love lost or found in data?

can data really identify our soul mate?  Can the essence of a good relationship be brought down to a numbers game?  Can we predict who will match with who?  These questions are currently the  core of the online dating industry & to date there are no clear conclusions.  I came across a few articles this week that deal with this issue.

Generally, they distilled a piece of content to its numerical essence. Songs were easiest, because their underlying structure is mostly math. Companies and research centers such as The Echo Nest and the International Society for Music Information Retrieval built up databases and correlated variables like pitch, tempo, and melody. By correlating them with historical information on how the song fared in the market, the hit predictors could make an educated guess about whether a brand-new song stood a chance of topping the charts.

One company trying to do this was called Hit Song Science, founded in Barcelona in 2001.  Hit Song Science had some early success. In 2002, as the team was fine-tuning its algorithms, HSS determined that 8 of the 14 tracks on an album by a then-obscure singer had genuine hit material. That album, Come Away with Me by Norah Jones, subsequently sold more than 10 million copies.  The same year, an executive at BMG who was promoting a new band, Maroon 5, got in touch with Mike McCready, one of HSS’s co-founders. The band’s single, Harder to Breathe, was going nowhere, and the BMG executive needed help. Running the album through his software, McCready determined that another track, This Love, had much greater hit potential. The executive sent the new single to radio stations, and Maroon 5′s album, Songs About Jane, went triple platinum.

The number of different possible chess games is 10 to the 120th power—a staggering number, and a surmountable one, if you have the right “brute-force programs.”  Popularity, by contrast, is a social phenomenon. Making predictions without accounting for human interaction and influence is like programming a computer to play chess and ignore the queen.

What the researchers found is that there’s no such thing as “intrinsic” quality: Each pool favored a different set of songs, and reviewers were heavily influenced by the rankings of others when they had access to them.

For Watts, one of the lessons of this experiment is that “for most of the things we care about, you can’t predict success. You can take a lot of historical data and attributes and show that, on average, certain attributes do better. Books about boy wizards do better than books about nonlinear equations, for instance. The problem is, there are many hits that have those qualities of success. But there are plenty of non-hits that do, too.” Knowing the difference between the successful and unsuccessful boy-wizard book is not yet a computable skill; in that gulf is where art, marketing, and social influence work their magic.

Watts, who is generally quite skeptical of hit prediction, serves as an adviser to BuzzFeed. The system works, he says, “by being very good at noticing what is taking off organically and then feeding the flames.”

“Soft data, hard conflicts. “Gerhard Kocher

It is my opinion that data has its place & value but that when it comes to really personal matters related to human beings that data cannot identify the heart of things.  Because by its very nature it has no heart (the data I mean).  If you are looking for a soul mate then a computer cannot deliver that to you.  Because the word soul according to Wikipedia ‘is the supposed incorporeal essence of a person or living thing’.  And a soulmate again according Wikipedia to ‘is a person with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, love, intimacy, sexuality, spirituality, and/or compatibility. ‘  In our world where soul has been redacted from most areas of our lives possibly due in part to progress & technology, a lot of people still hunger for that connection to soul through other.  Data cannot provide this because it simply does not cover this side of life.

The Daily Mail had an article Lotharios not wanted! The dating site that says it’s found the formula for love By Sadie Nicholas which was more an ad for eharmony in the UK than a serious article about dating & data.  However there was a response at the end of the article that seemed relevant to this issue:

‘In theory, the profiling increases your chances of finding someone. But there’s nothing to say that you wouldn’t have amazing chemistry with a man who seems like a complete mismatch.’

