From Dating to Vector Search – “Stable Marriages” on a Global Scale

In practice, a lot of people are just not compatible with anyone

On the last point: Somehow I haven’t even considered that :) Still, that’s just the RAM cost. The overall cluster would be much more expensive.

On the second paragraph: That’s exactly how it worked originally. You can create composite embeddings, and then define some hybrid similarity measure to compute both physical proximity, sentiment of writing, and some categorical tags.

Coding it and experimenting with metrics, however, was much harder then. There was no Numba and I had to implement every experiment in C++, without JIT-ing: https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch/releases/tag/v0.19.0

The problem space is much smaller than 1b. I’d be surprised if it was much larger than 10k when controlled for practical factors like proximity age etc.

Great points. I am from country where arranged marriages are norm. In last 2 decade or so divorce rates rising. And one reason I see is indulgent attitude. So things have to be beautiful, happy, awesome and so on. Older attitude of just being in a average relationship is no acceptable to lot of people. I see this incessant indulgence heavily promoted by media, movies, TV etc.

Arranged marriages lead to more stability but do they lead to more happiness?

There’s an argument to be made that perhaps it does. But I don’t think its as clear cut. Western societies are generally more liberal and give more importance to individual happiness over group stability and I don’t think that’s a bad tradeoff.

Author here :)

Not sure if it's related to the topic of the post. Even though I've originally used the algorithm for dating, its primary purpose is basic 1-to-1 matching of two sets.

Indeed, and we’re seeing the downsides of easily-dissolved marriages. Many people would have been better if they felt they couldn’t abandon their marriage, and either had to work on communication, work on themselves, or just get through a rough patch. Just doing what you “want” often just equates to “making a hedonistic decision based around short-term pleasure.” Not always, of course, but it happens often enough that it’s a meaningful pattern. I’m sure there are people who can rightfully state that theirs lives would have been worse if they could not have left their bad marriages. I’m not disagreeing with this in principle, just stating that the inverse problem exists as well.

Life is also more stable in a prison.

Individualism gives you the freedom to fail along with the freedom to succeed. It's a trade-off with being able to make your decisions.

I'd be more interested in not comparing the fail cases of western dating with arranged marriages but comparing the success cases against arranged marriages. Finding someone who truly feels like your missing half has got to be one of life's greatest pleasures. And the freedom to look for it and the freedom to fail sounds about 1000x better to me than "hanging in there" with a spouse my dad chose.

Every time I hear someone talk about it, the upsides of arranged marriage always kinda sound like "Sweetie, wouldn't it be much nicer to just stay inside where it's safe instead of going out into that dangerous world?"

I think societies with arranged marriage tend to be also more patriarchal, were divorce is looked down upon. At least where I am from, we used to be like that 40years ago (my father's oldest siblings were in arranged marriages). Women back then did not have the social liberty to ask for a divorce. A lot of my aunts (and their female friends) were trapped in unwanted (and miserble) marriages, and were conditioned to accept their misery and not to seek a divorce

Good observation.

I believe Duty and Obligation are in deep decline in the west.

Exhibit 1: Doctors being told that they can take time off from hospitals "to cope with the attack on X (x = current police brutality victim, unfortunate bystander, or neighbor dispute gone wrong)" , instead of doctors treating dying patients in ER, helping patients cope with pain in ICU, etc.

Exhibit 2: Cops failing to actively protect citizens and prevent crime (during protests, for example) because authorities have made it clear they will get sued/fired/lynched/prosecuted for doing so, and they are afraid to go against the system that pays them.

Exhibit 3: Same as (2) , but teachers in public school doing nothing to protect bullied kids

Exhibit 4: US military in forever conflicts causing an all-time low in voluntary army recruit numbers.

This is the west today. We reap what we sow.

This seems completely unrelated to the post and you just going off on a social soapbox. And your thesis is as insightful as observing that military employees quit less often than civilian employees, because no shit, in the former case you'll get arrested and prosecuted for desertion if you quit. It's trivial to enforce social stability by legal means or family-induced forced conformity, but societies and cultures differ on how much they value social stability versus freedom of individual self-determination.

> countries with the most stable marriages tend to be ones in which arranged marriages are much more common

These also happen to be countries where women have terrible economic prospects and divorcees are treated as social outcasts. I happen to live in such a country and from what I can tell, people in miserable marriages stay married because of external pressures.

I can only imagine people glorifying such an arrangement are either ignorant of the ground reality or are outright deranged.

What is your measure of stability? If its divorce rates then yeah countries where divorce is harder have lower rates of divorce.

The obvious conclusion is just ban all divorces and now we have perfectly stable marriages.

The article is nothing to do with marriage beyond the use of the term to explore a concept in matching.

It's like seeing a link to a paper on the Travelling Salesman problem and having it derailed to discussing dodgy car dealers instead.

We're primed to find clever second-order effects to justify grinding through unpleasantness. But sometimes things can just be nice: you don't like living with someone, so you don't, so you are happier.

> Yes there are exceptions, yes abuse and infidelity are justification often, no being pedantic in order to do a "gotcha" are not helpful.

Whether this is pedantry depends entirely on the proportions. Some studies suggest around a quarter of wives are abused. If that's the case then maybe divorce isn't high enough, and it's certainly a key consideration here and not a pedantic tangent. I don't know the area well enough to argue that either way, but I know enough to say you're being too dismissive of the question.