This is great; however, I don't quite understand how you can 'be stuck with' (i.e. choose) the second-best option if the very-best occurs in the first 37%... Surely you wouldn't be able to realise/decide that there is no one better than the best from the first group, if that is the case, until the end — by which point it's too late?
If you follow the rules of the equation, if you get to the end, you're marrying the last person you dated.
However, as noted in the article and by yourself, real life is never so constricting as only allowing you one chance at any particular person.
On the other hand, once you've passed on someone, there's nothing to guarantee that you'll be able to go back (they could be engaged, have moved away, hate your guts for evaluating mates by a mathematical formula, etc).
I think that's right. The only way you can choose the second best (and know it) is if the best occurs in the first 36% and the second best candidate is the very last one (if the best occurs in the first 36%, you'll always end up with the very last candidate, since nobody will satisfy the criterion of being the best so far).
You can unknowingly happen to choose the second best if the best candidate occurs among those you never consider because the second best is the best 'so far' when you get to them.
But the way it's described in the article is incorrect, as far as I can tell.
The scenario is that passing on a candidate means they might become unavailable, or choosing one means you can't look at the rest. Basically, how to choose the best item when you have to choose and can't change your mind?
Well, you can't guarantee you choose the best, but you can try to maximize the chance of doing better than random.
This models real-world situations such as (the article example) picking a wife from a pool of women, or even something such as who to hire from a pool of job applicants. In these scenarios, job candidate you passed on might take a different job, or the woman you choose to marry means you can't date the rest, or vice versa.
Obviously, if you can examine everyone and then go back and choose, you'd do that.
The irony is Kepler actually did get to go back - he hesitated on #5, she became unavailable, then he went through the rest of his list of women... and went back to re-woo #5. So he got to see all the candidates before choosing. ;)
Suppose the case of interview for a job where half the applicants are unqualified. This algorithm has an ~20% chance of hiring someone unqualified.
This algorithm seems optimized towards getting near-optimum rather then limiting risk. I think for real world problems it'd be much better to lower your standards as you near the end of the pool.
I married the first girl I dated because I waited to date someone I was truly attracted to, that I felt was my mental equal and who could hold a real discussion (plus she's beautiful). We've now been married 27 years ... I hope it's not a fluke!
My wife and I met when I was 15 and she was 16. After dating other people and a few years later we ended up getting married at 21 and 22. After 13 years, two kids, and watching many hours of "Star Trek" and "Pride and Prejudice" together we are still happily married with hopefully many more years to come.
My wife and I met when I was 18 and she was 16, online (playing the same video game). We married at 20 and 21.98, and are going on 12 years now.
Here's what my wife wrote a previous time this algorithm was discussed:
"To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion."
followup:
"Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance. That's why the quality of your wife is 120% you.
You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or sink to low ones
....
To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her."
My story is almost exactly like yours. Met at 15, married at 22. We are only married for 1 years now though, though we've been living together for 6 :)
This somewhat reminds me of when Microsoft announced the Zune. One of the selling points was (in true nerd form) you could send a song to a cute girl nearby. To which Steve Jobs replied, "Or you could just go up and talk to her."
A bunch of mathematicians came up with a formula for finding a wife. @smoyer effectively just went up and talked to her.
I've noticed a trend with computer people who married the first person they dated and the marriage being very successful (in terms of longevity at least). I haven't quite figured out why that is but I would say the vast majority of my software engineering friends are like this.
I've been told by women who are in my other circle of friends that they wouldn't want that because then they feel like they aren't the first choice but whatever the guy can get. But then I think about the marriages that have resulted and how happy those people are. Sometimes I wonder if people over think these things.
Forget the Kepler strategy. Forget getting the "best", if there is such a thing. If you click with the other person and both people care for and are kind to each other, then go for it and enjoy love and life.
This is very well discussed in Erich Fromm's book "The art of loving". He proposed that in today's society we put too much value on the object of love, and too little in learning how to love. Thus we look intensely for the best possible partner and we may have second thoughts even once we reach a decision, instead of learning how to love and enjoy life.
Eric Fromm also said true love is letting that person you
love sleep with other people if it makes them happy. I
have been with one person who I felt I loved according to Fromm, but I was not attracted to her--so I guess I never
loved? By the way, I think Fromm is right, but I'm just
to selfish, and he said that before AIDS. I wonder if he
would be so cavileer today?
Intellectuals have been known to give terrible relationship advice. They have their theory and they apply it. You can't hold them responsible when it blows up for you. I don't have advice on what to do, but mix a good dose of common sense and your experience of human nature in with Eric Fromm.
Edit: It sounds to me like you are rationalizing and intellectualizing.
Parents who truly loved their children would let their children pick others as parent figures if it's what would make them happy. I think there's a difference between that love and romantic love.
Isn't this data very skewed by the fact that not believing in cohabitation and not believing in divorce are highly correlated? This group includes lots of marriages that I wouldn't consider good outcomes even though they don't end in divorce.
