[0].
95% of Tinder swipes by women are passes compared to 47% for men. Women tend to date up. Online dating apps are rigged for men. These apps are search engines optimized to match women with the top 5% of men. These apps are designed for women. Being average or even above average will almost never result in a date. Tinder was designed like a slot machine which will ruin your self-esteem from constant rejection but your hope of a large reward will keep you going for ages. You will have a much higher success rate as an average guy simply with a completely cold approach. That is how bad online dating is for men.
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.
They're rigged for women. Even on the sites that claim to cater to women by forcing them to make first contact, they overwhelmingly use superficial low effort messages to unlock the other side and then proceed to reject 80% of the men they selected just like with regular sites.
Honestly I'm getting worried about the future of the existence of the human race at this point.
If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations and they set their expectations unreasonably high and online dating only benefits the top 5% of men and all real life venues of approach close for various reasons.... what are the bottom 90% of men going to do in the future? Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.
> Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.
Sex is unconditionally a privilege as long as we believe in consent. It is the prerogative of anyone who owns their own body to decide whether or not to give themselves to anyone. That includes the prerogative of holding out only for metaphorical Brad Pitt.
I'm not sure "but the incels engage in terrorism" is going to persuade women to give their bodies to the men they don't want.
Female primates are generally selective of the males they will mate with, looking for traits in the males that would give their offspring greater chances for survival, while male primates are significantly less selective of the females they will mate with.
I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.
> I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.
> We haven’t.
I have seen my own children develop their understanding of the world through such stereotypical behaviors that it further solidifies my appreciation of just how much human behavior is derived from innate instinct.
Maybe we're just heading toward single motherhood with fewer but more prolific fathers which I think happened before. As a man without children relying on government assistance, the real issue is this arrangement these days tends to rely on welfare and therefore higher taxes for me who has no stake in it.
Equilibrium will be restored after the members of the generation whose minds were poisoned and did not successfully reproduce do in fact die off (with their ideas). This is the process of evolution.
I think the taste of men in women is very predictable. We're all focussed on the same 5%.
With women, it's different. Each individual woman has a different taste. Some like men with beards, others hate them. Some like tattoos, others hate them. Some like them more chubby, some skinny. Some like a funny guy, some a serious one that doesn't act childish.
If you don't believe me, play a game with a women where you try to guess which guys she finds attractive. Very hard. With guys, that game is easy.
Make a fake profile on Tinder and the results speak for themselves. Women flock to a specific phenotype of homo sapien with a very high probability (top 5% of men). I think of this phenotype as a race of its own, since its members share many common characteristics, and interestingly the one many focus on first, skin color, isn't one of the distinguishing factors.
As a starting point geometrically the 95 percentile has proportions like those in the faces you see when you search Google Images or Bing Images for "average face in every country." Notice that the average face of either sex is universally attractive to most people.
Beyond this there are about 55 features that need to come together to get the 95th percentile phenotype. Rather than enumerating them all here, there is a four part analysis on YouTube:
I'm sorry but that's just the face. It's a bit absurd that women would only take the face into account. In fact, it absurd that women would only take looks into account.
Is there room for anything else on Tinder? Or other dating apps? Do people on those sites care? Debatable. Obviously looks are not the only factor in a relationship, but they are a major one, especially in longer term relationships, and are often the only factor.
- before, religion and morals were preventing sleeping around, which was effectively doing "sexual socialism" for the "poor" of the sexual market. this led to everyone having 1 partner as a pareto optimum. (even if in many cases paople were sleeping out of marriage)
- with sexual liberation (both of men and women), top performers get all the spoils, as it is with monopoly and businesses, and the lower perfomer gets... what's left.
Conclusion : be a top performer. Equality is always only a social construct
When I see these numbers, I think: Why do guys bother with Tinder? Why would you give up ALL the alpha, and create 100x more work for yourself down the road, just to have a marginally easier starting experience?
Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.
And of course, bars are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, as unpleasant as it gets. This is hard mode. Try any other setting - a meetup, a birding club, whatever - and things will be easier.
