Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation | Hacker News Reader

Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation

www2.warwick.ac.uk

16 pointskqr219 comments

When this guy goes out at night, he meets a perfectly random sample of people from London, totally uncorrelated to any of his variables? Where is this stochastic heaven? The statisticians want to know!

(Put another way, maybe he should frequent more singles bars in educated neighborhoods, where the clientele is of about his age and attractive to him.)

Yep. Thankfully, unlike the search for sentient life, there are ways we can significantly increase nearly all of his probabilities with just a little bit of thought.

He is using the wrong equation. His problem is not to do with being in stochastic hell. It is his search strategy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Cheers for "stochastic heaven".

Most profound concept for others to grok.

* I think 5% chance of him finding a women attractive is too low. Physical attractiveness could be affected by him finding a girl that matches the other criteria.

* The equation doesn't take in to account the constant influx of new people in London. And who's to say she is of British nationality?

* More importantly, where does he state the chance of the 'chosen' one liking him? Further to this - and I don't want to generalise here - but in my experience, this is precisely the type of humour that women do not find funny.

Finally: "on a  given  night [..] out in London there is [..] a 1 in 285,000  chance"

Should this be in a given instance? I live in London and probably walk past 1,000 people every day. I know that's not a meaningful interaction but, using his variables, in a given day that means there's a 1 in 285 chance I walked past 'the one'.

Life is cruel. As someone else has said, hang out in some university bars and break the random sample.

EDIT: Grammar, spacing.

This is the third submission of this article in a few days: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1031898 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030950

Please do a search on http://searchyc.com/ before submitting articles.

Whoever wants to do/acomplish something finds a way. Whoever doesn't finds a reason.

You have your reasons(based on faulty assumptions) so I would conclude that you simply don't want a girlfriend.

Annoying landing page to get to the PDF article but amusing when you get there. Now you can play - "spot the faulty assumptions".

Do you really find only 5% of girls your age attractive ?! And you say you were being generous!

I've been to London and the girls are not that horrible there, are they? Or was it the beer goggles?

Interesting paper, though. Thanks for writing it.

I'd go as far to say most girls around my age are attractive in some way or another, so 5% seems exceptionally fussy!

I've lived in London, and to be honest I found far less than 5% of women my age attractive.

Are you 70?

When I lived there I was around the average age of pornmodels and supermodels.

Would be interesting to check this for real, but off the top of my head my estimate would be more like 1% (not for London, but in general).

Although there was this other research that showed that men (maybe also women, can't remember) are very quick to adapt their "demands" to the available offering. That is if at a party, you might settle for someone from the 10% of attractiveness at that party, even if the attractiveness compared to the whole population might be a lot less.

Plus the title of the page/document is "Why I don’t have I girlfriend".

I've recently written an "An accurate description of a potential person to share some lifetime with": http://romansnitko.posterous.com/an-accurate-description-of-...

My friend says I'm gonna be sooo single.

Amusing idea but theory that underlies calculations is full of unreal assumptions. Let's consider spherical cow in vacuum instead.

This has been posted twice in the last month.

The author chooses to limit his options to women who already have college degrees, to women currently living in London, etc. People aren't plants or inanimate objects. They can move to different places. They can go back to school. Etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com