> The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption.
As far as I can see this suggests that believing in cohabitation is not a strong factor when it comes to divorce.
As I see the data in those green bars (the chart in your linked article), the chance of your marriage surviving ten years falls with each non-marital sexual partner you had before marriage in the way you might expect if your current partner had to go on competing with all your previous partners simultaneously. If she's the only one, she's the best. If she's one of two, the chance of her remaining the best is 1/2. If one of three, only 1/3 chance that she goes on seeming like the best of the lot, etc. (And substitute "he" where appropriate and note that the same calculus is being applied to YOU, too.)
Of course, maybe the marriage survival doesn't require being the best but just >= the past average or some other variation, but that still leaves a curve dropping in a sort of 1/n Zipf Law descent into too-bad-for-you-ness where the competition with the "ex"es never ends. Yikes.
Computer person here, married to the third person I dated. We met our senior year of high school, fell in love, got married a few years after that. This year will be our 20 year anniversary.
I dunno, you meet someone you like, why date more people just because? I never really understood the survey-the-field strategy. Seems like a recipe for disappointment.
well, the pessimistic view, as also expressed by michel houllebecq in his books:
ugly, weird, fat (and come on, look at our industry) people tend to stick to their partners because they know that the alternative is not another partner - but being alone.
truly attractive (varies by gender, between pure aestethics and power, wealth) humans tend to have more relationships - because of pure availability. it is one thing to stay loyal if there is no one actively going after you, but a whole other ballgame once you have suitors.
"is there someone better out there for me?" is the key question that defines longevity of marriage. and fear of being forever alone is a strong bond.
think about it the next time you see a morbidly obese couple living "happily" together.
The 38% sample allows you to build a model of the population distribution based on which you take your decision.
But this does not mean you have to do this EVERY time. Say you have done a round on interviews before and you are tasked with interviewing for a new position: you might hire the first person you speak with because you know the population model, and they are high up with respect to that.
In common parlance, this is called "being experienced"
This formula is great for "good enough" problems. The way I use it is to mark the first thing that is good enough, but then keep looking for something that is better than that, then stop. Works great for apartments, books and ice cream.
The key is to realize time and effort is finite, and that you can always keep on looking if you don't have a stopping point.
do you actually do that?
it sounds interesting in theory but i find it actually quite impossible to "remember" the satisfaction my favorite gives me so that i can reference it against every other track.
I reached an age where I was either going to join many of my peers in being weak and overweight, or I was going to do something about it. The something I did is... cycle to work (15 miles a day) and lift weights three days a week before work.
No way. Going to the gym is one of the nerdiest things you can do if you approach it the right way. I mean it is basically the real life equivalent of grinding levels in an rpg:
You choose a class (endurance, strength, or something in between). You have items and skills which you have to skill up individually (barbells, dumb bells, gymnastics equipment, running, cycling, etc.). The same dilemma exists for leveling up: skill points added to one category are skill points you can't add to another category. Thus if you split your time between strength and endurance you will never achieve as much as someone who exclusively trains one of the two.
The skill curve is even similar to that of a well designed RPG: in the beginning you make a lot of gains quickly but eventually you slow to a halt and it takes months to even gain a few skill points in one item/skill.
The gym in real life is like hardcore mode: If you don't play for a while, your skills degrade as a penalty. However, the skill lost as a penalty is easier to reattain then skill you never had.
There are even boss fights and co-op mode if you decide to compete.
There are too many parallels to list them all here, but I think you get the idea.
Going to the gym in itself is still not a 'nerdy' activity. All you did was describe going to a gym in a very nerdy way by comparing it to an RPG - you could most likely apply this practice to just about any activity one could do.
edit: I do disagree with that statement of the poster to whom you replied, you can still be a pretty big nerd and go to a gym.
> Going to the gym in itself is still not a 'nerdy' activity.
Neither is moving pieces on a chess board until you start to obsess over it, read about it in your free time, track your progress as a player, and constantly try and improved yourself as a chess player. No activity is really "intrinsically nerdy" (whatever that means), that's why I said "if you approach it the right way".
Still, society generally views playing chess as being nerdy, no matter how involved you are with it. They don't make these distinctions you're making. Whether or not they're accurate in their description is another discussion entirely, but I think we can all understand this in the context of the conversation.
You seem to be mixing up [1] geeks and nerds. What you describe is geeky rather than nerdy.
What would be a nerdy approach to gym/fitness? Perhaps doing 10 years of research into what's the most efficient way of maintaining fitness and publishing a paper. Or perhaps building your own gym -- on the orbit, and commuting by a rocket of your own design.
The article says nerds are achievement oriented. That is textbook RPG player. All they care about is the next level, getting a sub 4 minute mile, the 100kg snatch, etc. Going to the gym is entirely achievement oriented.
Side note: I think we're arguing semantics. If you draw a venn diagram of nerds and geek there would be so much overlap it is hardly practical to differentiate except in the rare instance when an activity falls into one category and not the other (which I don't think is the case here).