You're treating it here like this is no issue, but do you actually know anyone that can take that many rejections in a row and not have it impact their mental state? Even if you know it's not a judgement on you etc. etc., it is hard for any human to continue in the face of so many rejections. It's not just about dating -- successful entrepreneurs are often those people that can take rejection after rejection and continue going. But it's very hard and very rare.
In general I am on the same side -- you can get much better success approaching in real life vs. on the apps. But what the apps abstract away is that rejection which you feel very intimately when in person.
== Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.==
Treating relationships as an equation to be optimized might be the real hindrance.
You could say that the lowest common denominator of both of these methods is that, in both of them, there is an equation: you are either optimizing the equation, or part of the equation being optimized. You are absolutely being treated like a number on Tinder, after all.
But you can choose the system that gets you what you want, faster.
So, in choosing the lesser of two evils, choose the bar. Choose anything other than Tinder. Because pretty much any dating alternative to Tinder is better than Tinder.
== You could say that the lowest common denominator of both of these methods is that, in both of them, there is an equation==
You certainly could say that, but you have no idea how the variables will react. That sets people up for disappointment when they think they’ve “optimized” human relationships.
Anecdotally, I spent a year on most of the online dating apps with the paid features. Even as a 6’1 guy with a good surfing photo, and some Europe (traveling) photos, it was still a waste of time, effort, and confidence for me. Eventually I met my now girlfriend through a trivia night meetup. No photos and we were all sitting down. Hopefully it lasts.
The issue with real life is 'approach anxiety' and now that online dating has been out for a while - people are not as open to cold approaching as they used to be. The default has shifted. Further more, it's hard to tell if someone is single, or even open to dating - this leads to many more rejections.
The only good thing about online dating apps is the anonymous liking feature, you get match when you mutually like each other - so on paper there is less rejection. However as this thread states - it has other downfalls.
This issue really got to me few years ago and I set out to build an app that would allow you to have this anonymously liking but at events, bars etc
So it's hyper localised, you check-in to an event/bar and you see other singles that are there. If you match, you can then 'warm' approach them.
I always just saw this app as an ice breaker app - it was received well by my peers. Unfortunately due to flaky business partners and covid, i'm only now at a point where i'm ready to release. Pending Apple app store approval which has been an absolute pain.
It will be a slow roll out, initially in Bali, Indonesia. Pending response and funding.
Maybe you should just make sure your profile is top 5%, and if you think you need a six-pack for that, you're wrong. Any average guy can make a Tinder profile that is interesting for women. Women prefer other things in their partner than men (men mainly focus on looks).
You don't mention what is probably the biggest thing influencing all of the numbers you describe: What is the ratio of men to women on "dating" sites like Tinder? I don't actually know myself but I'd go out on a limb and guess _way_ more men than women.
Which means several things. As you say, for heterosexual individuals, it's much more difficult for a typical male to be matched with a typical female. It also means if you're a male looking for a long-term mate, then you'll do better with the old-fashioned approach of getting out and being social.
> All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term.
As an outsider whose exposure to Tinder is largely hearsay, my understanding is that long-term relationships are not really the goal of most users on this particular app.
Women tend to date up is somewhat similar to how fertilisation of egg is selective with the millions of sperms wanting to fertilise it.
When there is a disproportionate number of males competing for chance at mating, females become very selective. I guess the apps are just going with the data.
> a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate.
I'm that guy (6.5/10). I've never done numbers close to that bad. I could understand if someone was trying to date out of their socio-economic and age ranges (although you can always date up in age, for men).
In southern california, more like 200 swipes, 2 conversations, 1 date. Out of 5 dates, at least 1 overnight.
I don't think I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness, but I didn't have much trouble getting dates with quality people on bumble. Met someone and it's been going strong for 2+ years.
Tinder, however, was a total wasteland. Zero responses to anything. I think it just wasn't my scene.
Nice statistics. I found my wife on Tinder, and I'm by all means no top 5%. Actually that depends on how you count it of course. Women don't prefer men with 6-packs, if you haven't figured that out already.
