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Nornagest comments on Optimize Your Settings - Less Wrong
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I'm actually doing this. I don't feel suicidal (never would) but I do feel that people around me were so different that if I stay here, my Self will implode socially.
A suggestion for people who are at the point where moving seems like a decent alternative: In OKCupid, the match-making website, there is a long set of questions you can respond about yourself. If you fill those up (say 90 out of hundreds) you can ask the algorithm to find people who are high matches to you as Friend, and high matches to your romantically (correlated but distinct measurements).
If you ask the match making algorithm for those who are similar everywhere, you'll see where you may fit in better. The vast majority of people that show 90% or more correlation with me are concentrated in 2 areas of the world, New York city and California (SF Bay in particular), this is one of the indicators I choose for where I'll try to live.
I tried the same experiment and got the same results, modulo London. That seemed odd to me, so I punched in a couple of smaller cities where I've met reasonably interesting people and asked for match results back. Sure enough, it returned a few screens of 90+% matches in both cases -- comparable to the "everywhere" results, in fact.
Although I don't feel like putting enough effort into this to figure out exactly what's going on, it seems clear that the "everywhere" query isn't searching the entire database. I'm located in the SF Bay Area, so I'm guessing local results are overrepresented in what I'm getting back; it seems excessively convenient that I'd just happen to be living in my best possible social scene. NY and London are both among the largest English-speaking cities, though, so not much surprise there.
If I'm right, it'd be hard to use these results to gauge social compatibility unless you could correct for the missing matches. If it's dropping some geographically or demographically asymmetrical subset of possible matches, it might not be possible at all.
Related xkcd comic