I've never thought of it as an optimization problem at all, until now, but I do a form of this all the time when I'm listening to a playlist with a wide variety and nothing better going on (For instance when running or driving.)
The thing is for something trivial like that, it doesn't actually matter if you remember the satisfaction or not, all that really matters is if you are more satisfied than you think you were with the previous song, accuracy be damned.
This solution only applies if you have a finite number of secretaries that is known at the start to interview. Anything else and the equations get freaky. You can also add probability distributions for how many interviewies you expect.
This formula doesn't account for non-monogamous configurations. I'd be interested in seeing a mathematical representation of the maximum bonding pairs a person could reasonably handle.
Thank you. This is a much better article since it actually lays out and explains the reasoning behind the solution, as opposed to blandly stating "it has something to do with e" and padding up the rest of the note with grotesque drawings and minutiae.
(Also I appreciate what seems to me the less stridently gendered tone of the American Scientist article. Just a personal and subjective opinion though, so please be tolerant and try not jump on the hate.)
I'm surprised that utility doesn't come in here anywhere. Imagine a bimodal distribution, one set of matches that you hate, and a much smaller set of matches that you love. Why try to wait for the best after the first 1/e? Why not just pair off with someone that is 99% as good as #1?
My understanding is that this also give you 36.8% of not finding a wife at all because the best one is in the learning set. So 36.8% chance of success (picking the best one), 36.8% chance of no wife and 26.4% chance of picking the wrong one. I suppose there are different algorithms for different types of bachelors. Bachelors working under marry-or-lo-your-inheritance conditions are better off using different algorithms.
Using this method on a population of 100 prospective wives, what are the probabilities that: (1) you will pick the best wife (2) you will pick a wife in the top 3.
Thinking of this problem and eating a fun-blog level understanding of them is one of those things that give you "mental thinking models" of the Charlie Munger kind. Very useful.
For endless sample groups there is no chance of failure - there are always more individuals in every category including 'better than the first set of samples'.
Also - I met my wife and continued to date but returned to her, because obviously it would have been futile to try to beat what she had going on. So you don't have to be a slave to the algorithm.
Actually, if you are following the method described in the article, if the best candidate is in the learning set, you end up with the last one. So it's effectively a 36.8% chance of picking a random one from the "not-best" population.
... the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don't hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who's better than the best of that first group — that's the one you choose! Yes, the Very Best Candidate might show up in that first 36.8 percent — in which case you'll be stuck with second best, but still, if you like favorable odds, this is the best way to go.
Maybe I haven't had enough coffee this morning. Can someone explain how you would get second best in this case? Wouldn't you never meet a candidate better than the best of that first group and exhaust the rest of the candidates?
The article blithely describes the "best" strategy, without defining "best." I believe the strategy is only best in the sense of giving the highest probability of ending up with the best candidate--so the second best candidate is considered as bad as the worst.
This is not true. To maximize the expected rank, reject the first sqrt(n) candidates, and then pick the next one better than that group. Once you have more than 7 candidates, this means that for maximizing expected rank, you want to reject fewer candidates than if you maximize probability of choosing the best.
Can you link me to a proof? I recall working this out and finding that the solutions were the same whether you were maximizing rank or maximize P(best)
This is under this hypothesis: "the interviewer does not learn the actual relative rank of each applicant. He learns only whether the applicant has relative rank 1." I think this is rarely a reasonable hypothesis. Kepler certainly could tell how much he liked each woman, not just whether she was the best so far or not.
Under the (reasonable) hypothesis that you get some information about the relative value of each candidate, I believe spacehome is correct and the optimal strategies ARE different.
It's pretty easy to see for yourself that the two metrics can't simultaneously be maximized.
Imagine a situation where you've already passed by all of the candidates except for the last two. You meet the second-to-last candidate, and she's at the 99.99% percentile, but there was one single previous candidate that was ranked higher. What do you do?
If you want to maximize the expected value of the rank, you have to pick her, because the odds that the last candidate is better is vanishingly small. If you want to maximize the chance that you pick the maximum rank, you have to pass, because the chance that the second-to-last candidate is the best is zero (since you've already seen one who's better).
The point is, he will not end up even with second best if the best candidate is in the first group. Rather he will end up with the last candidate hitting a dead end just like the example. That's because no one in the second group is better than the best in first group.
Yeah I misread that. That's true, but my point still stands as well. It sounds like using this strategy as it is written yields increasingly poor results as the sample size increases (assuming a total ordering)
It's good that they finally mentioned it at the end - this is a flavor of the optimal stopping problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping). This is a cute application of that strategy, the problem is that mathematics has very little to do with actual relationships, as much so as the assumptions game theory makes about actual relationships (http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/13/whats-wrong-with-game-th...). Whats more important than trying to play your luck in a relationship is: working through the grit of an actual relationship.
In reality - if you don't put in the actual work any single relationship takes, then none of them will work out, it doesn't matter how large your "sample size" is.
