Love isn't Physics, but popular advice acts like it is

Most of the relationship advice i've received and also come across, romantic or platonic, has been pretty shit.

This applies to advice received from aunties, reddit's r/relationship, friends, rationalists, therapist tell-alls, my parents, and even my own advice and much more.

It didn't really hit me, until now, about why this was the case.

It's because most advice models love with a set of assumptions and mechanics not so different from a physics problem. Even if the advice giver isn't realising it.

And if you know some physics, you'd know that it is dangerous to apply assumptions that aren't true.

Here are examples of assumptions that I find particularly jarring, which after thinking about, i've realised that most conventional advice implicity assumes

• The idea that human personality traits are a vector of stationary parameters that can be estimated and measured.
• The idea of 'compatibility' as some metric space norm that tries to model the closeness of people's set of traits.
• The idea that relationships can be 'optimised' towards some big general 'quality' scalar metric.
• The idea of a marriage as a step function of this scalar 'quality' metric.

But the problem is - these assumptions can be just plain wrong, and in my case, here are some physics based reasons why modelling love as physics is just wrong

• My values are likely not stationary, and probably not estimable by anyone else in any meaningful way. Sometimes I feel generous, sometimes I like coffee, sometimes I don't.
  • Corollary: My (true) preferences are unbeknownst to you
• Even if such vectors were stationary - dimensionality would be too high to find distance metrics meaningful at all.
• And if we don't have distance metrics - the problem of optimisation becomes just... intractable...

This isn't meant to be relationship advice, and I'm not saying you should ignore all advice

What I am saying is that we should think harder about applying a model's core assumptions from one domain to a completely different one. We need to think carefully about which mechanics, if any, can be meaningfully used.