The Online Date That's Too Good to be True
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Single and looking for love, Dr Robert Epstein found himself chatting with a slim, attractive brunette online. She seemed perfect... perhaps even too good to be true.
Dr Epstein is an expert on artificial conversation - so surely he'd be the last person to fall for a computer? Chatbots fool us more often than we think... especially when they replicate our very worst conversational habits.
To read more on this topic try Brian Christian’s “The Most Human Human”. For a full list of sources go to timharford.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here in the last archive, I've been trying to figure out what happened to Truth. |
| 0:03.6 | I've been telling stories about how we know what we know, |
| 0:06.4 | and why it seems sometimes lately is if we don't know anything at all. |
| 0:10.6 | But I am done with the problems of Truth. I want solutions. |
| 0:14.8 | The season of the last archive is all about common knowledge. |
| 0:18.8 | Is that kind of knowledge still possible? I tried to find out. |
| 0:22.4 | Coming soon. |
| 0:24.7 | Listen to the last archive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, |
| 0:28.4 | or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:58.9 | Pushkin. |
| 1:15.2 | Robert Epstein had gone online to look for love. |
| 1:19.7 | And just a note, this cautionary tale contains more references to sex than most of our stories. |
| 1:26.3 | It was 2006, so online dating wasn't entirely mainstream yet, but it wasn't unusual either. |
| 1:34.2 | In any case, Dr. Epstein was a head of the technological curve. |
| 1:38.9 | He was a psychologist with a keen interest in computing. |
| 1:42.9 | So, although he was in his 50s, why not give internet dating a try? |
| 1:48.6 | Now, if Amalie Poulan's photograph was to be believed, she was a stunner. |
| 1:54.9 | Epstein was perfectly aware that the name wasn't real. |
| 1:58.9 | Amalie is a very strange, very charming character in a very strange, very charming, French movie. |
| 2:05.4 | And he knew the photograph might not be real either. |
| 2:09.5 | But still, she was claiming to be a slim, attractive brunette. |
| 2:14.7 | And Epstein cheerfully admitted to being a shallow as the next man. |
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