I came across this paper by Tristan Miller on "Why I will never have a girlfriend" wherein he tries to provide a statistical view of why a girlfriend is so hard to find. This is crap and I, by no means promote the same. This post tries to identify the real meaning of this paper - only the author will never find a girlfriend, this doesn't apply to you.
The paper is entirely based on assumptions (as you can already see if you've read it) where the author completely focuses on the extreme points of probability for a given event to occur. The author starts with the population of the entire earth which is obviously a right figure to start with. He then narrows it down to females in developed countries. Here he loses some points as the world now is a far smaller place because of the web and high level of internationalization. The author states that his chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. However, those chances aren't zero.
What I'm trying to say here is that while this is a nicely written informative paper, the name of the paper is slightly misleading. It probably should have been "Why I might never have a girlfriend".
Coming back to the paper, the author narrows down females by age and beauty, both of which aren't clearly specified. The author is human, he will adapt or adjust. Beauty, however, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Another criteria, intelligence, while completely essential, you cannot go around organising IQ tests for beautiful girls who aren't already committed.
And, the last and more funnier part: the shortlisted girls should also like the author. Uh, I'm not quite sure if I would comment on that, but if you gain fame for writing a paper on you never having a girlfriend, you obviously shouldn't be having a girlfriend for the paper to be any closer to being true.
The author also discusses how out of the total eligible girls, he would go on a blind every week and eventually it would take nearly 67 years to find that perfect girlfriend. The author, here, kills the headline again. The author is looking for "the perfect girlfriend" and not just any girlfriend. Probably this way he would've just added another criteria that she should be crowned Miss World at least once. That makes sense.
There's another fairly simple reason why the author will never have a girlfriend. And that's because the author is too pessimistic about it.
What's your take on this?
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2 comments
My take:
1. Clearly the original poster was making a joke and not a serious analysis.
2. I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the probability of meeting a babe from Bhutan etc. are less than the probability of not meeting a babe from Boston. It's an estimation that kind of comes out in the wash. Still, you've a point, but only if the chances are significantly higher than 0.
3. The original title was good if you aren't hyper-literal. The suggested modification is using weak words. We're speaking of probabilities here in the first place.
4. He specifies age VERY clearly and explicitly: 18-25 as of the year 2000. What are you talking about here?
5. You do not have to specify what you mean by beauty (and the beholder is very obviously himself, so it's in his eye). In fact he even mentions how beauty is subjective. All you have to do is assume a probability distribution function, and he assumed a normal curve.
6. I don't quite get your "funnier part" paragraph, but it seems to say that he will never have a girlfriend by virtue of making this paper, which again works against your new title. Anyway, I think that's easily the most reasonable criteria there is. The real pedantic point to make there is that there is a correlation between liking a person and being liked by a person.
7. He isn't looking for a perfect girlfriend; both you and he laid out the criteria quite clearly. The perfect girlfriend is the 100th percentile on all her aspects and in turn thinks he is the perfect boyfriend -- which is ridiculous and almost certainly not an real person. He wants:
1. Top 16% of intelligence
2. Within 3.5 years of the same age as him in either direction
3. Single
4. Willing (which is good; otherwise it's sexual harassment)
5. Top 2.2% of beauty. That seems VERY picky except that he's encompassing both "inner beauty" and "outer beauty". Assuming they carry equal weight, this means top 15% "outer beauty" and top 15% "inner beauty", or any of a number of other possible combinations (eg. top 4.4% "outer beauty" top 50% "inner beauty" or vice-versa will do). In fact, the ugliest woman on earth could satisfy this condition if she's also very kind and funny, putting her in the top 2.2%. On the other hand, a REALLY hot woman, top 2.2% (a bit better than one in 46 women), could be a real asshole and he'd still want to date her by this criterion.
The real errors, which the author doubtless recognizes and doesn't care about because it's a satirical piece in the first place, are:
1. Beauty is variable with time and can shift with getting to know somebody.
2. There is a reasonably high correlation between liking somebody and being liked, especially with regard to personality, or, as he calls it, "inner beauty".
3. Intelligence is not a gestalt but has multiple aspects, of which some can be far better than top 16% and some considerably worse, and "witty conversation" can be held with just a few of these aspects held high.
4. People are more likely to meet people of similar intelligence to themselves because they are more likely to do things that people of similar intelligence do, and like things that people of similar intelligence like.
5. You don't have to only blind date. Just meeting people before dating knocks off the outer beauty criteria of both him AND the female, and screening for outer beauty can occur VERY quickly. Inner beauty criteria can be partially filtered, but not all that well without the first date/meetup/whatever.
6. The average life expectancy statistics he's quoting are really average age of death statistics. Two factors work in favour of him living longer: first, that he has a 60 year advantage in medical technology over the people dying today, and second, that the conditional probability of surviving to 70 given that he's survived to 21 (at the time of the paper) is greater than the chance of a newborn baby reaching that age.
7. Friends (and even the subjects of failed dates) can help to extend the search for him by referring potential partners that meet his criteria as they understand it.
Working against the paper is the fact that he's not likely to meet, in his life, even a fraction of all the girls he listed even after restricting it to only developer countries.
I wonder how you stumbled on the paper..;)
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