Just to clarify, my concern with the data was that the success number, the 72%, included both the clients who used the service and succeeded, and those who didn't but later found someone through what you called more intentional dating, which is then connected to possible positive effects of the coaching. I think it would be more transparent to divide this number, because even a modest success rate like 20% matches worked - is still quite a bit, given, as you said, you being new + operating with a small pool of people. Your website says: Date outcomes: 72% in a relationship after 6 months — I think this is very accurate, as you're not claiming this is in any way connected with your service, and I appreciate the marketing; for EA forum, I prefer a bit more precision. 

I think if I were you, I would still think about some variants of your service I described above; e.g., I wonder if people would pay for: a) Online/offline events; b) Browsing an anonymous database of profiles and sending requests for matches; c) Paying extra for a successful match. I think you probably simplified the service for a reason, but I still wonder whether a tiered system wouldn't bring you more revenue. 

I had a conversation with people who used the service and didn't succeed, and with people who are considering trying it. People who used it and didn't succeed - probably would still want to be matched, but not at that price; others probably want to use it, but wonder if it's worth the money. So there are multiple ways to tackle this, but I imagine you could quickly and successfully build a community around this through a triaging system and engagement funnels, with maybe even higher pricing for successful matches, and by clearly defining the client base. 

I don't know; I am a comms person. I love marketing, and I just like to generate new ideas for business models; most of all, I truly believe in quick pilots to learn what works, and grows revenue. But I assume you also tried variations for this service, and maybe the ideas I mention just didn't work. 

I wish you success with this, though. I have been very enthusiastic about this topic for years, seeing all my friends struggle with dating :)  I feel like you are partly filling a gap that truly exists. 

I do think CEA has a special role here to coordinate and lead - as the safeguard of the EA brand and crucial community builder. I would love a Slack channel where key comms people from EA orgs can coordinate on things like this :) Maybe this already exists, and I am out of the loop?

I really appreciate that someone is building something for this audience. Finding value-aligned, sharp, ambitious EA/vegan partners through mainstream apps feels close to impossible, and this deserves more attention. The critique below comes from wanting this to work.

First, the conflict-of-interest disclaimer is good practice, but the post still reads like an advert framed as a general-interest Forum post. The "observations" lead step by step to "this is what Settled offers," and the strongest numbers are about Settled's own outcomes.

I'd prefer a post that simply said: "We run an altruistic dating service, here's why we think it matters, here's how it works, here's our data." That would also be a stronger case. The real argument for a service like this isn't that dating is generally hard. It's that many people in this community work long hours on demanding problems. We don't have days to spend browsing a thousand misaligned profiles to find one person who shares our values, our diet, and an understanding of why we work the way we do. That's a compelling, EA-specific case, and the post undersells it.

Second, my first concern when I looked at Settled was incentives. The structure seems easy to exploit, deliberately or not:

a) Payment upfront. The service is paid for before outcomes are known, so the incentive is to produce something that looks like success quickly.

b) Contrast effects. If someone gets three dates and two are clearly weaker, the third will look better than it would alone. People may "settle" (the brand name doesn't help here) for someone who meets some important criteria because of the contrast, not because the match is strong. Relationships formed that way may not last.

I'm not claiming this is happening. My question is: how do you protect match quality against the pressure to show quick results and win more clients? For example, do you track relationship outcomes beyond six months? Is there internal review of match quality, or any separation between who makes the match and who gets credit for success metrics?

Third, the figures at the end (85% "good use of time," 78% open to a second date, 72% in a serious relationship within six months) carry most of the persuasive weight, but the post doesn't say how they were calculated.

72% in a serious relationship within six months is extraordinarily high for any matchmaking service. And it's a bit suspicious that this includes people who didn't meet anyone through your service but, e.g., "were more intentional about dating" afterward, which you take credit for. Answers given directly to the service you paid may skew positive.

As I said in another comment: if the claim is that the coaching helped, is that number really evidence of this? Or is it misleading marketing? It depends heavily on the survey design. People who paid may feel obliged, or may want to justify the spending by saying "this helped my future dating." Also, "intentionality in dating" is very broad. It would be worth explaining what you mean and how you measure it.

Fourth, it seems to me like your pool is still pretty small? I think it would be great to be very upfront about that. Someone I spoke to felt their matches seemed fairly random given what they'd asked for. One account is anecdotal, but it fits the arithmetic.

Fifth, I think pricing and structure don't fit the risk. The upfront cost is high for a small number of dates. A tiered system would make more sense. Three dates is too few for people whose attraction is selective. Maybe photos aren't the answer (although I completely disagree here, and think they should be attached; for many of my EA friends, looks do matter; they go to the gym, have a healthy lifestyle, and want similar things from their partner). With three dates, the odds of meeting someone you click with in person are low. Five to ten dates feels more realistic at this price, but I suspect you believe the mechanism of limited choice will work better for success — but this means, again, you're trying to gamify the system for a great result, which I suspect might not last. Also, people might want some visibility into the pool, as the dates might not work, but wouldn't it be more beneficial to just know who's single and open in the database to start with?

