M&Ms: The Ideal State
How I am thinking about expertise in multi-disciplinary domains.
I started rooting for these newlywed couples on this show. And then my wife told me, "Don't get your hopes up. Only one out of these five couples from this season makes it."
The experts from Married at First Sight (a show on Netflix that's been running for 17 seasons) have PhDs in:
Psychology, Sexology, and Sociology, among other things.
Incredulous, I told my wife, "Only one out of these five couples make it!?"
But then I thought to myself, how can that be?
An 80% divorce rate? That is a higher divorce rate than even the average here in the U.S., which is already pretty high, between 40 to 50%.
But then, what are these so-called experts even doing?
When you watch the show, the experts say things like, "This person will balance that person out." Excuse the Bronx language that went off in my head when I heard that, but "What the f*ck!?" Why are these experts matching people on some ideal state in their heads? Rather than doing it on the things that last?
My mother, who dabbles as a part-time matchmaker, has a better hit rate than these "expert" matchmakers. My mother manages a bakery and meets a ton of people from the community. Naturally, sometimes, the conversation comes up with parents who wish their son or daughter was married. And my mother gets the gears going. She has matched many couples already, 10+, and maybe there has been a 10% miss rate, not 80%. And my mother didn't even graduate from college, never mind a Ph.D. in matchmaking.
So what the hell is going on with these "doctors" and "experts"?
One of the couples from season 12, Virginia, is this party girl, maybe 25. She matches with and marries a guy who got divorced because of his career in the military, Erik, who is 34. Erik, who is reserved, is desperate to have kids. Erik's mother is pressuring him for grandkids. And Virginia is a "maybe later" on kids but a definite no in the short term. She loves her parties. When I saw this, I thought, "What the hell? Didn't these experts ask a single question?" The experts hoped Erik would "balance" Virginia out. Excuse my Bronx language again, but when I saw that, my immediate reaction was, "Get the f*ck outta here with that sh!t."
When my mother matches someone, the first thing she looks at is the family. She asks around about the families of the two prospects. My mother inspects the trees to try and figure out what might happen to the apples. Then, she digs deeper into what each seeker would like out of life. She finds points that might be compromisable and points that are not. She matches them on similarity of the important interests, not on some ideal state. My mother somehow intuitively knows matching on the important interests is antifragile; the ideal state is fragile. My mother does all this on gut feeling.
But Married at First Sight’s matchmaking experts and their abysmal divorce rate bring up some important points about "experts."
Too many experts are too far gone into seeking “the ideal state."
Too much depth of knowledge in a single domain can actually be harmful when applied even a little bit outside of that domain. Many of the show's experts have PhDs in their domain, like Psychology or Sociology. But to my knowledge, there is no Ph.D. in something multi-disciplinary like matchmaking. If there is, my mother deserves one.
The show reminded me to check some of my own expertise when bringing it to a new domain. And that I should forget about the ideal state when I operate in something multi-disciplinary like entrepreneurship. And that I should try to operate more like my mother in those things than "the experts."
A Promo from Me: Three Newsletters by Students
We're entering the last week of our 3-week newsletter program on Small Bets. I wanted to highlight and promote three awesome newsletter editions published by folks in our program so far.
Tech changed a lot of people's lives in the last decade-and-a-half, including mine. It's nice to see that it is still doing that; Brandon is a self-taught engineer sharing his journey. And this is a great piece by him that I recommend.
Going from trading time for money to building products is not an easy thing to do in entrepreneurship. Paulina shares her journey going from consulting to Indie Hacking and building products. And growing an audience to get a distribution channel for those products and all of the things that come with that.
Bill says most poker players lose because of the mental game. He thinks the same happens in entrepreneurship. After reading his very insightful piece, I think he’s right.
Three Memes: Ai Companions, Made by Machines, Cables
“Ai Companions” are now going viral. Enabled by the recent advancements in AI and open source.
Adam thinks it will damage the expert matchmaker’s ability to make matches even more, I think he’s right.
For reference, here is one of those “Ai Romantic Companions” enabled by this tech:
Machine-made is starting to get a brand new meaning.
As we head into 2024, my box of random cables is still going strong. I hope yours is too. You never know when you might need them.
—Louie
P.S. You can reply to this email; it will get to me, and I will read it.
Common sense is powerful, but it's hard to make a show out of it. Just like it's equally unattractive to tell people there are no secrets just work and maybe getting lucky, but it's mostly work.
Your mom must have been a conservative Indian in her past life.... That's how most conservative Indian's do their match-making :) . Looking at the family/family tree is important, but I feel one more important point is missed when match-making. I feel the bonds would be stronger if both are in a similar or related profession.