Finding Compatibles

See Find Compatibles for information about finding compatible people, places, jobs, education and things.

It seems obvious that finding a spouse is a matter of searching and trying to find the right one out of what should be a large choice bank.

But today many people fail to find a compatible spouse, and do not succeed in finding good friends.

The problem can't be a shortage of men or a shortage of women; census details and lonely heart columns and websites tell us that much. Therefore it seems obvious that we have to find better search methods.

I see a parallel in politicians’ attitudes to unemployment, where the only solution they seem to put forward is that of job creation — based on the assumption that that there are not enough jobs and we need to create more.

I propose a radically different approach.

In recent times I have added a numerical scale to the problem of matching individuals; a logarithmic scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, in which a level 8 earthquake is not twice as energetic as a level 4 earthquake, but 10,000 times (ten to the fourth).

Briefly, I use a scale from 1 to 10 based on the base -10 logarithm of the size of the search space effectively considered in making a choice.

Thus if you get to know 1000 people and choose only one as a friend, then you should have located a more compatible friend than had you chosen from just a pool of 100.

To assign compatibility numbers to these friends we just count the zeros, so that the best-of-100 is given a compatibility rating of 2 and the best-of-1,000 is given a compatibility rating of 3.

An importance use of these numbers is to consider compatibility statistics for a large region, such as a nation of people.

I argue that almost every measure of the quality of life and the state of a nation's economy are profoundly affected by the levels of social compatibility found in that nation. Briefly, people with very compatible social connections are more productive, are better educated, have a more stable home life, and are much less likely to commit a crime.

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"The Big Picture" for the application of the scale is as follows.

Certain numbers are fundamental to understanding society, and can be plotted for different historical periods to describe fundamental changes in society. Thus the 18 ^th and 19 ^th centuries of British history can be characterized by workforce demographics, not just the population increase but more importantly the ongoing and unrelentless move of the labouring population from the agricultural workforce of rural areas to the industrial workforce of the cities.

Or, we can describe the changes in society today not just by the progress of the huge baby-boom generation from being children to middle-aged, but by the difference between that industrialized western-world population and the population pyramids of third-world countries.

Or we can talk about the gradual decrease in the crime rate as the baby boom generation ages, or the sometimes narrowing and more recently widening again of the income gap between the richest 1% of society and the poorest 1%.

And so on. All these numbers tell a story and there are many other numbers, sometimes gathered together under the name of 'social indicators'. A book of that title, an MIT-publication of a report prepared for NASA contains some lists of social indicators, which include information on such things as the literacy rate (slowly but steadily rising in many third-world countries, but, unbelievably falling in the U.S.), the racial integration of urban neighbourhoods, the unemployment rate, and so on.

Some of these are essentially the same as what we are more familiar with under the name 'economic indicators', and indeed we cannot make a perfectly clear distinction between the economics and sociology of society, but some of these social indicators have very little to do with economics, and reflect things like free speech, which can be measured as column-inches of national newspaper stories criticising the government, but is usually more subjective. (CHANGE!!!!!)

No one claims that all social indicators require absolutely objective measurement. No matter how many column-inches the newspapers devote to criticising the government, free speech only exists when individual people feel they have it -- if you are afraid to speak your mind then you don't enjoy free speech, period. So it's ok to base your social indicators on opinion polls, as long as you're reasonably careful.

It makes sense that there can be social indicators which measure or report public opinions on the characteristics of a society, and the book lists of a couple of dozen such indicators, some of them hard to be precise about, some very clear and precise such as the percentage of the population on welfare.

And, I think you'll agree that if we could get decent estimates for such numbers and how they have gradually changed over time, we would then know a lot about the societies they describe, in just the way various statistics about the workforce migration to cities tells us a lot about the history of our society.

But something is missing, something not measured by any of the indicators discussed in that book or anywhere else that I know of. In any society people don't just become employed or become unemployed, get married or get divorced, they have to search for a job, against the competition of other job-seekers, and they have to search for a spouse or sexual partner, also in competition with others.

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To some limited extent the unemployment rate and divorce rate say something about the difficulties of those searches, but not enough. The crime rate also tells us something, since people in good jobs with truly a compatible spouse rarely commit serious crimes — this is also true of people with close friends.

There are several sets of numbers I care about, all based on my logarithmic scale. One measure would be the mean, norm, or average — some measure of the overall compatibility for the whole of society, for various unfinished sentence

On a logarithmic scale of 1 to 10, how appropriate is your job for you? Suppose you started with an endless supply of 3-by-5 cards, each one listing a job, but chosen at random. On average how many of these would you have to look through in order to find another job as suitable as the one you have now? 100? 1000? 10000. That's compatibility levels 2, 3, and 4.

You have a lot of talents, so I bet you could find at least as good a job as you have now by looking through 1000 cards chosen at random, perhaps even by looking through 100. OK, so what about someone less talented that you, someone who doesn't know a computer from a boat anchor? They would on average have to look through more cards to find a suitable job. So now, what do you suppose the national average to be?

I use Canada for my examples, but I believe any ????? country could be substituted.

On my scale from 1 to 10, how good a job does the average Canadian have?

On my scale from 1 to 10, how compatible a spouse does the average married Canadian have?

Now here you go again waffle and rambling off the point to the extent of repetition

had I been a visitor to the page, I would have click to another site by the fourth paragraph down from here – even though I wanted to read more! I have started just hitting the delete key.

