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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

So. Should we spend the first 36.8% of our adult lives dating casually, and then settle down with the first person we find who’s better than anyone we’ve dated so far? That would suggest men start seriously looking for a life partner at 39 — and women at 41.

Strawman alert! The rate at which people date varies tremendously with age and life circumstance. To treat someone's dating life like a piece of uniform bar stock which can be cut off at the 36.8% mark is so obviously a bad approach, I'm immediately less sure of the article.

EDIT: It turns out the article's entire point is that the model is too simple. It really rubs me the wrong way that he starts out with an implementation which is way too simple.

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A better assumption is to look at the average age of first birth as the 'lifetime' for dating. That age is 28 for the average US female.

Assuming that you enter the marriage market at 18, you then have 10 years to find a partner.

Assume that you have a girl/boyfriend and are 'serious' with them, likely meaning sexual activity. The average number of partners in the US is 7.2

From the optimal strategy in the Secretary problem, you should be 'serious' for ~37% of the time that you have available to date.

Running through the math here, you have 6.2 partners (assuming that you stick with the most recent one for childbirth) over a 10 year dating lifetime. Assume that everyone magically follows the optimal path. That means the trial-time of a 'serious' dating partner is ~7 months and 4 days, on average.

So, if you were to be totally average and also follow the optimal dating strategy, meaning that you dated for 10 years and had 7 serious relationships, you would date 6 people before settling down, and each of the 'calibration' people would last about 7 months from partner to partner.

That sounds reasonable and very similar to a lot of personal anecdata. I've seen a lot of people do ~half a year flings through their college years (18-22) before settling down with someone in the last year of college or thereabouts.

It rubs you the wrong way that I start with an example that clearly illustrates the point I'm trying to make?

Yes. If I want to make the point that everything on Hacker News is complete rubbish, and I pick out a recent post about "alien lizards invented facebook to enable mind control", that looks like an example that really clearly illustrates my point, right? But it's not, because it's not a good example of the actual content of hacker news.

It rubs you the wrong way that I start with an example that clearly illustrates the point I'm trying to make?

Since it's such a clear strawman, it doesn't clearly illustrate the point you're trying to make for those readers who can see through it. It's common sense to exclude childhood as irrelevant to dating experience. It's common sense, that people will be more active in dating during certain phases in their life.

The whole point of the strawman, is that it appears to support a point by only weakly representing the counterpoint. A fairer analysis has been posted several times in other comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19360311

As I've said to others it highlights one weakness with the model - that it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching. When you add a cost to delay the appropriate time to spend exploring drops massively.

it highlights one weakness with the model

By applying the strategy in an unintelligent way which seems designed to make the model fail.

it will always say a longer possible search is better because it raises your odds to success and the model features no cost for searching

That's kind of the whole point of this tradeoff and of the analogies used with it. That there is a cost for searching and not "finding."

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