103 - Finding Connection

My long-time best friend, known for his ability to ask many good questions, recently put the question to me "...do you think it's possible to help find a person's soulmate absent collective intelligence?".

We had previously discussed how collective intelligence and scalable systems could overcome challenges including cognitive bias, conceptual grounding, and iterative improvement, presented by today's technology and various cultural and normative barriers, robustly, and with ease, but whether or not any meaningful progress was possible without that was a more difficult question. Setting aside the concept of "soulmate" in various spiritual and religious contexts, we can instead define it as an exceptional match at or above a rarity of 1 in 10,000, about how many people a given person might meet in their lifetime.

Taking a reasonable and quantifiable definition as the basis, the challenge then becomes how to effectively discover and sort through thousands of options efficiently, seeking some set of individually relevant criteria that makes one person such an optimal match for another. On top of that, there is also the separate problem of having two such people meet in such a way that both recognize the possibility of romance, which might otherwise be discounted by default.

Is this technically possible? Perhaps, very conditionally, but the tools to make this process practical don't yet exist. In fact, they can't currently be developed due to the opposite of Collective Intelligence rising in prominence to threaten many aspects of modern society.

Groupthink, as eloquently illustrated in "The Canceling of the American Mind" directly prevents the development of the tools that such a process would necessarily require. The necessary capacities can't be developed, because it is taboo to even acknowledge that they exist, and that taboo is enforced under threat from hordes of largely anonymous trolls acting as bullies.

This leads to the final answer as to whether such a thing is possible absent collective intelligence. While it may be technically possible absent collective intelligence, it isn't practical without it, and it is impossible within systems where Groupthink, the opposite of collective intelligence, plays a leading role. The result negatively impacts the vast majority of humans on the planet, a detriment that may be credited to sources of Groupthink directly as their ethical debt to humanity.

The attached meme is brought to you by security researchers, chronically laughing at Microsoft. The disturbing trend it jokingly refers to happens to be relevant.