Imagine you had 11 candidates like he described, and you interviewed them in random orders. For ease, we will describe them by number, which will also equate to their "goodness" by arbitrary criteria (known to the interviewer only).
One of the worst possible cases would be that you interview them like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
In this case, you would see them decreasing in "goodness" without ever increasing. You would get to 11 and be stuck with the crappiest whatever possible.
In the average version though, you might get something like:
7 3 4 6 5 8 11 1 10 9 2
Using their strategy, you would check the first 4 candidates (7 3 4 6) and then you would stop when you hit better than max(7 3 4 6) = (3), which in this case would equate to finding (1) at the 8th position.
You are correct that if the best is in the first block it screws everything up. In the specific version you mention, a possible arrangement that triggers could be:
3 9 8 1 5 10 2 6 4 7 11
You would interview the first set with a best of (1). All the rest would then not compare, and you would get (11).
(FYI, the scale used in parent's is 1 is best, 11 is worst. Confused me for a bit.)
[Edit - Ignore me. I guess you can't recall rejected candidates.] In your final example though, because you had now interviewed all the candidates, you could go back and offer jobs to the best candidates. The point of interviewing four and then interviewing until you find a better one is that it should keep you from wasting time interviewing the whole list. If you end up doing that anyway, you know who the best was and can hire them.
Yeah, 36% chance of getting nothing isn't great. I'd expect that for the last third, you might want to settle for someone who is a bit worse than the best of the test group.
This algorithm is only good if you'd rather have nothing than second best.
Yes, that appears to be a mistake. In the 36.8% of cases where the best candidate shows up in that first 36.8%, it would seem the algorithm must keep running until it is forced to select the final candidate, which is essentially a random choice out of all but the very best (assuming ordering has no relation to goodness) -- very different from being "stuck with the second best." However, the rest of the quote -- "but still, if you like favorable odds, this is the best way to go." -- might very well be true.
Presumably the optimal strategy would be to gradually lower your standards the further you go. It's easily proven that the optimal strategy for the second-to-last candidate is to select the candidate if the candidate is above average. So the algorithm as described in the article seems to be missing something.
I've always wondered if this is a sensible way to buy shares. Say I wanted to buy Google shares in the next 30 days. I could monitor the price for the first 36.8%, and then choose the best price in the remainder. Does that make sense as a strategy?
I think the volatility of the stock market adds extra complexity. Presuming you go on dates with 36.8% of your pool, you will have an idea of what you would like in a woman, and from there you can make a proper selection. But with the stock market, you can watch 36.8% of the time, see a rising trend, think it's a good choice, and be totally wrong five days later when their quarterly earnings come out.
I think you'd want better heuristics for investing in the stock market than observing a bit of time (unless, apparently, you're a HFT algorithm ;-)).
But how is that different from the original problem? Unknown distributions are unknown. Assuming a uniform shuffle of ranked options isn't actually appropriate in most real world situations.
IOW, strategy is bad, but the stick market isn't worse than the mate/employee interviewing situation.
No. This method assumes normally distributed potential wives. If a stock was normally distributed (i.e. has volatility) around a stable average, then yes, you could do that - but so can thousands of automated trading algorithms.
No, it doesn't assume that at all. It just assumes that they are i.i.d. (so all permutations of ranks are equally likely). Still probably not a good model of stock prices (which presumably are correlated more with the previous day than ten days ago)
And really, it isn't 3.5 billion. Reduce by % in relationship, in acceptable age range, straight, living within driving distance...you'd probably be fine.
- Girls in your range (age, available, and close geographically)
- Average time you need to 'learn' a girl (it is, to know the best/cons, and to take a decision if dropping her or not). On some it will take 2 hours, others will take 6 months or even years in some cases.
- Time when you start dating.
- Time when you plan to marry.
- Average time between dates.
So if living in a city big enough, and you start dating at around 18 and plan to marry at around 30, while being skillful enough to get a new date in less than 2 months, you can expect to date around 24 girls. That means you can discard the first 9 dates, and wait until you are almost 22 (3.75 years later) to take things seriously.
I like this article, and I love Krulwich & Radiolab. Its a lesson in statistics and not in marriage though, just in case you weren't sure. So just for fun, my inner monologue while reading...
Now that's love. "Honey, you were better than the 37% of women I was going to try. It is statistically likely that you're probably the best, or at least second best, of all my immediately available options. Will you marry me?"
I'm somewhat amused that the conclusion is to date (sample) for a while, then start getting serious once you get an idea of what you want. Sounds a lot like what everyone does already, at least the ones whose marriages aren't arranged for them.
Kepler got what he wanted and sampled 100% of his options. He didn't get a statistically likely "Right Girl", he got "The Right Girl", and he never wondered whether or not he got the best one.
Couldn't this be applied to startup ideas? Say you have savings to last you 12 months. Try one startup idea (/MVP) every month for 12/e = 4 months. Then keep going producing 1 MVP per month until you find one that looks more promising than the best of the first four. If the article is right then with a probability of 36.8% you will have found the best idea with some time to spare in your 12 months to make some money with it. No?
