Good questions, Eva, thank you. I'll try to answer them all.
> 1. How do you define compatibility?
> especially in a mathematical language for
> the computer.
What I'm doing is empirically based, and I'm not going to impose my
definition of compatibility on anyone, but rather try to meet theirs.
The empirical data comes largely from longitudinal social surveys,
such as the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, (WLS) which followed
thousands of high school seniors from the Class of 1957 for twenty
years at least, some of them to the present day. Other studies have
covered much larger numbers of people, and are still underway, but the
WLS is especially interesting because it covers such a long period of
time.
The WLS includes high school performance, intelligence, personality
information and much more, -- thousands of questions altogether, and
recorded further education, marriages, and jobs, together with
specific questions about job satisfaction, salaries, standard of
living, and so on.
>From these various studies we have a lot of empirical information
about people, and it can be used to estimate compatibility and the
appropriateness of jobs. It's specific enough about friendships and
marriages that I'm sure it can be used for finding potential friends
and potential spouses, and it is extremely good in the areas of higher
education and jobs.
To make use of this data we need to compare other people with those
surveyed in the WLS. That isn't easy, and it's not completely
reliable, but I'm not promising perfect answers, just suggestions that
people need to check carefully.
I will be putting up some web pages about this process, but basically
(in techspeak, sorry) it involves factor analysis to produce
coordinates for representing people and jobs as vectors in a space of
many dimensions, then using nearest-neighbour and Bayesian measures of
vector association as data for bipartite and other matching algorithms.
(I'll expand that into English on a web page!)
Suppose we look at two 17-year-olds from the WLS who were very similar
in intelligence, interests, personality, self-discipline, and overall
health. If the job one choose after high school was unsatisfactory
and while the other's was the start of a long and happy career, we can
inductively estimate that the former should have looked for a job like
the latter had. That information will have some relevence to two
similar young people today, and can be combined with a lot of other
data from other studies so that we can produce sensible suggestions
for them to follow (or not, as they choose).
Also, if two people of today are very similar in personality and
interests to two people from the WLS who have been close friends for
the past four decades, we ought to suggest they spend a bit of time
getting to know one another.
And if two people are very similar to a couple from the WLS who
married briefly but got divorced after a lot of fighting, we ought to
give them some warning. But if they are very similar to a couple
still happily married 42 years later, we should suggest they do get
to know each other.
It is not up to me or any of us to say whether compatibility is the
ability to get along for a long time, to have an intense relationship
for a short time, or any other definition we might choose. There is
is enough data to support a variety of interpretaions and we should
use it to help people find what they want to find, individually.
Of course the results will be only suggestions, but I think they will
be good suggestions that people can trust. We need to warn people
to only trust them so far -- people need to make their own decisions
based on their own experiences, and shouldn't place too much trust in
what a piece of software tells them.
There is much more to this than the simplified version given above,
but if anything the technical details make using the data easier and
make the results more reliable. I'll be posting other messages with
various technical details -- this is just a quick introduction to the
idea of using social survey data: the idea of using what social
scientists have collected as the basis for our social technology.
> Define this in computer language:
> How often are couples able to resolve
> disagreements in a satisfactory manner for
> both of them? How would you know this before
> they meet?
I'll be putting up source code for various programs when it's ready.
It's all about comparing people today with people studied in the past
and in ongoing studies. Several studies asked thousands of people almost
exactly the question you posed -- how often are they able to resolve
disagreements.
> I think the same applies for friend-relationships.
> Would people be happy to leave their local
> pond for the possibility of "better" friendship/
> spouse?
Leaving is too drastic, the key idea is local search which means
making only small changes in social environments -- spending a little
bit of time with a few new friends so that gradually over months or
years people grow a new social environment, perhaps still seeing their
old friends, but less often. The same applies to jobs -- we need to
set up a situation in which people can make gradual transitions from
one job to another by holding the two as part-time jobs for a while.
I'll make an exception to that rule for sexual relationships of any
intimacy, discouraging people from having two part-time spouses,
but part time is OK in the "pre-intimacy" stage of mate selection.
> It seems that in the past in small communities people
> found both friend and spouse - though probably
> the expectations were miles different. people
> became isolated/enstranged in the large masses
> of the cities, but I think more to do with
> the working/living practices, than the numbers.
