fun with statistics

Actually, this is not fun, and I rather suspect that most people would never think to put “fun” and “statistics” in the same sentence to begin with, but: here is what I have been occupying myself with this weekend.

Let’s say I’d like to find someone as smart, nice and open-minded as myself.

My IQ is 3 standard deviations from the mean, so that’s 1/750, just about.

I’m in the first centile for niceness and second for open-mindedness. So that’s:

1/750 x 1/100 x 1/50 = 0.00000027, or 1/3,750,000.

According to these very helpful statistics, there is one person in the local metropolitan area who is as intelligent (according to IQ), agreeable and open as I am, and it’s me.

I would like to stress that this is not or do I consider it to be any kind of measure of virtue or worthwhileness, just a few basic intelligence and personality measures that are correlated with relationship satisfaction. If you’d rather look at it differently you could easily claim that I’m just very hard to please. Or I could be, if I’d ever applied this in reality.

Let’s add in the other stuff I’ve been looking for, just for maximum torture effect:

Taller than me (1/2), male (1/2), between my age and about ten years older (1/7), reasonably attractive (1/3), fairly conscientious (1/3): 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/7 x 1/3 = 1/84 on its own, which is not so bad. But let’s add this to the above equation:

1/750 x 1/100 x 1/50 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/7 x 1/3 = 1/315,000,000

So there would be about 1.5 guys on this continent who would have all of these qualities.

1.5. What do you think the odds are that they live near Beyond Bob? Not so good? That’s what I’m guessing. Hell, the chances he lives in this country are pretty fucking slim. Notice that I haven’t stipulated he must be single, mostly because I haven’t looked up the statistics for that.

Before you all jump on my case–even silently–let me point out that I very obviously haven’t been using all of these as screening criteria or I wouldn’t have gone on any dates with anyone since leaving the Ex. I knew that the person I would really, really like to be with was likely not to be nearby and/or single so I should be practical and not expect to get the whole list in one package. But frankly, at one in three hundred and fifteen million, how much exactly am I going to have to bend to get down to the one in fifteen thousand range that would make it reasonably likely he might live within a ten minute drive of my house?

1/15 x 1/4 x 1/4 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/4 x 1/3 = 1/11,520, or: if I look for someone smart, reasonably nice and open-minded, male, taller than me, within 20 years of my age and reasonably conscientious, there is a chance that he might exist within my community and there might be as many as 217 such individuals within the local metropolitan area. Some of whom are bound to be single, and a few of whom might be interested in me in turn.

Those are better odds than “there might be somebody somewhere but I’ll never find him” but still not particularly good, and in order to get to that, chances are high that I will need to get used to the idea of being a better partner for him than he will be for me, in most respects. As in: I will probably be some combination of nicer, smarter, more emotionally stable, etc. than whoever I’m with. So then I start thinking about trade-offs and what someone else could have to offer that would bring me satisfaction beyond what I could provide for myself, outside of money (which I don’t particularly value) and help with the housework (which I have purchased).

I have no idea what to do with this.

Advertisement