It brings a lark to your hand

If only it were radiocarbon dating.

Instead, the combined isolation of my chosen profession and chosen hobby makes me unacceptably unlikely to meet anywhere near a sufficiently large set of people to encounter a good match. Things look even worse if you subscribe to the theory, as part of me does, that I need to sample the entire 6 billion person space to determine the truly optimal match. So, I’ve done the anti-social thing and cast a line into a local online dating pool for the past several months with minimal success.

For whatever reason, a couple days ago, I decided to more fully explore the options available at okcupid. It’s a dating site a particle physicist can come to love. The matching algorithm is clearly stated, and importantly, is manipulated by the user into a personalized filter. The filtering algorithm isn’t what I would choose (first perform all possible strict cuts, then pass the remaining results through a sensitive and detailed filter to suss out the best matches), but it’s still useful. If you choose to use it, ruminate on the matching algorithm for a while before you start training it. It’s easy to attempt lots of strict cuts with “Very Important”s, especially with exclusions (selecting all options but one), that will totally swamp the signal from the copious “Somewhat”s. One must have faith in the central limit theorem, and also in the other user’s tuning patterns. I’ve had more conversations with interesting new dating folk in the past three days than in six months with a more traditional service.

It’s in these searches that it seems to me that it’s best to be very in tune with, but disconnected from, one’s emotional and physical needs. Unfortunately, we’re hardwired to search more aggressively as we become more needy. I’ve little doubt that the natural system produces, on average, more children and genetically successful family/species units, but it’s not what I want.