I think numbers have a lot to do with it. I use a compatibility
scale based on the base-10 logarithm of the pool size, (that is to say
the number of zeroes on the number). On average, people who choose
the most compatible person from a pool of 1000 would get what I call
compatibility level 3 -- from the 3 zeroes in 1000. There is actually
a fokelore factoid in the social science community which says that you
pick out one good friend from each thousand people you meet.
It is possible to meet a thousand people and get to know them quite
well, and so people in villages of 1000 people will probably find
themselves a level 3 friendship. But in a city of a million it is
very hard to get to know 1000 people anywhere near as well as you
would if isolated in a small town with those people, so I say it is
very difficult to find even a level 3 friendship in a city where
a level 6 (1-in-a-million) or better is theoretically possible.
The same thing applies to jobs, where I use the same logarithmic
scale. I'm not aiming at perfect matches, but I think level 6 is
possible for all of us with a bit of technological help. I think
we could each get that 1-in-a-million job and the 1-in-a-million
friend, and many other equally compatible social relationships.
Please look at http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/scale.html for more
information about this scale and how it is applied.
> 2. If you picture a no-profit, thus non-capitalist
> society, as you mention at some point, there is
> no employer-employee, but co-worker relationships.
There is some ambiguity in the terms here, but I can argue for both
interpretations. Yes, I envision a non-capitalist society at some
point in time, and I can go along with calling that a non-profit
society, in the sense of non-exploitive society -- yes. Surely the
exploitation of one person by another must end some day. But when
I used the phase "non-profit society" I was trying to describe
a non-profit organization, or non-profit association, an NGO, to
develop and promote social technology.
I can also agree that some day the employee-employer relationship
will disappear, though people may still have co-workers who perform
some sort of supervisory tasks -- but even that may not be necessary.
I do put a lot of emphasis on compatible co-workers, and I can agree
that finding what we now call a job will someday come down to finding
compatible co-workers and suitable tasks to carry out with them.
> 3. You still have to have a high level economical
> integration for a high-technology society you
> envisage - and indeed we need, to keep 6-->10
> billion people going. ...
I envision a very high level of interpersonal integration, and I think
that will bring about a high level of economic integration. Remember
that I am envisioning people matched with very compatible co-workers
who can collectively make good decisions, better decisions that any of
them alone. So society should run efficiently and be sustainable in
all ways.
But be careful with the phrase "high-technology society". I'm talking
about high-SOCIAL-technology, or SOCIAL high-technology, one in which
social structures and relations are as good as possible, but that does
not mean I favour high-technology in all aspects of society. I try to
remain neutral on that. Will the future have high-tech automobiles,
fusion power plants, and all the rest of it? Only if the people want
these things. The well-integrated, stable, happy, and very democratic
society of the future could choose a simpler life style and may very
well do so.
That's up to them. They will make the right decision, whatever it is.
Let me quote myself from my (old) home page:
Traditional futurists have described worlds with humanoid robots
and flying automobiles, but the world I dream about is one in which
love and friendship are abundant, along with truly satisfying work
in good jobs that are easy to find and keep.
> ... You have to decide on
> a more universal democratic structure to make
> the larger community to be able to cooperate
> effectively.
I don't disagree with that, but I think the integrated social network
will be intrinsically democratic. You might take a look at my page on
social power structures, http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/structures.html
for an overview. I don't think we will need the kind of democratic
institutions we have now, though I think we should keep them around as
a safety-device, not to mention historical artifact and tourist
attraction.
I hope that answers your questions, Eva. For your information, my
political tendencies are rather anarchistic, in a totally non-violent
way, and I much prefer Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid" to Marx's "Das Capital".
Kropotkin places enormous emphasis on voluntary cooperation, and I
agree, but it isn't easy to cooperate with many people and very hard to
base a society on that. So I add the insight that there are "lots of
fish in the sea" -- lots of people we CAN cooperate with, because they
are very compatible with us. And so, bringing about global voluntary
cooperation and mutual aid becomes a question of helping each person
to find the others he or she can and will cooperate with easily.
dpw
Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html <=== old homepage, being rewritten
http://www.SocialTechnology.org/index.html
