The Naked Future (20 page)

Shortly after putting his lectures online, Ng kept running into folks who had taken his course. He knew, from YouTube, that tens of thousands of people had seen the videos but the experience of encountering random strangers, students who appreciated the effort, who wanted more, turned out to be critical for reinforcement.

“I was fortunate,” he acknowledges. “It's a big circle.”

A common complaint of the Internet era is that the spread of information technology inevitably creates distance. Some, like Professor Michael Bugeja, have suggested that the withering of interpersonal connections is the inevitable result of the creeping digitization of life. The growth in the number of conversations and exchanges that take place purely over digital media can surely contribute to feelings of alienation. But the stories of Andrew Ng and the MIT Media Lab suggest that certain communities and the places they are attached to, which urban studies theorist Richard Florida calls “creative class cities,” will only grow more important in the future. The most recent data on college admissions suggest that, far from hurting applications to Stanford and MIT, putting courses online has attracted a lot more applicants to these schools. The bottom line that this trend suggests is that MOOCs necessarily repair inequalities in America's education system even if they only address portions of it, such as stereotype threat.

But even if MOOCs aren't the ultimate solution, they can certainly help us improve the way we learn. A moving score, in the form of a continuously updating education profile, is probably a better indication of your potential than a static one that reflects who you were or what you could do when you were sixteen, or where you completed four years of schooling when you were in your late teens and early twenties.

Learning will become easier and much more of it will happen outside school settings, all of which will diminish the importance of schools and teachers as we know them today. But platforms such as Coursera can amplify the talents of gifted and effective
instructors and reduce the cost of education in the coming decade for all.
Some
schools and colleges will thrive and prosper at a level not seen in their history. But they will do so only by transitioning away from today's classroom model and toward something else, such as data-driven skills workshops at the high school level and start-up incubators or problem-solving workshops at the college level. The latter transition may be the hardest but it is also the most essential for the survival of higher education. Many less intellectually fecund colleges will find it hard to persuade young people to go into debt in order to get a credential that is increasing in cost and diminishing in value.

We may be conflicted about relying less on classrooms and more on platforms but if we are to be honest with ourselves, we know that we can't prepare coming generations for the challenges of a technological and globalized economy in the same way we prepared previous generations to be factory workers. The greatest thinker of the current century (a person whose identity we do not yet know) will understand more about how he or she thinks and learns than any student in any previous generation long before ever stepping foot inside a schoolhouse.

When Your Phone Says You're in Love

MATHEMATICAL
matchmaking sounds like a modern method for finding love. In truth, it predates dating Web sites, the computer, the field of statistics, or even
Europe
. The practice goes back to 1500
BC
and the composition of the four Veda scriptures, part of the ancient Indian religion of Brahmin that later became Hindu. While the rules governing Western astrology are open, discoverable, and thus easy to ridicule, Vedic astrology as traditionally practiced was esoteric. Expertise was passed among a small, elite group with intimate knowledge of the ancient Veda texts. These Brahmins had a monopoly on the business of drafting personality profiles, or
janam kundalis
, which all well-to-do parents had to have before they could arrange marriages for their children.

Vedic astrology puts forward a mathematical explanation for human personality that has logical and weighted underpinnings, even if it is fabricated. Paramahansa Yogananda, whose
Autobiography of a Yogi
was one of the first accounts of the religion to be translated into English, explained the connection between an
individual personality and planetary movement as a causal relationship.

“Astrology is the study of man's response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity, but offer a lawful channel for the outward operation of cause-effect equilibriums which each man has set into motion in the past.”
¹

Today, most of us in technologically advanced societies view arranged marriage as an inherently chauvinistic practice, seeing as its goal an exchange of daughters (mostly) for property or alliance formation and quite separated from anything resembling love. The history of the practice in the West would support that view. But
janam kundali
–based matchmaking in India, which is still practiced today, is somewhat less transactional. Compatibility is the goal. Vedic matchmakers consider dozens of elaborate weighted variables as part of a predictive model. It's believed that a promised pair should share at least eighteen matching points in their thirty-six-point
gun milan
, in addition to moon position. All of this formulation is based on careful observation of planetary movements. Today, many Indian couples who were married according to Vedic tradition swear by the practice and have long, stable marriages to bolster their case.
²

