[shanusmagnus]

Thank you for yes-anding the linear algebra metaphor :)

After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant "encounter vector" served to motivate the encounter, and potentially update each person's original "personality" vector? And day-to-day life could sometimes result in self-multiplication, depending on what you're doing.

That seemed fruitful, though obv very incomplete. I mention it in case you want to return volley :)

[cmehdy]

There might be some tricky bits to that: most people's domains aren't going to be the same and the projections will result in empty results. In some cases a few bases are shared and there's something to work with, in other cases it might be possible for one party to find.. I guess some homomorphism, that would enable some projections to be non-null.

It could be the case that it's not the usual way things go however, and instead of finding a perfect transformation instead an imperfect one loses some of the information (for example if you and I were to have this exchange in a language where one of us isn't comfortable and the other is). And I guess there's also the question of what to do with the resulting projections we get when we do get some.. are they part of feedback loops around the measure of engagement between people, perhaps? Can the measure of that projection become actionable in any meaningful way to either party? etc.