My wife works as a dating coach, with both men and women. Men are very reluctant to listen or even try the advice, so I'm not going to try to convince you guys that you can make it work. It's not that hard actually, but most men already made up their mind on the whole dating thing. I'm sure there's plenty of "experts" here that can tell you all about how it can never work.
She gives personal advice of course, which can be very specific for each case.
One specific example I can give you: Women find it important that you have clean, well-groomed hands. This is not intuitive or obvious to men at all, unless you know.
But I think the main problem is not necessarily the lack of information, but a more a mentality change. A lot of the men think "She has to accept me for who I am". That might be true, but it's not really relevant. You have to show what you can offer in a relationship. A woman doesn't start a relationship with you just because she all of a sudden loves you. No, she starts a relationship because somehow she gets some benefit out of that relationship. So you have to show what you have to offer. You like traveling? Maybe she wants to travel. You like a certain kind of music? Maybe she likes that music and likes to go to concerts. Or whatever.
Answering the question "Why would a woman start a relationship with you? What's in it for her?" seems a question that some men don't want to answer. I don't mean that they don't know the answer, I mean they have a problem with the question itself.
I was pretty skeptical about dating books. But I’ve been reading “Models - Attract women through honesty”, and it has a lot of very good advice in it. I would recommend it to any guy.
The TL;DR is to improve yourself, work on your insecurities, be emotionally open, and become genuinely not-needy. He provides a lot of specific helpful tactics.
Honestly it's more the "5% that make an effort to have decent colorful and well shot photos, ok bio and and look vaguely manly" instead of the 95% who either take a crappy selfie or either look like or speak like they are coming out of a trailer park.
I have a friend who ABSOLUTELY do not fit the stereotype of attractive men (1.70m / software engineer and he does climbing but with a small belly) and he f** like 60 girls in 8 months when he discovered the tinder magic.
I've done my time too, but at a lower scale, but since I'm slightly attractive that would not make my point. In general the biggest fuckboys Ive met were really not considered nice looking at best.
>Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.
I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.
When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.
There is a great piece on this (IMO) surgery from a few years ago from an author at jezebel (Prachi Gupta maybe?) whose brother did this in Italy and ended up dying as a result of this very surgery.
Not worth it for better tinder matches. Also
I very very much doubt that the effect of height on income is causal.
233 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadWhat could possibly go wrong? /s
Genuinely curious: has someone here gone through the procedure and care to share your experience? I'd imagine the 3 months must be hell, but won't it keep hurting even after when walking, running, or doing sports?
Bone is dynamic and living. It remodels (and fortifies) itself according to forces exerted on it!
https://www.youtube.com/c/Cyborg4Life
I imagine some physical therapy and you're all good - the nerves can stretch just fine.
Plus, if you know the risks, and you want to be taller - go for it. One life, spend it how you wish.
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing
You'll get back your $75k in only 32 short years! (Or are those tall years?)
6 feet = 182 cm.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-dating-investing-match-t...
But counter-anecdote: I visited an ex-gf the other day to borrow something from her new partner, and she actually commented "I forget how tall you are". And it wasn't a positive thing, it was quite explicitly "new boyfriend is my height and it's great". Albeit that's 1.5m vs 1.8m so it's quite a difference.
Maybe we need a rule like "half your age plus 7"... "no more than 10% height difference?"
In Australia we have several ethnic communities where the stats for stuff like height diverge noticeably from the national stats. So "immigrated from The Netherlands" as a category will be taller by a few percent, "immigrated from China" will be shorter and have greater sexual dimorphism.
https://www.gigacalculator.com/calculators/height-percentile...
P.S. I did catch the Mythical Man Month reference
I'm pretty short, but I'd much rather be 6'2" than 6'4".
It is rare that being super tall - or super strong - provides a significant advantage. We have engineering for that.
But being slightly above average (like everyone thinks they are) can be handy enough for day-to-day without any real drawbacks.
I guess getting ripped is too mainstream in the bro-tech spheres.