No, because you can go back to a better idea anytime you want to do so. If you estimated that you have 12 months of savings and that it takes you a month to build an MVP and six months to take an MVP to ramen profit, you should spend the first six months building six MVPs, then evaluate them and pick the best to work on for another six months.
Except the number of startup ideas is not fixed, just the number of months, so you haven't exactly found the "best idea" -- more that you've found the best month+idea pairing. It might still be an okay approximation if your goal is to build a good-enough MVP, but it's not exactly the same formula since there are any number of ideas you might have to work with.
This seems like it works on the same principle of the Monty Hall problem, where statistically you win more often by always throwing away your first choice - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Sounds similar but the Monty Hall problem isn't just about throwing away your first choice - it's about throwing away your first choice after you've been given more information about the remaining two choices.
Exactly. Modern marriage is like a game of Russian Roulette for men. The difference is that your odds are worse, and the gun has financial incentive to destroy you.
Divorce rates are over 50%, divorce is initiated by women over 70% of the time, women get custody of children 90% of the time.
Laws like VAWA and the Duluth Model give women a surefire way to have you arrested and charged with zero evidence. Now you have a criminal record and no access to your children - 100% legal! Guess what happens to the suicide and addiction rates of men in these situations?
Enjoy your archaic life-long alimony payments, 'supervised visitation' with your children, drug testing, mandatory psychological evaluations, dumping thousands into a custody battle to end up with 4 days/month with your kids, and a child support system that rewards the payee for alienating your children from you.
Hey, your lawyer's kids will have no problem paying college tuition! Don't worry about yours.
Do you like the things you've earned over your life? Hold on to them by avoiding marriage like the plague its become.
"Divorce rate" is a misleading statistic. It compares marriages in year X to divorces in year X, but divorces in year X can come from marriages in many prior years -- so it's not exactly a direct comparison.
People often mistake it for "the chances of an average marriage ending in divorce", which is a bit lower (the data I've looked at puts it in the 30-40% range.)
But wait, there's more! There are ways to determine, beforehand, which marriages are more or less likely to end in divorce. There are mathematical models based on behavior (James Murray, John Gottman). There are statistics related to various life decisions and behaviors and shared interests. You can dig through all sorts of interesting statistics and figure out your own risk profile if you so desire (see, for example, the General Social Survey at http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 ). People like to act like divorce is just a thing that randomly happens through no fault of your own, and on occasion that's true, but there are a lot of choices you can make to reduce the chances it'll happen to you. (Making choices like my grandparents seems to work out -- one pair celebrated 65 years last month, the other celebrates 67 years this weekend. And yes, the statistics bear out that making similar choices to them results in lifelong marriage a very high percentage of the time.)
not in a single HN comment, no. I can't compress a lifetime of experience (second-hand) into the amount of text I'm willing to write right now with fidelity.
Reading through my HN comment history, and my wife's HN comment history, can give you some insight into what we learned from our grandparents (hers also had lifelong marriages.) Reading through the books published by the mathematicians I mentioned, and digging through the statistics I posted, are additional methods you can use to gain insight into what works. Talking to people you know who've had long and successful marriages (ie, not my grandparents, but yours) can help.
The difference is that your grandmother didn't have a guaranteed payday and a "strong independent single-mother's movement" awaiting her if she decided she was tired of your grandfather.
The quickly disappearing stigma against single-motherhood combined with the demonization of men as deadbeats and child molesters, when paired with massive amounts of state handouts to single mothers (wic, welfare, child support, alimony, state medical insurance, housing subsidy, single-mother scholarships, affirmative action jobs, etc.) has made divorce as inconsequential as possible for women while dramatically raising the consequences for men.
Marriage is broken and men who go into it without understanding the disparity of legal, psychological, and economic outcomes between the genders are in for a rude awakening.
... yes, I'm sure you've identified the only relevant difference.
Which totally explains why my parents and my wife's parents, both married in the 1970s when those social movements were in full bloom, also have wonderful and happy marriages going on 40 and 38 years, respectively.
Are you arguing that our social environment hasn't changed since the 1970's or that our obviously dramatically changed social environment has had no effect on male-female relationships?
Either way, your advice is more of the same feel-good nonsense that we feed our young men, hand-waving away the outcomes of divorce and custody law, and pushing them towards a statistically likely devastating outcome.
It may feel good to preach the traditional loving family of your grandparents, but the data shows that they are the outlier. A much more likely outcome is a split family and emotional and financial devastation for the husband.
I am also not giving "feel-good nonsense" advice, nor hand-waving. I'm suggesting avenues of research that require a level of effort commensurate with the task at hand, namely, creating a long-term stable relationship.
Statistically, relationships with the same attributes as my grandparents' relationships don't fall apart. Statistically, the most likely outcome in that case is "til death do us part". (You really should read some of JD Murray's books/papers. We can predict with a fairly high likelihood which relationships are going to lead to a split family and emotional/financial devastation for the husband, and which are not. But it takes a level of introspection and a level of honesty from friends and observers that most people don't have.)
