Before demanding that, first come up with metrics for the optimal attributes of a marriage. What is the optimal number of loads of laundry to do each month? The proper number of silly dances to invent?
This is a ridiculous critique of the argument. Just because everything can’t be quantified doesn’t mean we can’t quantify some things.
I worked in quant finance for many years so I’m very familiar with low signal to noise in complex systems. You can’t throw your hands up simply because you’ll never capture everything in your models.
This field is so far from my areas of expertise but I imagine there are lots of smart people investigating and putting structure around these questions.
> You can’t throw your hands up simply because you’ll never capture everything in your models.
You can however, decide that the key drivers in your domain are essentially impossible to capture quantitatively and decide not to model the domain scientifically.
This applies especially well to cases where 'tacit knowledge' is important. Because that knowledge is hard to formulate, let alone formalize, it is really hard to quantize.
Taleb makes an argument in Black Swan that a bad model can do more harm than no model at all, and that "we can't throw our hands up" is not a valid excuse either: sometimes that's exactly the right call.
what’s more interesting about dunbar’s number is that it suggests a potential maximum for the size of an effective organization (say, 520) rather than pinpointing an optimum. the idea of a maximum like this appeals to intuition, so it’s worth studying more (and more quantitatively), but opposes ambition, which is probably why we don’t have plentiful research in this area already.
Do regular blood tests on a randomized sample of married couples and measure the stress levels.
Once you've found the couple with the lowest overall levels, book them on a touring circuit so audiences can ask them how many silly dances they invented. Since the couple doesn't know whether that's a source of their happiness or not, it won't really get us any closer to an answer. But at least the couple's resulting stress from the tour and impending marital problems will teach the audience about the limits of their method of inquiry.
The more drawn out / harmful form is: when you mandate that only the measureable is valid, and something is hard (or impossible) to measure, everyone comes up with reasons it's not important.
I think there can be a useful middle ground, where "fuzzy" descriptions are used with models to explain strategies that are developed organically.
I empathise with the OP on the lack of modelling in this space. I think it shows a lack of maturity of the field since good, simple models are usually used to produce fundamental understanding in a field.
The optimal number of loads of laundry is whatever rate keeps you in clean clothes within bounds with which you are comfortable.
There are people who are comfortable with the zero margin of wearing their last clean clothes while doing laundry. There are people who are unhappy when they get close to that. And there are people who want to be at the top border, where no more than one or two days' wear can be allowed to be unclean at a time.
The important thing for a marriage is that you are both happy with similar rates, or that you are both happy with your partner's rate even though it is not your own.
That's because life is not solely a series of numeric optimization problems; objectivity is a useful tool, but people's desires are by definition subjective.
I worked in quant finance for many years so I’m very familiar with low signal to noise in complex systems. You can’t throw your hands up simply because you’ll never capture everything in your models.
This field is so far from my areas of expertise but I imagine there are lots of smart people investigating and putting structure around these questions.