[sean2]

I'd disagree for the dating case; you know a lot about people, but you don't know what its like to spend 6 waking hours with someone every day for awhile until you try it, you don't know what the sex will be like, you don't know what being a whatever-in-law will be like. All things that have to be sampled over a period before you can build up a distribution.

Plus, for the dating especially, there's a lot of "je ne sais quoi" which requires sampling and can not be polled from the population at large.