Again - is it your assertion that our drastically changed social environment has had no effect on the stability of relationships?
I whole-heartedly agree with you that there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point.
It's shortsighted and a case of "ignoring the elephant in the room" to pretend that a dramatic shift in our social environment is having no effect on the stability marriage or that factors which contributed to past-generation's successful marriages have been unaffected by this shift.
> "is it your assertion that our drastically changed social environment has had no effect on the stability of relationships?"
I have already said explicitly that it is not. Please don't be obtuse.
> "there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point."
No; it's exactly the point. Your initial comment used misleading statistics to argue that marriage is a "plague" that should be avoided, and you later hinted that my grandfather would have been a victim of this plague if my grandparents had lived in a different era.
I've countered that those statistics don't apply to every situation, and that in fact marriage remains quite a worthwhile pursuit especially for those whose circumstances and life choices put them in the "very high probability of success" category. My grandparents, my parents, and my wife and I are all in this category.
Repeating your assertion that current marriages lead "towards a statistically likely devastating outcome" is useless. The assertion, while true for many couples, ignores the reality that some couples are statistically likely to enjoy the benefits of marriage for their entire lives.
This is extremely misleading, though, because the first marriages are much less likely to end in divorce, and subsequent marriages are more likely to end in divorce (with increasing probability for each subsequent marriage).
> women get custody of children 90% of the time.
Women get custody of children far less often when men seek custody. Women get custody more often because women want custody more often.
What a sexist load of garbage. Women /want/ custody and men don't give a shit about their children, right?
The statistic touting men's success rate in seeking custody ignores the price of entry. Men /want/ to be in their children's lives, but must be wealthy to fund a custody battle (while also paying child support and alimony if he was married) in order to do so.
Women are the automatic receivers of custody, it is then the father's "privilege" to hire a family practice lawyer and sue for custody to the tune of thousands of dollars and invasion of his privacy via drug and psychological testing.
You should educate yourself about how the Tender Years Doctrine works as well as how custody is awarded to unwed parents if you think custody is not automatically awarded to the mother.
> You should educate yourself about how the Tender Years Doctrine works as well as how custody is awarded to unwed parents if you think custody is not automatically awarded to the mother.
You should educate yourself about the fact that the tender years doctrine has both been legislatively replaced in most states starting in the 1970s and also struck down by various courts as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution and similar provisions of various state Constitution if you think it is relevant now, rather than historically, to policy on child custody.
Unwed parents are a somewhat different case (because the legal presumption of paternity, and the implicit assumption of stable cohabitation, doesn't exist outside of marriage.) Yes, in the case of unmarried parents, the mother has automatic custody, and the father must both establish paternity and make an active claim for custody.
The title is link bait and inaccurate. It's not about "how to marry the right girl". It's about "how to marry the right girl, given an unrealistic set of constraints".
this also assumes every candidate is fully willing to accept the offer. what if your first best candidate accepted the offer but was in the 36%. Then the 2nd best candidate after 36% rejected the offer, leaving you with potentially a bad choice in candidates. This seems highly probable too...
If everyone did this, you have to assume the other candidate is doing the same, thus your choice after 36% may end with you being insider their 36% bracket. This works only at a selfish scale and dubious at best.
This only really works for a gameshow situation. You have 20 boxes with money inside. You don't know what is the minimum or maximum amount, you get to look at a box and determine yes/no. So you do the 36%. Then the very next box that is close enough or above the maximum of the first 36% is what you chose.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadAm I missing something? Surely...
However, as noted in the article and by yourself, real life is never so constricting as only allowing you one chance at any particular person.
On the other hand, once you've passed on someone, there's nothing to guarantee that you'll be able to go back (they could be engaged, have moved away, hate your guts for evaluating mates by a mathematical formula, etc).
You can unknowingly happen to choose the second best if the best candidate occurs among those you never consider because the second best is the best 'so far' when you get to them.
But the way it's described in the article is incorrect, as far as I can tell.
Well, you can't guarantee you choose the best, but you can try to maximize the chance of doing better than random.
This models real-world situations such as (the article example) picking a wife from a pool of women, or even something such as who to hire from a pool of job applicants. In these scenarios, job candidate you passed on might take a different job, or the woman you choose to marry means you can't date the rest, or vice versa.
Obviously, if you can examine everyone and then go back and choose, you'd do that.
The irony is Kepler actually did get to go back - he hesitated on #5, she became unavailable, then he went through the rest of his list of women... and went back to re-woo #5. So he got to see all the candidates before choosing. ;)
This algorithm seems optimized towards getting near-optimum rather then limiting risk. I think for real world problems it'd be much better to lower your standards as you near the end of the pool.
Here's what my wife wrote a previous time this algorithm was discussed:
"To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion."
followup:
"Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance. That's why the quality of your wife is 120% you.
