[icebraining]

I don't think the article is saying that everyone must match to that level of specifiety, or that your preferences must match your own characteristics. I'm sure some people would try to find people just like them, but you could just list your "must haves", or even exclude people like you.

A good example is OKC (the dating site), which asks you a bunch of questions, and then lets you choose one or more "acceptable" answers, and how strongly you feel about that. You can choose to accept all answers for most questions, or to say the other person must answer exactly one way, it's up to the user.

[_8j50]

You don't know what you don't know. Those questions merely isolate you in a bubble. They prevent you from discovering the uncomfortable different which might actually be exactly what you need.

[wallacoloo]

It cuts both ways though. You only have so much time you’ll spend socializing. In a lifetime you’ll meet maybe 0.001% of the people you possibly could have. If you aren’t discerning with who you give your time to, you’ll miss out on more and more of what could have been better relationships.

It’s easiest demonstrated at large events or parties: there might be 200 people you could meet, and you have 3 hours there. If you weren’t discerning, you’ll spend 80% of your time just with whoever happened to be loudest and you’ll not meet lots of the more compatible people there. In reality, you can make snap decisions about whether a relationship is worth pursuing with > 50% chance. “This person is whining about how awful their spouse is”: probably not someone you’ll be able to mutually respect. “This person refuses to make eye contact with me”: probably not someone you’ll have any real intimacy with. And so on. These might be wrong 20% of the time you apply them, but even so you’ve boosted your chance of meeting someone compatible at this 3 hour party. These aren’t questions like “I like to play Super Mario Bros”, these are trying to gauge real deep-seated, fundamental personality traits like “I’m driven by a curiosity of the world around me”, or “I tend to the people in my life”. These are things that really do matter in relationships. I know I want my friends or spouse to tend to the people in their life. I know that without curious people around me I lose my motivation. Take that 0.001% of the world you’ll ever meet and be more discerning about which 0.001% that is. There’s nothing wrong with being selective about who you let into your life.

[perl4ever]

To explore any vast search space, you have to apply some randomness though.

Precisely because you can never explore more than a tiny bit, you can't know your snap judgements are not systematically blinding you to important stuff without just trying things at random sometimes.

[hos234]

Optimization problems are for robots, not human beings.

Be a good human. And you will attract good humans.