You’re gonna loooove this:
As if e-harmony and Dr.phil wasn’t enough.
I can’t stand Dr. Phil, but I just find there’s something strange and almost creepy about the eHarmony guy.
I think the eHarmony guy isn’t human..he’s a robot controlled by Dr.Phil.
Ummmm… what exactly is…
“our eerily effective psychographic matchmaking software” 
Frankly, when psychographic profiling and matching reaches the next level… given the improvements in computation, data mining, social acceptance, psychological research, we WILL see, in short order, breathtaking transformations in social clustering phenomena that will make pheromones seem like quaint ancestral practices, like women who used to put belladona in their eyes to dialte their pupils and simulate arousal…
Imagine (this is a reasonable expectation in the not so distant future) that you build a comprehensive profile of your “optimal social frame”, the parameters of your social environment that bring out the absolute best in you, professionally, socially, aesthetically… and your social-event-bot alerts you that next thursday night there will be optimal social frame night for your paradigm, dinner, bar… whatever… closely matched in IQ, subject interests, energy levels, philosophies, with exactly the right amount of variation for stimulus… and you no longer have to futz around looking for topics of interest or shared experiences…
“contextual date”???
Cell phones? GPS? Excuse me??? What do you do later? Have phone sex?
Anyone actually try the search yet? 
Noooo… have real sex… look at it like this, all these E-harmony like things are “proof of concept” small scale endeavors until the architecture for the real thing is worked out… once you can demonstrate a reliable technology for putting the right people together in the right alchemical combinations you effect a massive change in the social efficiency of that culture… and at this point we have no idea how deep these social discoveries will be… by continuously mutating social cluster size, social ingredients, contexts…there will, sooner or later, be a high payoff, huge bang for your buck non linear social clustering algorithm… people try, boy do they try, through group structures, like clubs, organizations, political pressure groups, cliques… it is already a hardwired basic human drive… soon new models derived from swarm theory, genetic algorithms, social dynamics, NLP (!!!), Amazon, Ebay will fuse into a new, paradigm twisting layer on the existing social constructs… high energy for some, sheer terror for others…
Tacitus do you work for the “Machines” in the matrix?
Not directly, I know of their ways though…
newer computational techniques allow for ambiguity, some punched up mojo knows as Fuzzy Clustering… goes way beyond the old crisp logic either/or sorting models… produces much more interesting results too… because we all too often are asking the wrong questions, or let me put it this way, we think a certain model in our heads will give us exactly what we need, so if we set a crisp filter to only include exactly what we believe, ahead of time, will be the best fit… we may end up with dumb ass results…
But maybe we develop a data mining tool that fishes around for us and finds much more interesting (seemingly imperfect) fits to our request…
So how would we do that ? Well… easier said than done, but we could first set up a list of traits that we believe we’d find attractive, then we might read a long list of self descriptions of people, WITHOUT knowing their explicit parameters (does drugs/does not do drugs… own a car/doesn’t own a car… is x/is not x… ad naseum)…
Then the algorithm compares what we BELIEVE would interest us with the parameters of what ACTUALLY interests us (which may diverge considerably) and then generated fuzzy categories…
Example… I always believed that I would only be interested in light drinkers or non-drinkers… the idea of heavy drinkers turns me off, conceptually… but when I ran the reverse perception test, it was mostly the heavy drinkers (by self report) that sounded interesting, and the light drinkers-non drinkers sounded dull and constrained…
So the fuzzification algorithm might “mildly prefer” a non drinker but be open to a heavy drinker if other conditions are “more or less satisfied”… this technique is so incredibly flexible and so much more intelligent than the current “you much satisfy conditions X,Y, and Z and you must NOT, EVER, do A,B,or C…”… which produces rigid, bullshit groupings.
Once the Fuzzy Cluster engines have enough computational power behind then and deep enough databases then they’ll be able to do outrageous reverse fuzzifications, like figure out the fuzzy parameters for people who will be outrageously successful in 10 years, or have stable families with 3 kids…
There was something along the fuzzy method I think being tried as the basis for chemistry.com, an off-shoot of match.com. After the system found a “match” for you, you could rate it using a slider bar thing which I guess was supposed to help refine eventual matches.
