Matching for Proxies

You are here because you understand advance care planning, health care proxies, friendship acceleraton, and building friendships under acceleration, but you need help locating a candidate for friendship acceleration towards matching for proxies.

[Non-profit name] provides a service aimed at helping people in your position find a candidate to pair with you for working at developing a proxy-oriented friendship. Below is an outline of how the service works. Call it the ProxMatch service. The button at the bottom of this page takes you to the application page for the ProxMatch service.

ProxMatch maintains a database of people, some currently proxyless, some having found a proxy match, but who have chosen to remain in the database (discussed below);
Proxyless people apply to join the database. An application requires the following:
- Filling out a basic personal information form;
- Completing a simple attitude/opinion profile (discussed below);
- Completing a request for a crimminal background check and digitally signing it (see Security);
- Submission of payment; Amount to be determined (see below);
To be accepted for joining the database, an applicant must submit paykment, and must pass the background check (see Security) (refunds will not be issued for background check failure);
When an applicant is successul, their record is added to the database (cf. Continuing in the database below);
When a new record for a person P is added, the distance of the incoming profile is calculated from all the currently unmatched (or continuing match) profiles in the database. The set M of those database profiles with the smallest distance are the candidates for matching the incoming person.
If M is empty (i.e., there are no existing profiles potentially matching the incoming one -- there are no possible candidates), the applicant is sent an email saying so and asking them to wait for further applicants to join the database;
If the set M is non-empty and the smallest distance from the incoming record is less than [some fixed value], then a record from M is randomly selected, say for person Q.
Email is sent to both P and Q telling them about the match, and providing each with the contact info of the other, and givein them instructions for proceeding with their attempt to develop a proxy-level friendship;
At this point, ProxMatch steps back and allows P and Q to work on their own;

Simple attitude/opinion profile

The purpose of this profile is simply to avoid trying to pair up two people who have almost no hope of becoming friends good enough to be each other's proxies because of their basic opinions and attitudes. Pairing them would be a waste of each individual person's time and emotional energy.

Continuing in the database

Any person in the database can ask to be removed at any time, for any reason. When two people people from the database have initially been paired, by default they remain in the database. If the pairing is successful, they are encouraged to notify ProxMatch of their success.

If both choose to stay in the databse, their records are updated to indicate their successful match.
If one chooses to stay, but the other choses to leave, the one staying will be recorded as matching with the person called Anonymous;

Reasons for remaining in the database include:

Being willing to serve as a proxy to one or more other people beyond the first successful pairing;;
Seeking a secondary (backup) proxy;
Being willing to serve as a secondary (backup) proxy to one or more other successfully matched people;
Providing for the possible loss of their proxy (death, incapacity, interpersonal reasons, ...) at sometime in the future

Application Fee

Every effort will be made to keep the operating costs of ProxMatch as low as possible, and also to obtain donations. However, there will be operating costs. Moreover, ProxMatch will have to pay to obtain the necessary crimminal background checks. As of 10/17/2025, all of that is as yet undetermined.

Security

Sadly, our world contains many scammers who would masquarade as proxyless people seeking a health care proxy from ProxMatch, and would attempt to defraud the person they were paired with. Requiring a crimminal background check will go a long ways towards excluding such scammers from the ProxMatch database.

Simple Profile

People vary incredibly. It would be silly to attempt to pair two people whose views on life topics would make it impossible for one to act correctly on the other's advanced care document. The simple profile presents a small collection of ranked (1 - 5) topics where such disagreemet is possible, such as:

Only God can make                      Each person has the ultimate 
decisions about a life                 power over their life
         1        2       3        4        5

Each profile is represented by a vector of the values chosen by the person. The distance between two profiles is just the standard n-space distance between their value vectors.