There's, as far as I know, no such analogous singular deal-breaker trait for women.
I'm 5'3" and haven't needed to take 'drastic measures' to find women interested in me, both in real life and online. I would say that the majority of women 5'4" or under don't consider my height a dealbreaker, even if it's a disadvantage (which it definitely is). Yes, taller women are another story, but the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4".
So why does my experience differ with the conclusion you've drawn? My guess: I have a pretty good looking face, a reasonably fit body, and I'm a musician. In other words, height excluded, I'm above-average in attractiveness. And that's evidently enough to take away the whole dealbreaker thing, if it existed in the first place.
I know it's an n=1, but your statement is so profoundly certain that an n=1 is enough weaken it.
I would much rather be a physically unattractive guy than a physically unattractive woman. Women consider so many different traits that it's easier for guys to work on becoming attractive for women.
But again - should we use something that is innately genetic and unchangeable as a means for “compensating”?
You’re not even ripped. You just say reasonably fit - so I assume something barely above skinny fat. Your face (genetics) are doing you favors here a lot.
It also depends a lot on where you are and where you’re pulling women from. Personally - there’s not a single woman I know who would date a man who is 5’3”. Heck - most don’t even want to date a man under 5’10” and will only do such when someone in person sweeps them off their feet. (Relying on repeated forced interaction - they’ll never go on a date with them from OLD)
Certainly in a speed dating or o stranger dating (e. g., online dating) environment, but maybe that's not your best game if that's what you are working with.
Did a tall person write this? This is horse shit. If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in a bubble where this fallacy actually applies, get out quickly. Or if this is you, and you're under average height, I'd legitimately suggest seeking counseling to try and overcome the short supply of confidence, perhaps discover the reason why you're projecting this onto yourself. There is an immense supply of people and an incredible variety of tastes.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-effect-of-male-and-f...
There's a large amount of incredibly shallow men based on all the guys I've become friends or acquaintances with over the years, and I can only assume that women are just as capable of being shallow.
>There's, as far as I know, no such analogous singular deal-breaker trait for women.
Obesity, smell, creepiness, being disfigured, in a wheelchair.
Age.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-d... (control-f "How Age Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women")
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ElYAU3S0hhWWdqoxqv-4DRi1...
https://archive.ph/Bhwhe (https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...)
https://archive.ph/dHvWf (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...)
https://archive.ph/HqHNr (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/4/8/eaap981...)
Race and ethnicity in shambles.
That does not sound easier than spending the same 3 months with ~4 hours of workouts a week (which is enough to get most untrained people into pretty solid shape lifting), never mind the other health benefits.
I don't really think efficiency is a particularly good argument here :P
they did, by grinding 1000s of leetcode problems, to get a SV job, to get money, to pay for leg surgery!
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/limb...
I hope this is a joke. I'm a thin short man. I bet many women can beat me up if they wanted to. Yet, no one in my long working career remarked about my height.
You'd think tech wouldn't have these "old school" type of attitudes as part of the company culture, but you'd be wrong. I will say though, tech companies tend to have it concentrated more at the Exec level than the Engineer level.
In general, women like taller men.
Ergo… some guys with the means are gonna try to get taller.
However they will be sorely disappointed as to get with the ladies one has to have a lot more going for him than height.
Kind, well rounded, able to gather resources, confident, attractive and respected by his peers and society. Also tall.
A sign of lack of confidence is not being comfortable and accepting of your limitations so you can work around them.
Heck, this is the same as a lady getting a boob job or bbl. And we know how men feel about those fake things already.
Men don't run away screaming from surgically modified boobs.
Don’t be dramatic.
This is life in general. There is an awful lot of privilege associated for completely arbitrary characteristics over which individuals have absolutely no control. Work, dating, whatever. This applies to both men and women . The article doesn't really go into why people are seeking this procedure. It would be illuminating to see quantitatve data on this. Is it because of dating opportunities? Work? Something else?
