11–20 of 29 posts
If you need interpretability just use an autoencoder or simese network instead of PCA. This way the new "personality" vectors are highly meaningful and visualizations are better...
No, you can't.
Also, people don't have "preferences" in the way the article posits
For both personality and preference vectors, it would be great to see data from the data from OKCupid, from its good old days ( https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_... ). Even more, since for questions there are: - questions one decided to answer (which says something on its own) - answers - declared answers they accept in their partners - actual partners they pursue (judged by matches, or dat…
Which is all very silly since OKcupid will incorporate dealbreaker questions like “how important is your partner’s religion to you” with ones like “do you like horror movies”, and thus you may end up matching at 90%+ with someone whom you would never consider dating.
https://twitter.com/pmigdal/status/1268959822378082304
It used to be much more informative, especially as the answers are weighted. Of course, a much more informative approach would be to use update weights from data.
Also, when it comes to your example:
- I know people with a deep believer and a lukewarm one (I don't take for granted that it is a more important question than if someone enjoys horror movies),
- for important matters (e.g. whole conservative-religious-right-traditional) it is not a single answer but many, many.
Also, usually, there are much fewer deal-breakers than one initially states (vide https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...). Again, looking at data (vs assuming what is important) would be a big deal.
I was recently thinking about this, but on a slightly bigger scale. There’s a term “off-kilter”, which is easy to explain using vectors like this. If we take the general vector of society, just sum up all personal vectors and normalise, we form a big vector for society. This is what’s “normal”. Kilter refers to the concept of how aligned we are with society’s vector. So the concept of being off-kilter is how skewed y…
It'd be nice if vector based approaches (think MBTI tests being originally created using PCA) would use state of the art dimensionality reduction techniques instead of stuff from the 70s so that way each vector actually matters and explains far more variance in the data. If you need interpretability just use an autoencoder or simese network instead of PCA. This way the new "personality" vectors are highly meaningful…
I was recently thinking about this, but on a slightly bigger scale. There’s a term “off-kilter”, which is easy to explain using vectors like this. If we take the general vector of society, just sum up all personal vectors and normalise, we form a big vector for society. This is what’s “normal”. Kilter refers to the concept of how aligned we are with society’s vector. So the concept of being off-kilter is how skewed y…
In sociology anyways, there's no such thing as a "normal" vector. People talk a lot about the Overton Window in a 1d sense, either you're left or right. When in reality it's a series of multi-dimentional "value" axes which inform / create certain societal norms.
> You can take these preferences and combine them into a single value/point on a vector. No, you can't. Also, people don't have "preferences" in the way the article posits
Honestly, this article is fascinating to me for reasons that might discomfit its author.
Not that ignorance of the last 300 years of philosophy on this topic is something necessarily to be ashamed of, but this essay, and the reaction to it here, is of interest to me because (a) this is not an empirically-validated, or even merely well-argued, approach to reasoning about people, but (b) seems to be thought well of anyway, reading the room in this comments section.
I understand better the class of ontological and epistemological elisions system-thinking folks tend not to 'see', and I am reminded of the (now thankfully bygone) era of analytic philosophy where you couldn't make an argument in a respectable journal without translating your propositions into a symbolic logic (your choice of which).
An excellent kettleball to level up with. It's like geocaching but with unsupported assertions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is all very silly since OKcupid will incorporate dealbreaker questions like “how important is your partner’s religion to you” with ones like “do you like horror movies”, and thus you may end up matching at 90%+ with someone whom you would never consider dating.
Right now the match % is close to useless, see: https://twitter.com/pmigdal/status/1268959822378082304 It used to be much more informative, especially as the answers are weighted. Of course, a much more informative approach would be to use update weights from data. Also, when it comes to your example: - I know people with a deep believer and a lukewarm one (I don't take for granted that it is a more important questio…
And as you point out, that makes the notion of a dealbreaker a fairly nuanced one - e.g. I might tell myself that I would never date someone who doesn't want kids because I do want kids, so why would I waste my time? On a website that shows these preferences, I will likely not engage with profiles who mention that they don't want kids, and ignore their messages.
But of course when the new guy shows up at work and he turns out to be really cute and interesting, I may be interested in him/we may start a romantic relationship before these preferences become apparent.
Which can then go in any number of directions - the relationship might fizzle out really fast. Or it may engender personal change for the partners. Or it might lead to many decades of bitter resentment. Who knows! This could make the rational argument that one should accept to chat with anyone on a dating profile regardless of their displayed preferences, but of course that's not how humans tend to reason.
For both personality and preference vectors, it would be great to see data from the data from OKCupid, from its good old days ( https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_... ). Even more, since for questions there are: - questions one decided to answer (which says something on its own) - answers - declared answers they accept in their partners - actual partners they pursue (judged by matches, or dat…
Which is all very silly since OKcupid will incorporate dealbreaker questions like “how important is your partner’s religion to you” with ones like “do you like horror movies”, and thus you may end up matching at 90%+ with someone whom you would never consider dating.
> Rudder even pinpoints the two OkCupid profile questions that best predict a couple's longevity if they both answer the same way: Do you like horror movies? And, have you ever traveled to another country alone? [0]
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/heartache-by-the-numbers-and-o...
- HIPSTERS: If you really like something, but don't want others to crowd your interests, you will pretend to be nonchalant about it.
- AUTHENTICITY: A person's interests in a topic can be vetted as "authentic" if they are influenced by others whose average of personality vectors matches the person's.
- SOCIOPATHS: You can make in-roads with a group of interest by transforming your PV; see AUTHENTICITY.
- SKEW: You can influence others more by projecting a _very_ high value for a specific topic. If you love a particular form of music to an absurd degree, you're more likely to convert others.
I don't have any non-anecdotal evidence of any of these phenomena. Rather, these are some reasonable if not amusing deductions from the author's model.