8^8 – Find another you

To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to.

There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo.

Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible.

People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.

From a purely statistical standpoint - their claim is false about the roughly 1 in 16,777,216 chance. But the goal is to find like-minded people.

Let's create a 1 question True/False test. Let's assign the probability of answering True on the question is 70% and answering False is 30%.

You give the test to 100 people. You now have 35 pairings for "True" and 15 pairings for "False". Would it make sense to pair the "True" people with the "False" people to approach an "even distribution"? Only if your goal was to match people with "1 out of every 2 people" from a purely statistical standpoint of weighing 2 options.

The importance in this case is not distribution - but rather if these 8 questions determine who is "similar" in thinking to another person. If you asked someone their favorite color and their favorite pet - you might get a lot of matches. But many of those matches might be terrible with the people having little in common beyond that.

In the FAQ they take a step back and don't really guarantee good matching, even in the event of a match. However matches should be statistically rare (even if biased towards a specific 8 answers on the questions) and might still produce "good results". This makes it an interesting case study and one that can be tweaked and redone if we ever discover a way of asking only a few questions (I'd say no more than 10?) and accurately defining someones personality.

That's the way I see it at least. More of a case study than a statistical claim, even if they're trying to spin the statistics to spur people to take the 8 question quiz. Who knows, it may end up with a lot of good matches based on just-vague-enough questions and the likilihood of similar answers (even if, in some scenarios, fewer than the projected 16~ million and in other scenarios even more)

I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.

As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.