Hiring practices are notoriously superficial. Ageism, sexism, racism (eg [1]), etc. Often these things are masked as "culture fit". HR will put lots of processes in place ostensibly to counteract bias but the net effect is really to shield the company with plausible deniability when it comes to bias against protected classes from individual interviewers and hiring managers.
It would be interesting to see how height fits into this. Height seems to be a mixed blessing in acting, for example. There are certainly some very successful shorter actors (eg Tom Cruise is 5'7").
I imagine there is some of in software engineering too. Height goes to confidence and confidence will sway interviewers more than any technical competence will.
[1]: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...
'if you walk into any Big Tech company and want to figure out who the manager is, just look for the tallest, best-dressed man and you'll be right 90% of the time.'
whereas 'the managers' of some of the most successful big tech companies are short relative to people of similar backgrounds, let alone the tallest.
If you had said they were unlikely to be the tallest person in the room, I would have wholeheartedly agreed. If you had said they were short by white male american standards I would have also agreed. If you had said they were short by standards of U.S. tech workers, I would have half-heartedly agreed (since there is good Asian representation in that demographic but men are overrepresented).
C-suite and owners is a much more mixed bag.
Buffet and Gates are both 5’ 10”.
(Musk is 6’ 1.5” which is hilarious as I’d have pegged him as shorter than Gates for some reason)
I doubt we will see another lead “hero” actor of Tom Cruise’s height.
Many legendary scenes in cinematic history has been filmed with actors standing on platforms.
The results clearly showed that being taller increase men chances of getting a yes - no matter how tall you are, and no matter what the woman initially stated as their max ideal height!
Scroll through the charts below. The entire article is worth reading due to the solid methodology that removed most biases involved in these studies.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-effect-of-male-and-f...
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.61....
Whereas it is an easy lifehack for a less visually attractive man (5.4), or simply shorter man (5.5) to be selected by a woman, if they make more.
I don't get the impression anything has changed since that study in 2006. I don't even think the same study could be done now given how broken online dating services have become now.
A corollary of this, more related to this forum, is that this is a greater aspect of workplace gender and earning inequality than readjusting the workplace for women. Greater displacement of workers would occur if women were interested in having a lower earning man in subsidy, because many men would leave the workplace for that option. The option of unpaid household and emotional labor that is overrepresented by, and a predictable option for, women. The people interested in that role are probably a more even distribution across society.
> Really what we want to do is observe people’s choices directly which is why dating websites are so useful to us. Here’s an example. What if I have a hypothesis that when choosing a mate, men care more about their potential partner’s appearance than her income and women care more about her potential partner’s income than his appearance. Imagine the following experiment. A woman/man can choose between communicating with two people. One earns $60,000 a year and is more attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. The other earns X dollars per year and is less attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. Every other observable characteristic about these two people is identical. We can use the information that tells us who individuals choose to communicate with to determine what X would have to be in order to make a woman/man prefer the less attractive person.
> Researchers have done this and find that for men there is no amount of income that the woman in the bottom ten percent in terms of appearance can earn to make men prefer her over women in the top 10 percent. That is, looks really matter to men relative to income. For women though, if the man in the bottom ten percent in terms of looks earns more than $248,500, they will prefer him over the more attractive guy earning $60,000. My students often interpret this result as saying that women really care about money, but that is not what it says at all—$186,000 is a huge difference in income. If women didn’t care about looks and only cared about money, the figure would be much, much lower. This says that despite the impression that on the marriage market women really care about income, the evidence suggest that they also care about looks. They just care about income too.
the intimidatingly attractive woman has the same social anxieties as the woman in the bottom ten percent. the person that's beautiful on the outside, is also beautiful on the inside, despite many woman in the bottom ten percent relying on the "inner beauty" becoming their whole identity and sales pitch. the income isn't interesting and barely a factor at all, the marketable skills to potentially generate income aren't that interesting (but a common interest might be), the education to potentially generate income isn't that interesting serving only to change the social circle to meet potentially stable partners with economic prowess. so its deduces to men continuing to just try for the more visually/sexually attractive person.