“If you torture data long enough, it will tell you anything you want!” Unknown

The Boston Globe also had a thoughtful article Data mining the heart: How do we choose a mate? What scientists are learning from online dating:

This mountain of information is beginning to yield intriguing findings. The dating website OKCupid has begun publishing statistics about its users’ behavior on its blog, and using the numbers to generate real-world advice. For example: Men get more responses from women if they don’t smile in their profile pictures, and women find most men below average in attractiveness — but write to them anyway. More recently, the site has begun inviting collaboration with academics to do more thorough studies with the data. And in the past few years, several other researchers used data from other online dating and speed dating companies to uncover insights into what makes men and women actually respond to each other. The sheer number of interactions makes it possible for the first time to get a detailed look at how different characteristics — weight, height, race, income, age, appearance, and political leanings, to name a few — influence a person’s ability to get a date. Researchers have found, for example, that a man needs to make several extra tens of thousands of dollars to compensate for being an inch shorter, and that race matters more than people admit.
All of this information promises to give singles advice based on real evidence rather than anecdote. But it also raises questions about how much we can learn about the intricacies of individual relationships by taking a bird’s-eye view of the dating world.  Does the opportunity to catalog the flirtations of thousands of daters really tell us what makes two people choose to be together?
The moment of attraction between two people used to be an unpredictable and mysterious event: a mutual spark felt in a glance exchanged at a party, a spontaneous meeting at a coffee shop, or a connection blooming gradually through work or a social network. But the Web has streamlined the dating process, concentrating singles into enormous online pools with a structured framework for searching and interacting. You can now go looking for attraction as easily as you can shop for shoes. The result is a dating scene based more on searchable features than on je ne sais quoi. Before that first glance is ever cast in person, two people often already know each other’s age, height, religion, political leanings, hobbies, and favorite bands. They have usually exchanged e-mails and decided whether or not the other person is worth pursuing. And unlike a private conversation in a bar, all of it has been recorded.
Fiore and colleagues at University of California at Berkeley looked in detail at the profiles and messaging behaviors of online daters on a major (anonymous) American dating website. They confirmed some conventional gender roles: Men tend to look for younger women, while women look for older men; women were pickier than men about what they were looking for; and over 75 percent of messages were from men to women. They also found that responsiveness matters in messages: The faster someone replies to an initial message, the more likely he or she is to get a follow-up message. Fiore has also been one of the few researchers to study what happens in the weeks after online daters actually meet. He found that daters tend to like one another less after meeting. The judgments they formed about each other before meeting didn’t predict who would continue to date, though they sometimes predicted the quality of the relationship in those who formed one.
These websites yield beautiful statistics because they let people categorize themselves according to a set of defined attributes. Which points to a potential problem with studying online dating. By setting up romantic interactions as a marketplace, online dating sites may actually fuel the somewhat superficial behavior seen in some of these analyses. In one study, Ariely and his colleagues tried to quantify how valuable people were in the dating market; they then created an algorithm that artificially paired people with others of equal “market value” according to these factors. The real-life behavior of daters corresponded very well with the ideal scenario they created; given a list of characteristics, daters are very good at figuring out where they fit in the social hierarchy and seeking out those who match their own value.
But is that necessarily a good thing? “Within this system — and this system is about searching on these attributes — people function quite well,” Ariely says. “But it doesn’t say they’re really doing the optimal thing. It doesn’t say that they understand who will be their soul mate.” Instead, online dating may create a situation in which people can methodically shop for the best “match,” but miss out on the qualities that lead to good relationships when the interaction moves off-line. Studying these sites may tell us who catches our eye in a profile, but it takes more to tell us who makes us happy in the end.

“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.” John Naisbitt

Related articles by Zemanta

• Can Computers Pick the Next Big Thing? (businessweek.com)
• The Computer as Oracle (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Maroon 5: A guitar band that manages to be soulful (theglobeandmail.com)
• 6 reviews of It Won’t Be Soon Before Long (Maroon 5) (rateitall.com)
• Maroon 5 returns after four-year wait, visits Miami (pbpulse.com)
• 50 reviews of Ten (Pearl Jam) (rateitall.com)
• Computer Love: Is Your Soul Mate Only A Click Away? (urbanbellemag.com)
• PEARL JAM’s Mike McCready, DUFF McKAGAN Among Artists To Perform At Hootenanny For A Healthy Gulf (bravewords.com)