You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or sink to low ones
....
To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her."
( Full discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236686 )
Don't be in too much of a hurry.
A bunch of mathematicians came up with a formula for finding a wife. @smoyer effectively just went up and talked to her.
Kudos to you sir... and your wife! :)
Good job Microsoft.
jk, congrats on a successful marriage!
I've been told by women who are in my other circle of friends that they wouldn't want that because then they feel like they aren't the first choice but whatever the guy can get. But then I think about the marriages that have resulted and how happy those people are. Sometimes I wonder if people over think these things.
Forget the Kepler strategy. Forget getting the "best", if there is such a thing. If you click with the other person and both people care for and are kind to each other, then go for it and enjoy love and life.
Edit: It sounds to me like you are rationalizing and intellectualizing.
"You love me, so you allow me others; but I love you, so I will not take them."
> the marriage being very successful
> I haven't quite figured out why that is
It is not about software engineers, it is a general correlation to the "numbers" of pre-marital dates.
The lower the number of partners before marriage, the more likely is the marriage to succeed:
> http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-d...
As far as I can see this suggests that believing in cohabitation is not a strong factor when it comes to divorce.
Of course, maybe the marriage survival doesn't require being the best but just >= the past average or some other variation, but that still leaves a curve dropping in a sort of 1/n Zipf Law descent into too-bad-for-you-ness where the competition with the "ex"es never ends. Yikes.
I dunno, you meet someone you like, why date more people just because? I never really understood the survey-the-field strategy. Seems like a recipe for disappointment.
ugly, weird, fat (and come on, look at our industry) people tend to stick to their partners because they know that the alternative is not another partner - but being alone.
truly attractive (varies by gender, between pure aestethics and power, wealth) humans tend to have more relationships - because of pure availability. it is one thing to stay loyal if there is no one actively going after you, but a whole other ballgame once you have suitors.
"is there someone better out there for me?" is the key question that defines longevity of marriage. and fear of being forever alone is a strong bond.
think about it the next time you see a morbidly obese couple living "happily" together.
But this does not mean you have to do this EVERY time. Say you have done a round on interviews before and you are tasked with interviewing for a new position: you might hire the first person you speak with because you know the population model, and they are high up with respect to that.
In common parlance, this is called "being experienced"
The key is to realize time and effort is finite, and that you can always keep on looking if you don't have a stopping point.
You should click through the first 40/e (roughly 15). Then start clicking until you come across a song better then the best one in the first 15.
Listen to that one.
What a dilemma!
But then again I'm a giant nerd.
I still think I'm pretty nerdy. For example, I made a light for my bike that flashes in Morse: https://github.com/jgrahamc/bikemorse
Now why does that not surprise me at all :)
I think you are in no danger whatsoever of losing your nerd card :)
You choose a class (endurance, strength, or something in between). You have items and skills which you have to skill up individually (barbells, dumb bells, gymnastics equipment, running, cycling, etc.). The same dilemma exists for leveling up: skill points added to one category are skill points you can't add to another category. Thus if you split your time between strength and endurance you will never achieve as much as someone who exclusively trains one of the two.
The skill curve is even similar to that of a well designed RPG: in the beginning you make a lot of gains quickly but eventually you slow to a halt and it takes months to even gain a few skill points in one item/skill.
The gym in real life is like hardcore mode: If you don't play for a while, your skills degrade as a penalty. However, the skill lost as a penalty is easier to reattain then skill you never had.
There are even boss fights and co-op mode if you decide to compete.
There are too many parallels to list them all here, but I think you get the idea.
edit: I do disagree with that statement of the poster to whom you replied, you can still be a pretty big nerd and go to a gym.
Neither is moving pieces on a chess board until you start to obsess over it, read about it in your free time, track your progress as a player, and constantly try and improved yourself as a chess player. No activity is really "intrinsically nerdy" (whatever that means), that's why I said "if you approach it the right way".
What would be a nerdy approach to gym/fitness? Perhaps doing 10 years of research into what's the most efficient way of maintaining fitness and publishing a paper. Or perhaps building your own gym -- on the orbit, and commuting by a rocket of your own design.
[1] http://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-ner...
Side note: I think we're arguing semantics. If you draw a venn diagram of nerds and geek there would be so much overlap it is hardly practical to differentiate except in the rare instance when an activity falls into one category and not the other (which I don't think is the case here).
You start as a giant nerd going to the gym. Over time, you probably become a smaller nerd, or at least a denser one.
The thing is for something trivial like that, it doesn't actually matter if you remember the satisfaction or not, all that really matters is if you are more satisfied than you think you were with the previous song, accuracy be damned.
[1]:http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.5783,y.2009,no.2,...
(Also I appreciate what seems to me the less stridently gendered tone of the American Scientist article. Just a personal and subjective opinion though, so please be tolerant and try not jump on the hate.)