I assume at 7 feet or so you start getting more yeses just because of the novelty.
https://medcraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NuVasive-PRE...
Would not recommend.
Why? Trying to change the steel to yellow in color?
The problem is that ceteris paribus, tall people do have an advantage in the aggregate, and "short king energy" is about having the requisite physical traits (ex. facial hair, body hair, muscles), confidence, and compelling personality to make the cetera not be paria.
I also think part of the problem is A) that dating, especially on apps, places physical appearance front and center when it comes to getting your foot in the door to talk to people, and B) a lot of other people are instinctively judgmental about certain dynamics in heterosexual dating, especially when shorter/younger/less successful/less dominant men date taller/older/more successful/more dominant women, and homosexual dating is comparatively a blank slate in terms of how your friend group/family will perceive it.
There are so many assumptions being made here. I want to know what the conditions in this hypothetical world are. It sounds fascinating.
Tech bros need money to get height gainz -> must pass tech interviews/bring a product to market -> intelligence
But also there is probably a correlation between height and wealth as well. Either way I don't think that it's anyone's place to determine who should reproduce.
Not by much, maybe an inch or two (exceptions exist though). I am taller than my taller parent (dad) by an inch. My dad is taller than his dad (the taller parent) by about 3 inches.
Given that such a surgery adds up to 3 inches in height, things could work out just fine. It isn't like this surgery tranforms 5'1 people into 6'1 people.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2015/apr/29/do-t...
One of the tack-on benefits of remote work is that at least it gets rid of height discrimination for fully-remote positions
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823294
They're rigged for women. Even on the sites that claim to cater to women by forcing them to make first contact, they overwhelmingly use superficial low effort messages to unlock the other side and then proceed to reject 80% of the men they selected just like with regular sites.
If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations and they set their expectations unreasonably high and online dating only benefits the top 5% of men and all real life venues of approach close for various reasons.... what are the bottom 90% of men going to do in the future? Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.
Sex is unconditionally a privilege as long as we believe in consent. It is the prerogative of anyone who owns their own body to decide whether or not to give themselves to anyone. That includes the prerogative of holding out only for metaphorical Brad Pitt.
I'm not sure "but the incels engage in terrorism" is going to persuade women to give their bodies to the men they don't want.
I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.
We haven’t.
> We haven’t.
I have seen my own children develop their understanding of the world through such stereotypical behaviors that it further solidifies my appreciation of just how much human behavior is derived from innate instinct.
This is why Lori Gottlieb wrote Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. <https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough-eboo...>
One can also see the relation to the message of Susan "the Princeton mom" Patton's Marry Smart. <https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-mar...>.
With women, it's different. Each individual woman has a different taste. Some like men with beards, others hate them. Some like tattoos, others hate them. Some like them more chubby, some skinny. Some like a funny guy, some a serious one that doesn't act childish.
If you don't believe me, play a game with a women where you try to guess which guys she finds attractive. Very hard. With guys, that game is easy.
Beyond this there are about 55 features that need to come together to get the 95th percentile phenotype. Rather than enumerating them all here, there is a four part analysis on YouTube:
Evidence from 2014 craigslist personals: https://incels.wiki/images/6/61/Juggernaut_test_2014.jpg
Looks unmatched couples are unstable and the better looking partner is at elevated risk of monkey branching.
- before, religion and morals were preventing sleeping around, which was effectively doing "sexual socialism" for the "poor" of the sexual market. this led to everyone having 1 partner as a pareto optimum. (even if in many cases paople were sleeping out of marriage)
- with sexual liberation (both of men and women), top performers get all the spoils, as it is with monopoly and businesses, and the lower perfomer gets... what's left.
Conclusion : be a top performer. Equality is always only a social construct
Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.
And of course, bars are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, as unpleasant as it gets. This is hard mode. Try any other setting - a meetup, a birding club, whatever - and things will be easier.
You're treating it here like this is no issue, but do you actually know anyone that can take that many rejections in a row and not have it impact their mental state? Even if you know it's not a judgement on you etc. etc., it is hard for any human to continue in the face of so many rejections. It's not just about dating -- successful entrepreneurs are often those people that can take rejection after rejection and continue going. But it's very hard and very rare.