I got to play with it a little bit as I did try a 3-month thing on match.com a while back as an experiment (got 0 matches on match by the way…, and I didn’t think I was being that picky…). I let the subscription lapse so have done nothing since.
I recall the introduction of “fuzzy logic” in electronics. Shoot, I remember the intoduction of transistors…
We’re still in the early phase of this technology
Did you see the article in Newsweek (I think) about the rise of internet driven social spaces ? Virtual Harvards… virtual everythings…
Well, there are two dynamics at work here, one is the blogsphere… everybody puts all their crap out there, interesting or not, like driving around looking at other people’s houses decked with Christmas lights…
Then there is the profile driven service, E-harmony models which must reach a critical mass before they can be truly useful… Gaussian distributions and the law of large numbers thing… there has to be a sufficiently large population that even when you set pretty rigorous filters your chosen cluster will have a stastically useful number of members…
Annnnd… the twist to this is that if your personal frame lurks out there, two or three deviations off the mean, you have to have a massive user base to have anything going on in the tails of the bell curve…
Once the filtering system reaches adequate sophistication (it figures out what makes great social groupings tick) and it captures the involvement of maybe a few million participants… then the sparks begin to fly…
And, as well, perhaps then traditional entertainment media seriously goes into crisis mode when human interaction, on a new level, begins to displace traditional entertainment media as ruthlessly as “traditional” media displaced earlier social forms in the late 1950’s and 1960’s…
Look at the explosion of gamer culture once you had two factors, broadband lines widely available and specialized gamebox computers cheaply manufactured (and a developer base of game products)…
I strongly feel that we paleo-asscratchers who were raised on TV culture have no clue about how powerfully game driven culture will impact society in a decade from the present… and that’s just the surface phenomenon of a larger computational human culture that is only beginning to be seen…
This thing will hit us like a tidal wave we have no prior models for, it will turn our ideas of social normality upside down, everything will alter, politics, media, “hooking up”…movies like the Matrix will be seen as pathetic guess of futurity, like the old Toyo studios Godzilla movies look today…
Have fun while you can, and check your airbags, it’s gonna be a wild ride.
I’ve been riding the online game driven culture since 50mhz CPUs and dial-up computers were available. Now I buy computers that were made to play games at there highest resolutions and quality settings and play on broadband…top played online games: Battlefield 2 and Counter-Strike:Source…yes..I’m a closet nerd..good thing I don’t look or act like one.
I see a potential problem politically coming up down the road as computer graphics continually reach to that of real life. Then we come into the issue of violent shooter games that have the visuals that look almost as real as you and me.
then there is the dark side
Congress, those great moralists in washington… they have enacted very specific laws about what you cannot show in “legitimate” pornography… OK, sure, there is way-hardcore where angels fear to tread… the bad stuff, the evil stuff… and if they catch you with it… enter a LTR with the penal system…
But they had to make an exception… it was one of those bizarre 1st amendment issues… where drawings, cartoons, and depictions of such acts that involved no physical, living person… no matter how disgusting, weird, or mentally warped, were permissable because they had no “counterpart in the physical world” as a photograph or a video would.
Then… 3D modelling has become so sophisticated that there is now legislation (pending ? enacted ? merely proposed ?) that asserts that state of the art 3D cartoons may be so realistic that a reasonable person will not be able to distinguish whether they show a “counterpart in the physical world” or if they are purely the product of an individual imagination… and hence, once again, illegal.
Clearly we are entering into murky waters indeed as to what IS real… do we need some new Turing Test… if the average person thinks it is real, i.e. they have no doubt that what they are seeing is real, even if it isn’t, then it is “legally real” ???
I hope they don’t take screw with our rights to play realistic games that involve violence in the future because of increased realism. Thats all we need is to become less free and less USA.
Yeah, well what we might end up with is a radical redefinition of Freedom… (anther of the great Nominalizations the John Grinder’s version of NLP gagged on…)… or as Stokley Carmichael wrote: “the masters are those who have the power to define”.
So what IS freedom ? Who defines the term ?
I would hope the people that fought against being controlled by their government like slaves would define it..but who really knows.
nobody ever told tacitus it was an april fools joke huh? you guys are cruel LOL
google trends
Hey!! We’re in sixth place here in San Diego!! woo hoo!!!