Sixth, I wonder how you address the problem of trusting one matchmaker's judgment. Some people have great experiences and others don't. The whole outcome rests on one person's view of who fits and why. 

Seventh, I heard the London in-person mixer felt awkward because it was unstructured. A few people got lots of attention, and others risked getting very little. Was that representative? If structured events work better, that would be a useful lesson to share.

I also thought a little bit about improvements/alternative ideas on this; not sure if useful, but I asked Claude to quickly sum up my thoughts on this here: 

1. Go all in on the altruistic niche, worldwide. Settle the positioning: dating for people who've made altruism central to their lives. Then grow the pool far beyond the UK. My dream would be to know about any EA or animal-impact person anywhere in the world, in my age range, who is open to dating. Right now, the only option is meeting someone at a conference. I'd never want to do that because it can feel unprofessional and can involve power imbalances.

2. A curated catalog (a "Raya for altruists"). Write rich, values-focused profiles that members approve. Then offer access in tiers, for example:

• Pay to browse anonymized profiles, with no names or contact details.
• Pick 3–5 people. If both sides agree, have a short video call.
• If both want to meet, contact details are released for an additional fee per person.

This requires less matchmaker time per person, so the price could drop significantly.

3. The Altruists dating app with clear eligibility. To join, members would either work at a nonprofit, be a pledger, donate above a set amount to high-impact charities each year, volunteer etc. Profiles would focus most of all on values — no algorithm, just filtering systems; likes on both sides = match. Members who behave badly could be removed, which would make it a trusted space with clear norms.

4. Structured online speed dating by age group. Run Zoom events grouped by age, with breakout rooms and topic-based small-group discussions so people can see how others think before choosing who to follow up with. This scales across countries and fixes the problems of unstructured mixers.

5. A tiered membership funnel. For example:

• About $50 to join the catalog, then pay per event.
• About $99 for the catalog plus roughly five events a year.
• Full matchmaking and coaching as the premium tier.

6. Tie revenue to giving. Commit a set share of revenue to effective charities, perhaps letting each member choose from a shortlist of high-impact organizations, and report the totals publicly. This would strengthen the service's identity with an altruistic audience, give members another reason to join, and answer some "is this just a business?" skepticism.

7. Publish more about the pool. This would be the most useful addition to the post, and it would build trust. For example:

• Total active profiles, by region.
• Age distribution, and gender balance within age groups.
• Share who are vegan or vegetarian.
• What people work on (cause areas, sectors).

People with narrow criteria could then judge for themselves whether signing up makes sense.

But then isn't claiming that number simply misleading marketing, or do you have data, that the coaching helped them (how), and that's how you arrived at the number? I feel this really depends on the quality of your survey. I can imagine people who paid for your service may just feel obligated/ or may just want to rationalize their spending from the past by saying, "this helped me in my future dating." "Intentionality in dating" seems very broad; it's worth explaining what you meant :) 

Vasco, let me try to say more clearly what I'm getting at:

Societies have repeatedly let large groups oppress smaller ones because it suited their preferences: white people enslaving Black people, most humans keeping animals in factory farms, religious majorities restricting women's lives. In each case, a small group of activists started by saying: this is wrong, it causes enormous harm, and your preferences don't justify it. And we now think they were right, not just that their preferences eventually spread.

As I understand your view, something is good if you prefer it and don't expect that preference to change on reflection. That makes "good" relative to each person. So imagine someone who says: "I like eating chickens from factory farms, and I fully expect to keep liking it." By your definition, factory farming is good for them and bad for you, and that's the end of the discussion. Why should they care about your preference, any more than you should care about theirs? But in real life, that's not what we do. We say: you're wrong, these chickens suffer enormously, and you should help us end this. I don't see how your view lets us say that and mean it.

I'm also unsure how this works at the level of a society. You say you want to satisfy the preferences of moral agents, all else equal. If 10,000 people stably prefer to keep 100 people enslaved, the preference satisfaction seems to be heavily on the enslavers' side. You said long-term outcomes don't have to be good, but on your view that only means they don't have to be good by your lights. What would make the majority wrong, rather than just different from you?

And a related question: chickens and shrimp aren't moral agents. Do their interests count in themselves on your view, or only because moral agents like you happen to care about them?

I think I'm still missing what kind of system you're trying to build, so I'd really like to understand how you'd answer these. But maybe this is to much to continue on the forum.