And you talk about tree-pruning!!!!!!!!!

Now, extend the questions by asking about historical trends in these numbers with time.

Here's a slight variation on these questions: Does it matter how good a job the average Canadian has? Does it matter how compatible a spouse the average married Canadian has?

I think it does matter, in many ways, both economic and social. Even with the somewhat better economic conditions in the past couple of years one hears a lot about layoffs and downsizing, about shrinking budgets for health care and education. But why is that? How come we had economic problems for so long and still have them enough to threaten the education of our children? What's wrong?

I think the answer has a lot to do with the quality of the match (or mismatch) between people and jobs. Fewer people are happy with the jobs they have, and I think productivity depends a lot on people doing the right jobs and been happy at it.

Productivity and other economic matters depend on how successful people are at finding good jobs and working with compatible co-workers and supervisors.

Now this is where tree-pruning comes. I think I need to get a job as a tree-pruner that would be perfect for me, a level 6 match, at least.

I am refering to search-tree pruning, of course. For us computer people a search among many options involves a tree structure, from the root, along major branches, to smaller branches, and finally to a leaf or terminal node. Tree-pruning is the art of saying in some a priori way that your search will ignore leaf-nodes that you might reach by following along some major branch. Currently this is most typically done with job qualifications, so that you can prune away all jobs to be reached by taking the major branch that involves getting an M.D. degree and working at a hospital.

But there are lots of jobs that you would qualify for but would not be happy or effective doing, and the hard part is pruning away those. And harder still to going beyond the tree-pruning to dealing with the effects of competition for jobs, which is what makes it really a combinatorial problem.

I think of tree-pruning as the job of some software product, for which my work is some kind of systems engineering or requirements analysis, and which can be thought of a multiplier, enhancing the human ability to choose by pruning away the egregious mismatches.

A software product with enough data collection, encryption, and analysis capability might provide a multiplier effect of 1000, so that you could get a level 5 (1-in-100,000) job, spouse, friend, or whatever, by actually examining only the 100 best choices. We have this kind of capability right now in search engines for information retrieval -- you still have to look at whatever result AltaVista or HotBot comes up with, but you have been saved the task of looking over millions of web pages yourself.

As mentioned above, regarding unemployment, politicians propose the solution as the need to create more jobs. I think that's nonsense. If a search problem is difficult some people will not succeed, and the answer is to make the search easier, not to complicate the matter with more targets.

I don't think jobs are created or used up, because I think most potential jobs remain as "hidden jobs", not advertised and often unfilled. There is hardly any company, organization, or branch of government that could not hire a new person if they could get exactly the right one. For a level 6 match -- 1 in a million -- they could always make room.

I often make little notes to myself at the end of a night’s work, to remind myself what to do tomorrow. One note that has been sitting there by the computer for a long time now has just the single arabic numeral '1' on it, to remind me that finding jobs, spouses, friends, and so on is all part of just 1 problem, THE problem, the one that will face us in 2098 or 3098 and subsequent centuries, long after our current political and economic systems have disappeared and technology we can't even imagine has changed everything else and perhaps transported humankind to distant planets.

I make it a habit to periodically suspend belief in legal fictions, reminding myself that Canada is not entirely real, and neither are the banks, the big corporations, and so on. All of these are incorporations, the results of thinking of a collection of people and the places the live or work as a corporate entity like a person.

What really matters is that we are free to move about within certain geographical boundaries and to associate with certain groups of people. When you get a job and start to work at certain locations with certain co-workers, for certain supervisors, what is really real -- if you'll forgive the abuse of language -- what is really real are the places and the people you work with or for. All else is fiction.

Of these, the geographic part is almost trivial, since it is largely a consequence of who you work with. The 1 problem, THE problem, can be summed up in 1 word, THE word. And that word is WHO. Who do you work with, who do sleep with, who do you phone up at midnight to discuss metaphysics with; who do you learn from, who do you teach, who do trust, who do have any social contact at all with, who do you avoid at all costs, who do you seek out, who, who, who.

When I talk about the years 2098 or even 3098, I am perfectly serious, because no matter what wonderful technological advances the future might bring there is no hope of a genuine solution to the combinatorial problems facing the population of the present planet Earth, and even a crude approximation would take an astounding amount of computrons, (Vax-millenia, teraflops, or whatever other unit of computing power you choose).

Were every atom in the universe a computer with as much power as the one you're using to read this, the combinatorial problem of simply matching the most qualified billion or so people with one of the planet's billion or so reasonable jobs -- or each adult male with an appropriate female -- could not be properly solved, even if all compatibility data had already been provided.

So, the history of the future is in some way limited: there cannot be a future in which we solve all our combinatorial problems. The best we can hope for is a future in which we get some relief from them. But even such a limited future can be very much better than what we have now. It's a question of a quantitative change being big enough to cross some threshold, making something that really didn't work into something that does. Or, if we make the wrong choices, turning something that worked a bit into something disastrous.

There's a point at which job-mismatch can be bad enough that people don't survive it. There are people who kill themselves over problems at work, and we've all heard about disgruntled postal workers with guns who decide to take a few other people with them. There's also a point at which men kill their wives -- less often it happens the other way around -- and a few of these men decide to take their children with them. It's happened not long ago on Vancouver Island, as it does occasionally all over the world.

It is the other side of the coin that interests me, the side in which a simple improvement in matching makes for an enormous social change.

Copyright © 1998 Douglas P. Wilson