That's not to say this method for pairing people holds up to any sort of serious scrutiny. The endurance of arranged Vedic marriages has nothing to do with moon position but with partner commonality. Social convention biases the results because throughout most of Indian history it was customary for individuals to marry within their caste. This ensured that couples had similar socioeconomic backgrounds and a wide web of mutual affiliations, two factors that have been proven to be predictors of marriage longevity. And, of course, divorce was not really an option.
³

Today, we use better instruments and more complex math to map the movements of planets. While the field of physics has yet to
reconcile the divergent equations of Sir Isaac Newton with those of Albert Einstein, it has given us a serviceable understanding of how matter and energy interact. There exists neither a plausible theoretical basis—nor any evidence—to support the idea that the position of the moon, the sun, or Neptune on the day of a person's birth will have any measurable effect on her personality, relationship, or the future.

In some ways, science has triumphed over superstition. But in many other crucial ways, the power of the esoteric has only grown. Humanity is even more open to the idea of matchmaking by math,
even math we don't understand
, than we were thousands of years ago. Many of the 40-million plus Americans who have tried online dating sites that use propriety (i.e., secret) matching algorithms aren't that different from the poor souls who paid hefty sums to Brahmin wise men for predictive models that couldn't be proven. To date, no online matching site has demonstrated the success of their algorithm in any way that would allow an independent skeptic to check their work or repeat their results.

The one online dating site that is relatively open about their matching methodology is the very popular OKCupid. The system uses two scores: how you answer questions and the importance you place on a potential mate's response to the same questions. The more questions you answer, the more information the system has to improve its matches. Users are presented with questions ranging from the humorous (e.g., “Have you ever murdered anyone?”) to the personal (e.g., “How often are you open with your feelings?”) to the basic (e.g., “Is the earth bigger than the sun?”) to the political (e.g., “Is gay marriage a sin?”). The most provocative questions are extremely personal, dealing with sexual preferences, interests, boundaries, and history.

After a user responds to a question she is presented with an importance scale to categorize how she wants a partner to respond. Answers here range from “irrelevant” to “mandatory,” indicating that the user does not want to be matched with people who avoid that question. The point value is logarithmic so the values increase exponentially as opposed to linearly.

How important is this question to you?

(Source http://www.okcupid.com/help/match-percentages)

To calculate how well you match with someone else, the system takes your scores, the scores of the person whose profile you're viewing, multiplies these together, and takes the square root. If you're a 95 percent match with someone, that means you answered many of that person's
most important
questions “correctly” (i.e., in the way she indicated she wanted that question answered) and she answered your most important questions the same way. The logarithmic system ensures you're not matched with someone who just happened to share lots of trivial things in common with you but was miles away on the important stuff.
⁴

Because users submit their own questions, there's a seemingly endless supply of them, and because the more questions you answer, the higher the likelihood of getting a good match, OKCupid is one of the very few Web start-ups outside health care that offers a real and tangible benefit for giving away more personal information.

Theoretically.

The success of this service illustrates how readily we'll give up extremely compromising information when asked. A great deal more tech coverage and scrutiny are given to Facebook for making minute changes in privacy policy than are given to sites like OKCupid, though the user-submitted material in OKCupid's databases makes the typical Friday-night Facebook post look positively Amish. When users tell their intimate secrets to OKCupid, they do so with an expectation of privacy. But the site reshares a surprisingly large amount of very sensitive information gleaned from questions such
as drug habits and sexual orientation, with (at the time of this writing) nine different data resellers such as PubMatic, Lotame, Google's DoubleClick, Nexus, and Facebook. These outfits then go and sell that data to marketers looking to target customers.
⁵

When OKCupid purges a user for violating the terms of service as happens from time to time, that user has no means of getting her questionnaire data out of the system or verifying that's it's been destroyed. If you leave OKCupid voluntarily, you don't get your data back, either.

In its early days, OKCupid was critical of such dating sites as Match.com, which charges a subscription fee of $35. Christian Rudder, one of OKCupid's founders, explained the start-up's philosophy in a 2010 blog post: “The practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken.”
⁶

The primary malfunction was an imbalance of parties. As Rudder observed, “Men drive interactions in online dating. Our data suggest that men send nearly 4 times as many first messages as women and conduct about twice the match searches. Thus, to examine how the problem of ghost profiles affects the men on pay dating sites is to examine their effect on the whole system.”
⁷

OKCupid was eventually purchased by IAC/InterActiveCorp, the same company that owns Match.com, which also bought all of OKCupid's data. Sam Yagan, another cofounder of OKCupid, soon rose to become head of the entire portfolio of IAC dating sites including Match.com. He had a change of heart about paid dating.

