How to take a quantum approach to finding love

Quantum loving

The Netflix show Love Is Blind had rather passed Feedback by. It’s a dating show in which participants aren’t allowed to see each other face to face and only communicate by voice. Only if they get engaged are they allowed to meet in person.

Like so many reality shows, it bills itself as a “social experiment”, which is an interesting way to describe televising something so personal for entertainment, but we are sure Netflix’s consent forms are impeccable.

We bring this up because season seven, released in October, featured a quantum physicist. Garrett Josemans is a technical program manager at IonQ, which is developing “next-generation” quantum computing systems.

According to a company blog post promoting his experience, he said: “The opportunity to focus on love in a structured setting was intriguing.” That’s one way to put it. Josemans added: “My intellectual curiosity kicked in, and it felt like fate knocking on my door.”

Evidently he was right: Josemans is now married to fellow cast member Taylor Krause. As one of my colleagues in the news department noted, being comfortable with two confusing and conflicting realities existing at once is probably a boon in some relationships.

Maxximum stink

Speaking of dating, Mrs Feedback draws our attention to pheromone maxing, sometimes spelled maxxing. This is apparently something that alpha males do.

Actually, let me stop you right there. Alpha males are not a thing. The concept comes from research on captive wolves in the 1940s, which found that a single male would often dominate the pack. From there, the concept spread into popular culture. However, it turns out that wild wolves don’t behave like this: their packs are more like extended families. Wolf researcher L. David Mech has spent much of his career trying to correct the record, including attempting to get one of his own early books taken out of print.

Where were we? OK, so human alpha males (which don’t exist) have come up with a novel strategy to attract women as sexual partners. They stop showering and wear the same clothes for several days, thus maximising their “musk” and generating an alluring cocktail of pheromones that will, we guess, drive women into a sexual frenzy.

The idea gained a certain amount of internet fame after a teenaged TikTok user posted a video about his experiments, which began: “First off, I’m not stinky. I’m pheromone maxing.” A follow-up video, from his mother, asked other parents for advice on how to get him to take a shower.

Feedback isn’t quite sure where to start. Maybe with the idea of human pheromones? It’s true that some animals communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air, some of which play a role in mating. However, despite decades of research, there is no definitive evidence that human pheromones exist. It is a bold choice to base your dating strategy around a phenomenon that may not be real.

Even if human sexual pheromones do exist, why would avoiding showering maximise your output? And why would the pheromones cancel out your other smells?

It has been a long time since Feedback played the dating game, but our foggy memories suggest the best way to connect with people was talking to them, finding shared interests and being nice. Still: young minds, fresh ideas.

TED talk trouble

Feedback has never given a TED Talk – our invitation probably got lost in our spam folder – but the idea is to get the best and brightest to communicate their ideas to a wide audience. CRISPR pioneer and Nobel prizewinner Jennifer Doudna has done two TED Talks. Malcolm Gladwell, of The Tipping Point fame, has done four, so we guess he’s twice as important.

However, the need for a never-ending fire hose of content necessarily leads to scrabbling around for material – Feedback knows this feeling all too well – and so we come to a talk given by Raymond Tang. He delivered it in 2017, but TED Conferences’s social media reshared it in October, when Feedback encountered its profound wisdom for the first time.

Tang was at the time an IT manager for a financial services company. However, his talk is about “lessons from the philosophy of water”. You see, by studying how water behaves, we can find fulfilment in our own lives. This sort of thing makes Feedback’s brain feel scratchy, so we will give you a few examples of what was on offer.

“If we think about water flowing in a river, it is always staying low,” says Tang. Yes, liquids under gravity do tend to do that. “Water is open to change. Depending on the temperature, it can be a liquid, solid or gas… We, too, are expected to constantly reinvent and refresh our skills to stay relevant.” Feedback appreciates the comparison between the state of the job market and the experience of being boiled and frozen. Truly, water exemplifies the hustle mentality. #grind

Let’s set aside the obvious fact: that you could get similar advice from one of those internet memes that emboss an “inspirational” phrase onto a photo of a waterfall. The real trouble with advice like this is that it is never as universally applicable as the speaker claims. Many hands might make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. We hereby pitch our TED Talk: “It depends”.

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