Or they can develop a preference to keep slaves, and keep animals in factory farms, because these preferences were/are shared by so many, how will you defend that they're unethical? Let's say you have 100 people enslaved, and 10,000 who think it's a brilliant idea — in your theory, do the strongest preferences win? Because this would quickly become gamified if a large number of people were oppressing a small group (because they don't include this group in their moral circle). 
"They would not be making a mistake from their perspective, in the sense there would not be "an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result" from their perspective." - this is exactly what I mean above: you reduced morality to perspective, so in a society you would just accumulate those and assume whatever this accumulation arrived at is good? Cause meta-ethical views do spill over into practical ethics, and this is then a problem: under some theories, we end up in "do whatever," and under others we end up in "there is something that makes us know that action X or Y is wrong/not desirable/should be outlawed". I can't accept a world where it all depends on the sum of individual preferences; we would make no moral progress if that were the case, and we're clearly expanding the moral circle. 

I wonder whether we have a semantic problem here, or if you actually defend subjectivism.

You say "bad" can only mean "our feelings about it." If badness is our attitude toward pain, then pain is bad because we dislike it, not because of the pain itself. If badness is in the experience of the one suffering, then it's bad whether or not any observer cares, which is all I meant by "bad regardless of whether anyone cares about it."

Very few people care about soil arthropods. If badness were grounded in what humans or moral agents feel about it, their pain would matter little, and estimating it would mostly measure human sentiment. Your thinking it's worth estimating suggests their pain matters independently of anyone caring.

The baby example points the same way. A hungry baby shows hunger is bad for the baby, with no beliefs or attitudes required. What preferences don't give us is impartiality. If preferences are the foundation, nothing obliges a human to weigh the suffering of a shrimp or a mite. Impartiality is the part that needs a justification beyond what anyone happens to feel.

On "what impartial agents would endorse on reflection": do they endorse reducing suffering because it's bad, or is it bad because they endorse it? If the first, the endorsement tracks something prior. If the second, a reflective agent who came to endorse cruelty wouldn't be making any mistake, which I find hard to accept.

I often find that nihilists drop words like "wrong" and "bad" while keeping the activity those words were doing, and that activity usually involves a kind of impartiality nihilism can't account for. Like you treat the question of soil anthropods and their welfare as something one can get right or wrong (not a matter of taste), this to me does not seem preference driven. As de Lazari-Radek and Singer argued, evolution explains partial concern for ourselves and our kin very well, but not concern for creatures that give us nothing back. Caring about them looks less like a built-in preference and more like reason taking us past our preferences.

But yeah I would need more definitions to do this discussion well, just to insure we don't talk pass each other, but I probably can't also engage endlessly on this, as these are unsolvable ethical questions with all pathways being prone to problems.

Just sharing some intuitions on this further, no need to reply.
Given that donors potentially are accounting for short AI timelines, should the money not focus on things like regulatory approvals, building consumer acceptance, and better facilities? As money spent there now will buy time, while the science part will be solved simply by the AI progress and TAI. Especially since you're pointing out to an example, where the main constraint is capital and market access rather than solving unknowns? My intuition also is that a well-designed market test would be something people want to see. Where I would put my effort in terms of pitching this, if I were GFI, is probably a short list of specific bets, their cost estimates, milestones, and kill criteria + making the case for the things AI can't speed up and that you work on already. Or, if you really want to speed up tractable things now, what are the very specific things: cell lines, media optimization, fat alternatives, what exactly needs to be done there that AI labs could help with, and why now vs. waiting for TAI to solve it in 5 -10 years.
 

If I understand this properly from your summary, Vasco (sorry, no time to read the long article), Tomasik lands in something like subjectivism/expressivism? I think naturalism might be a better way out, and it fits physicalist monism well. In naturalism, factory farming/ slavery are bad because of the pain itself, as a natural state in the world, not because of our feelings about it. It's bad regardless of whether anyone cares about it. Obviously, naturalism does not explain why we should care; that's why, e.g., Singer moved towards the "point of view of the universe," with impartiality as an objective truth. I wonder if, by understanding it as a constitutive norm of reasoning itself, we could somehow stay naturalists without the objections that subjectivism faces. I do think most of us think that the suffering is bad for the subject and not because we perceive it as bad, but that's obviously not tackling the part about "what is it that binds us". I feel like morality has an almost Kantian feeling of authority, and I'm unsure we can capture it without stepping outside this monism trip, which might be why Singer is where he is.

Subjectivism is the easiest way out, but it will quickly leave us empty-handed in ethics; we won't be able to defend anything, as there can never be a mistake. But yeah, either we will remain skeptical forever or pick something up. Personally, my brain pushes me into moral uncertainty/philosophical skepticism, but I know a lot of us, understandably, need to anchor in something, sometimes something greater than ourselves, or, in the case above, in part of ourselves :) Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 

I fixed the number in the comment above, yes, 3.6 to 29.