“I think that there was a time where I believed that dating would be a winner-take-all market in the same way that Craigslist, eBay, PayPal, were all winners-take-all marketplaces. I think dating is different,” he told me. Because Match.com has a much higher number of users across more age groups (93 million monthly site visits), there's a better chance of users finding a date, which is worth paying for, he says. More users also help both Match.com and OKCupid better understand the science of love.

In his first post on the blog, titled “Rape Fantasies and Hygiene
by State,” which showed a state-by-state breakdown of people who answered questions about their willingness to act out rape scenarios in bed at a partner's request, OKCupid cofounder Chris Coyne boasted about the utility of OKCupid as a living social science lab: “Old media could only get 3,050 people to answer a poll about Obama. And it was enough to call the election with confidence. OKCupid, on the other hand, can ask the world's most personal questions and get hundreds of thousands of answers.”
⁸

OKCupid, as a Web site, is indeed a provocative tool for measuring the attitudes, beliefs, and sexual peccadilloes of millions of people. But no matter how many questions users answer about themselves on the site, their matching percentages with other users aren't any real indication of how likely one or another of them is to enter a long-term relationship.

In a 2012 article from the journal
Psychological Science
, Northwestern University psychologist Eli J. Finkel and his colleagues show that at best, even very good online dating sites can help you rule out whom not to go on a date with, but can't tell you if the person you're on a date with is at all likely to become your lifelong partner. Likewise, it can't give you any advice on making that relationship stronger.

Here's why relying on profile compatibility alone doesn't work. When agents are free to select potential matches from a menu of profiles, certain profiles receive a lot more attention than others; and the more popular a person's profile, the more messages, chat requests, and invitations she receives, the less likely she is to answer
any
of them. The result is that the best candidates feel overwhelmed and don't want to participate in the network, and a lot of lesser candidates send out requests that aren't answered. Eventually, they lose interest, too.

You might call this the prettiest-girl-in-the-room syndrome. It's really just the social manifestation of survival of the fittest. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense that we would constantly seek to associate with people who are a bit out of our league, even when sexual reproduction isn't an issue, but we don't
want to be so outside our league that we give up any shot of scoring. Online dating sites mask the true odds.

Christian Rudder has acknowledged that the online environment makes the prettiest-girl-in-the-room syndrome worse. “You've got to make sure certain people don't get all the attention. In a bar, it's self-correcting. You see ten guys standing around one woman, maybe you don't walk over and try to introduce yourself. Online, people have no idea how ‘surrounded' a person is.”
⁹

We experience online dating profiles in the same context we view Amazon items. We shop for what on paper looks best. But with online dating, there's an added illusion of one-on-one bonding. When we happen upon a profile that speaks to us we feel like we're getting to know someone for the first time, intimately. We can't see that dozens, perhaps hundreds of people are having the same reaction to the same profile. Dating Web sites would provide more value if they could predict which profiles were going to get the most attention. This is the score that really matters, and we've barely begun to understand how to tally it.

In 1946 psychologist Fritz Heider first proposed a methodology, albeit a simple one, to quantify how what you liked affected your relationships, and how your relationships affected what you liked.
¹⁰

His methodology, since dubbed balance theory, holds simply that when the people we like don't like the same things we like, we grow to either like those people less, tolerate their bizarre affections a bit more, or convince ourselves that the discrepancy is an illusion or irrelevant. Any one of the above options brings the relationship back into balance. And because balanced relationships require less energy to maintain, they are more sustainable. This is how he explained it: “p likes his children, people similar to him; p is uneasy if he has to live with people he does not like; p tends to
imitate admired persons; p likes to think that loved persons are similar to him.”

Balance theory, in other words, suggests that it's easy to be friends with those who are also friends with your friends, and your friends' enemies make suitable enemies for you as well. You could plot this out on a triangle with a series of pluses and minuses, and depending on how the pluses and minuses matched up, the relationship would be either balanced or imbalanced. In relationships that are out of balance, where you have two friends who dislike each other (and neither can pretend the other does not exist), you're very likely to drop the relationship that has the highest cost. That means that if you can accurately ascertain which of your friends like one another and how much each relationship “costs,” you can predict which of your friends you will keep and drop.