In general I am on the same side -- you can get much better success approaching in real life vs. on the apps. But what the apps abstract away is that rejection which you feel very intimately when in person.
Treating relationships as an equation to be optimized might be the real hindrance.
But you can choose the system that gets you what you want, faster.
So, in choosing the lesser of two evils, choose the bar. Choose anything other than Tinder. Because pretty much any dating alternative to Tinder is better than Tinder.
You certainly could say that, but you have no idea how the variables will react. That sets people up for disappointment when they think they’ve “optimized” human relationships.
The only good thing about online dating apps is the anonymous liking feature, you get match when you mutually like each other - so on paper there is less rejection. However as this thread states - it has other downfalls.
This issue really got to me few years ago and I set out to build an app that would allow you to have this anonymously liking but at events, bars etc So it's hyper localised, you check-in to an event/bar and you see other singles that are there. If you match, you can then 'warm' approach them.
I always just saw this app as an ice breaker app - it was received well by my peers. Unfortunately due to flaky business partners and covid, i'm only now at a point where i'm ready to release. Pending Apple app store approval which has been an absolute pain.
It will be a slow roll out, initially in Bali, Indonesia. Pending response and funding.
if anyone is interested, its called SeeMe http://www.seemeapp.net/
Which means several things. As you say, for heterosexual individuals, it's much more difficult for a typical male to be matched with a typical female. It also means if you're a male looking for a long-term mate, then you'll do better with the old-fashioned approach of getting out and being social.
> All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term.
As an outsider whose exposure to Tinder is largely hearsay, my understanding is that long-term relationships are not really the goal of most users on this particular app.
Of course it's still brutal. Good candidates get out of the pool quickly and so the remaining ones tend to have issues :/
When there is a disproportionate number of males competing for chance at mating, females become very selective. I guess the apps are just going with the data.
I'm that guy (6.5/10). I've never done numbers close to that bad. I could understand if someone was trying to date out of their socio-economic and age ranges (although you can always date up in age, for men).
In southern california, more like 200 swipes, 2 conversations, 1 date. Out of 5 dates, at least 1 overnight.
Tinder, however, was a total wasteland. Zero responses to anything. I think it just wasn't my scene.
My wife works as a dating coach, with both men and women. Men are very reluctant to listen or even try the advice, so I'm not going to try to convince you guys that you can make it work. It's not that hard actually, but most men already made up their mind on the whole dating thing. I'm sure there's plenty of "experts" here that can tell you all about how it can never work.
One specific example I can give you: Women find it important that you have clean, well-groomed hands. This is not intuitive or obvious to men at all, unless you know.
But I think the main problem is not necessarily the lack of information, but a more a mentality change. A lot of the men think "She has to accept me for who I am". That might be true, but it's not really relevant. You have to show what you can offer in a relationship. A woman doesn't start a relationship with you just because she all of a sudden loves you. No, she starts a relationship because somehow she gets some benefit out of that relationship. So you have to show what you have to offer. You like traveling? Maybe she wants to travel. You like a certain kind of music? Maybe she likes that music and likes to go to concerts. Or whatever.
Answering the question "Why would a woman start a relationship with you? What's in it for her?" seems a question that some men don't want to answer. I don't mean that they don't know the answer, I mean they have a problem with the question itself.
The TL;DR is to improve yourself, work on your insecurities, be emotionally open, and become genuinely not-needy. He provides a lot of specific helpful tactics.
I have a friend who ABSOLUTELY do not fit the stereotype of attractive men (1.70m / software engineer and he does climbing but with a small belly) and he f** like 60 girls in 8 months when he discovered the tinder magic.
I've done my time too, but at a lower scale, but since I'm slightly attractive that would not make my point. In general the biggest fuckboys Ive met were really not considered nice looking at best.
I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.
When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.
Not worth it for better tinder matches. Also I very very much doubt that the effect of height on income is causal.