Before demanding that, first come up with metrics for the optimal attributes of a marriage. What is the optimal number of loads of laundry to do each month? The proper number of silly dances to invent?
I worked in quant finance for many years so I’m very familiar with low signal to noise in complex systems. You can’t throw your hands up simply because you’ll never capture everything in your models.
This field is so far from my areas of expertise but I imagine there are lots of smart people investigating and putting structure around these questions.
But it is misleading to expect an employee to maintain relationships with 150 people—they also have a family and friends.
> However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) implied that specifying any one number is futile.
You can however, decide that the key drivers in your domain are essentially impossible to capture quantitatively and decide not to model the domain scientifically. This applies especially well to cases where 'tacit knowledge' is important. Because that knowledge is hard to formulate, let alone formalize, it is really hard to quantize.
Once you've found the couple with the lowest overall levels, book them on a touring circuit so audiences can ask them how many silly dances they invented. Since the couple doesn't know whether that's a source of their happiness or not, it won't really get us any closer to an answer. But at least the couple's resulting stress from the tour and impending marital problems will teach the audience about the limits of their method of inquiry.
I think there can be a useful middle ground, where "fuzzy" descriptions are used with models to explain strategies that are developed organically.
I empathise with the OP on the lack of modelling in this space. I think it shows a lack of maturity of the field since good, simple models are usually used to produce fundamental understanding in a field.
There are people who are comfortable with the zero margin of wearing their last clean clothes while doing laundry. There are people who are unhappy when they get close to that. And there are people who want to be at the top border, where no more than one or two days' wear can be allowed to be unclean at a time.
The important thing for a marriage is that you are both happy with similar rates, or that you are both happy with your partner's rate even though it is not your own.