This month’s column was inspired by The Materialists — a film about modern dating for the wealthy. It’s part movie review and part deliberation on this month’s question …
How does data dehumanize?
I’ve previously written about love in a time of big data and the many ways algorithmically driven dating apps can be biased. In this film, professional matchmaker Lucy, delivers a human curated profile for finding love. However, just like the AI version, it starts with data.
People as Data Points
“Love is something you can’t quantify” – Celine Song, director, The Materialists
Lucy’s client intake process offers a crash course on the reductiveness of metrics to classify people. It serves as a data-driven proxy for finding “the one” by attempting to quantify the highly unquantifiable goal of finding true love.
From female clients, the data is mostly about height and income: “six feet tall, or at least 5’11,” “has to earn $250,000 or more a year.”
From the males, it’s all about age and weight: “under 30, not 31, 29 is even pushing it” and “must be fit … nothing over a 20 BMI.”
Doctor, lawyer, investment banker … there’s even specific requests for race. Lucy’s clients are not shy about making their every wish known and insisting they get what’s on their often extensive lists. “I deserve someone who fulfills all of my criteria,” one client puts it while handing Lucy pages of requirements, at a level of detail you might expect in an RFP for selecting an enterprise software system.
Lucy has a formula. She assesses the value of the “merchandise” in light of their attributes and attempts to match like with like – similarly valued prospects based on tangible factors such as socio-economic background, eduction, and attractiveness. She tries to get clients the best deal possible. It works. Lucy is highly successful and responsible for nine marriages, earning her professional accolades.
Yet, as the film progresses, we come to see the physical and emotional scars that reveal what is really at stake for everyone involved in this highly transactional dating culture. People go to great lengths to attain the best metrics possible.
Conversely, it’s also not always possible to collect the necessary data to assess the things that really matter. Lucy learns this the hard way when one of her matches goes horribly wrong.
Living in a Material World
As Madonna astutely pointed out in the ’80s, it’s a material world. Materialism (or consumerism) seems to be the dominant philosophy of our times. Perhaps it’s always been this way, certainly when we think of historical marriage arrangements that have less to do with love than uniting business or aristocratic dynasties. Yet, the role of data and algorithms in fostering our material calculus has crept into so many aspects of social relationships as we seek to make our lives Instagrammable.
Is the end result that we’ve become superficial people in a shallow society?
It’s not just dating. We’re being measured all the time in our algorithmic culture using these same kinds of metrics: education, grades, profession, income, status. They are proxies to determine our value. It’s no wonder we are obsessed with self improvement. We’re simply trying to make the data look as good as possible.
Signals and Noise
Data analysts know its about cutting through the noise to find the real signals. If we insist on gathering data in the quest for love, perhaps we need to start with better inputs. Do height, weight, age, or income really matter, or are they just more noise? What would the data look like for kindness, caring, joy, curiosity – or any number of qualities that would actually be important for a life partner? Are those things even quantifiable?
Does it even make sense to use a data-driven approach to relationships? In a word – no. This was the conclusion from a research paper that attempted to predict successful relationships from a dataset of over 11,000 hetrosexual couples capturing data points that included everything from demographics to physical appearances to hobbies and even values using state-of-the-art machine learning models. The article, People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science, sums it up this way:
“In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.” (Wired, 2022)
The piece also makes a point of calling out what they term “the irrelevant eight” – the eight data points that have absolutely nothing to do with predicting romantic happiness. Guess what those points are? We’ve covered most of them already. What these data points do convey is desire – shiny qualities that have no bearing on long-term happiness.
There is one piece of data-driven advice in the article and it has nothing to do with data about the other person, and everything to do with how you answer this one question: How happy are you with yourself?
We could also just forget about data as a mechanism of attempting to exert control over chaos and instead embrace uncertainty. Maybe in doing that, we open ourselves up to the possibilities not just for love, but for life.
Send Me Your Questions!
I would love to hear about your data dilemmas or AI ethics questions and quandaries. You can send me a note at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn. I will keep all inquiries confidential and remove any potentially sensitive information – so please feel free to keep things high level and anonymous as well.
This column is not legal advice. The information provided is strictly for educational purposes. AI and data regulation is an evolving area and anyone with specific questions should seek advice from a legal professional.
