So I posted yesterday about SocialGrid, the proposed “Hey, I know! Lets make everyone’s demographics completely explicit!” peer-to-peer Google-reliant online dating service. What I didn’t see is that it’s part of a larger effort to “solve dating”, in the author’s felicitous phrase. The Solve Dating manifesto runs thusly:
You may also want to try the SoulMate Calculator, which looks like FOAF gone mad, and don’t miss the notes on Love Economics. There really is a very particular mental illness associated with presuming that human dealings can be perfected through reduction to discrete variables. (I wonder if DSM IV has a name for it?) This site obviously veers far into net.kook territory, but the scary thing is the number of proposed services that suffer from a mild case of the same disease.