2026-02-09
minor edit 2026-04-29
Why use "show, don't tell" on date me docs?
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Incomplete. might get back to it later
Main
- What?
- I seem to increasingly prefer "show, don't tell" as the approach for my date me doc. This post is me trying to figure out why.
- My older date me doc did try to sell myself explicitly a lot more, like 'here's why I am conscientious', 'here's why I am protective', 'here's what my values are', 'here's why I have money', and so on. Feel free to go read it, but also, I no longer think this approach works well.
- Potential reasons for "show, don't tell"
- If you explicitly tell, you come across as neuroatypical.
- For reasons I don't fully understand yet, a lot of neurotypical people already seem to have an understanding that "show, don't tell" is the way to approach dating - be it how they present themselves in-person or online across various settings. Online dating apps are already too much of "tell, don't show" for a lot of people, and date me docs take that to another extreme.
- This is not a reason that influences me a lot. I am probably non-zero neuroatypical and I am trying to attract someone who understands that I am this way, and is maybe even similar themselves. So I am also fine coming across as atypical on the doc.
- How do people know you are telling the truth?
- For instance, I could write on my date me doc that I care about protecting women's safety, but women could just be straightforwardly correct in not believing me if I say that.
- This is important. On women's safety in particular, I think actual hard evidence trumps believing what people say.
- Some people seem are literally afraid of mind control.
- This was surprising for me to learn, but apparently some people have a heuristic where they listen to you less if they realise they're being explicitly sold to. They're afraid that your sales pitch will work too well on them, and they'll later come to regret it. Some people are literally afraid of being mind-controlled.
- I didn't first believe this, but now I think I have enough experience talking to people in-person to confirm that this is a thing.
- I find this hard to relate to. It is true that society is full of all sorts of people trying to mind control you for all sorts of self-interested ends, and this includes people trying to get you to date them. My personal way of handling this is to get better at evaluating sales pitches, not to stop listening to sales pitches completely.
- I understand if you are too busy to sit and evaluate it. If you really only have 60 seconds of time to sit and listen to a sales pitch, then you literally may not have enough time to think through or verify anything that the other person said. Having a general heuristic of avoiding sales pitches in general might make a little sense here.
- On the internet, people tend to move way faster, atleast if they're reading your content passively, not interacting with you. They might look at your content for as little as one second before making a quick yes/no judgement on whether to read more or not. This makes atleast some sense to me because there is a huge amount of information on the internet, compared to how much time you have to evaluate all of it.
- Coming back to the dating context, I seem to have some resistance to this whole idea? Why do I need to make a 60 second sales pitch when I can just give the other person 10 hours or 100 to actually evaluate whether I am the right person for them?
- I understand some people approach this as a sales funnel. They're more interested in crafting sales pitches for the early stages of the funnel (on a dating profile, in making first impression in a group meet, on a first date) but more authentic in the later stages.
- I still seem to have strong aversion to this that I can't explain yet. Like, I have a strong sense that a huge amount of value is being destroyed in civilisation because a lot of people are this way.
- I understand increasing information density on the early stages of the funnel. Suppose there are 1000 sentences about you that are important, but people in early stages of the funnel only have time to listen to 3 sentences from you.
- One thing you can do is try and compress this into a summary, based on what you think is most important.
- Another thing you can do is to make guesses of what your target audience (some subset of the entire dating pool) considers important. This includes figuring out their hard filters and their soft filters. And then share the sentences most relevamt to these filtes
- And yet another thing you can do is to .... incomplete
- I do not know what makes me likeable to others.
- It is possible that what I think other people like about me, is entirely different from what other people like about me.
- One response to this is just 'git gud at understanding your target audience, lol'
- I think this is actually quite hard to do for me to do in practice.
- I have asked a few (male) friends what they like about me. I have also separately asked them what they like in a partner.
- I don't currently have a large pool of women to ask these questions in person, where I know they like me and also we're close enough that they won't find it weird if I ask "what do you like about me?"
- There's also the obvious problem most people (myself included) themselves don't seem to understand what makes someone else likeable to them or not.
- Selling your moral values explicitly might mean you're less moral
- Naval Ravikant seems to very explicitly have a heuristic that if someone is trying too hard to sell to you that they're a moral person, they're probably not a moral person.
- I am quite sympathetic to this heuristic because of first-hand experience. My document on "why you should trust me" is so long precisely because I'm willing to cross some moral lines that most people wouldn't think to cross.
- In my personal case, I wanna be very precise about which lines I will and won't cross, and then build some internal clarity on this myself, and then build some external credibility that I actually mean this. I don't know if this is how building trust actually works (maybe it doesn't?) but this is what I am currently trying to do.
- That being said, I don't think morality is simple for anyone, and being an ethical billionaire sure as shit is complex. I know Naval didn't literally say this, but I don't endorse a heuristic that says "people who don't think too much about morality are inherently moral, because being moral is the default for humans".
- I don't think a child and a (self-claimed) ethical billionaire will agree on moral values. I don't think all children would agree with each other on moral values.
- I think the very fact that you enter into a trade with someone is basically the following. "I am giving you something that you seem to think is short-term good for you, and I don't really care enough about you as a person to check whether this is long-term good for you or not." If you are offering trades to people at scale, usually by making a software app that scales (like Naval recommends), it seems somewhat inevitable that this would happen. You can offer them a link to a feedback form, and maybe even some incentive, for them to honestly tell you if your product is harming them. You can get a few of your users to actually show up on a video call, or at your house. But this is just yet another trade you're offering, and if they're being sufficiently suppressed by someone else, they will refuse this trade too. I think if you're operating at that scale you atleast somewhat lose the ability to track who you are hurting versus helping.
- I seem to have written this entire section above on morality while think about ASI risk, and not in a dating context. But they're obviously interconnected, how you conduct yourself in professional life will affect relationship with your partner.
- (Update 2026-04-29) LMFAO why did I go on a tangent about Naval Ravikant and internet-scale morality, when the original topic was dating? Clearly my neurotic level obsession with morality. Maybe do less of this in future.
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