Love Is Not a Metric Space
or, Why You Should Go to a Weird Party Instead
Eric Garcia
I.The Setup
The promise, stated fairly
Enough attributes, enough people, good enough matching — and the right person is a query away.
Two ways to meet someone
- a query
- a room full of people who came for the same strange reason
The claim
Compatibility isn't a distance. The weight on every feature changes with the pair, so it doesn't add up across people the way a distance does.
II.One Ruler
Sam's first date
Ninety-seven percent.
The rebuttal
“Fine. Don't use a ruler off the shelf. Learn the metric — let the model learn the weights from who actually matched.”
What's true in it
Recommenders find compatibility every day. If you liked B, and B is like C, you'll like C. Granted — for films.
III.A Ruler per Pair
Sam's second date
Wrong on three of the questions the app weighted most. Right at the table.
The turn
There's no single metric to learn. The ruler is different on every line.
Why you can't learn your way around it
- the pair space is n squared, and the data per pair is one date
- the model learned what Sam tapped, not what made Sam happy
Compatibility doesn't triangulate, and no amount of data makes it.
IV.Master and Emissary
The Master and His Emissary
Two modes of attention. One takes a thing apart and re-presents it. The other meets it whole.
— McGilchrist, 2009
What only exists whole
- timing
- how he treated the waiter
- whether the silence was fine
- the laugh at the wrong moment
The weights were never in the column. So Sam was never in the column.
V.The Weird Party
What the apps did instead
The questionnaire lost. The swipe won: one photo, one thumb, one number about one person.
A different way of knowing
The alternative isn't a better app. It's a different way of knowing.
The room versus the query
A room full of people who came for the same strange reason is a better-conditioned sample than any query.
“But I met my partner on an app”
The app was the bus stop. The room did the work.
The search was never the hard part. The apps solved search. Love was never a search problem.