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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"Besides, for most people access to jobs (and thus homes), loans and insurance would actually be reduced by loss of privacy."That doesn't fit with my understanding of signalling econ. The gatekeepers of jobs, homes, loans, insurance etc look for applicant signals to see who would be best. More information allows them to better discriminate, changing the distribution/prices of who gets those things. I certainly would not expect it to decrease the aggregate number of people receiving those things. In fact it should INCREASE it. Fewer people would bother dating under Hanson's Fair Dating Act, and some gatekeepers will not bother to provide certain things if they don't have enough confidence that they can find a good candidate. You can argue that there is an aggregate downside for the applicants, because now they have to pay signalling costs, but that is a separate issue from reduced access.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

An obvious reason for the discrepancy between business and dating is the Law of Diminishing Returns. Allowing businesses to make decisions with certain information will primarily benefit a few people (managers, investors) who already have highly satisfied preferences due to their wealth, while harming many people whose preferences are much less satisfied. Allowing dating to make use of such information will allow a much larger amount of people, many with very unsatisfied preferences, to benefit, while harming people with about equally satisfied preferences.

There's also the fact that, while humans instinctively dislike being told what to do, such instincts are stronger in dating than in business. So dating regs violate a much stronger preference than business regs.

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