My understanding is that this also give you 36.8% of not finding a wife at all because the best one is in the learning set. So 36.8% chance of success (picking the best one), 36.8% chance of no wife and 26.4% chance of picking the wrong one. I suppose there are different algorithms for different types of bachelors. Bachelors working under marry-or-lo-your-inheritance conditions are better off using different algorithms.
Using this method on a population of 100 prospective wives, what are the probabilities that: (1) you will pick the best wife (2) you will pick a wife in the top 3.
Thinking of this problem and eating a fun-blog level understanding of them is one of those things that give you "mental thinking models" of the Charlie Munger kind. Very useful.
EDIT: clarity
Also - I met my wife and continued to date but returned to her, because obviously it would have been futile to try to beat what she had going on. So you don't have to be a slave to the algorithm.
Maybe I haven't had enough coffee this morning. Can someone explain how you would get second best in this case? Wouldn't you never meet a candidate better than the best of that first group and exhaust the rest of the candidates?
> That presumes 'serial dating,' but you can actually know several people at once, and get more serious with one once you've evaluated the pool.
Under the (reasonable) hypothesis that you get some information about the relative value of each candidate, I believe spacehome is correct and the optimal strategies ARE different.
Imagine a situation where you've already passed by all of the candidates except for the last two. You meet the second-to-last candidate, and she's at the 99.99% percentile, but there was one single previous candidate that was ranked higher. What do you do?
If you want to maximize the expected value of the rank, you have to pick her, because the odds that the last candidate is better is vanishingly small. If you want to maximize the chance that you pick the maximum rank, you have to pass, because the chance that the second-to-last candidate is the best is zero (since you've already seen one who's better).
In reality - if you don't put in the actual work any single relationship takes, then none of them will work out, it doesn't matter how large your "sample size" is.
One of the worst possible cases would be that you interview them like:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
In this case, you would see them decreasing in "goodness" without ever increasing. You would get to 11 and be stuck with the crappiest whatever possible.
In the average version though, you might get something like:
7 3 4 6 5 8 11 1 10 9 2
Using their strategy, you would check the first 4 candidates (7 3 4 6) and then you would stop when you hit better than max(7 3 4 6) = (3), which in this case would equate to finding (1) at the 8th position.
You are correct that if the best is in the first block it screws everything up. In the specific version you mention, a possible arrangement that triggers could be:
3 9 8 1 5 10 2 6 4 7 11
You would interview the first set with a best of (1). All the rest would then not compare, and you would get (11).
[Edit - Ignore me. I guess you can't recall rejected candidates.] In your final example though, because you had now interviewed all the candidates, you could go back and offer jobs to the best candidates. The point of interviewing four and then interviewing until you find a better one is that it should keep you from wasting time interviewing the whole list. If you end up doing that anyway, you know who the best was and can hire them.
This algorithm is only good if you'd rather have nothing than second best.
The main thing here to notice is that this is a strategy and not a solution.
If the best options is in the first 1/e * n of group elements of the group you will end up with the last interviewee as the one to choose.
But if you use this strategy many times over max permutations of the group it WILL give you the best output in general.
btw i would like to thank the author for posting this.
I think you'd want better heuristics for investing in the stock market than observing a bit of time (unless, apparently, you're a HFT algorithm ;-)).
Stock prices are not like meeting that special someone.
But when they go down it's usually worse. :(
IOW, strategy is bad, but the stick market isn't worse than the mate/employee interviewing situation.
- Girls in your range (age, available, and close geographically)
- Average time you need to 'learn' a girl (it is, to know the best/cons, and to take a decision if dropping her or not). On some it will take 2 hours, others will take 6 months or even years in some cases.
- Time when you start dating.
- Time when you plan to marry.
- Average time between dates.
So if living in a city big enough, and you start dating at around 18 and plan to marry at around 30, while being skillful enough to get a new date in less than 2 months, you can expect to date around 24 girls. That means you can discard the first 9 dates, and wait until you are almost 22 (3.75 years later) to take things seriously.
But maybe the difference is that I never plan to actually marry. Makes things easier.
Now that's love. "Honey, you were better than the 37% of women I was going to try. It is statistically likely that you're probably the best, or at least second best, of all my immediately available options. Will you marry me?"
I'm somewhat amused that the conclusion is to date (sample) for a while, then start getting serious once you get an idea of what you want. Sounds a lot like what everyone does already, at least the ones whose marriages aren't arranged for them.
Kepler got what he wanted and sampled 100% of his options. He didn't get a statistically likely "Right Girl", he got "The Right Girl", and he never wondered whether or not he got the best one.
A slightly different variant, is how to make it totally random selection http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/june52013/index.html
Divorce rates are over 50%, divorce is initiated by women over 70% of the time, women get custody of children 90% of the time.
Laws like VAWA and the Duluth Model give women a surefire way to have you arrested and charged with zero evidence. Now you have a criminal record and no access to your children - 100% legal! Guess what happens to the suicide and addiction rates of men in these situations?
Enjoy your archaic life-long alimony payments, 'supervised visitation' with your children, drug testing, mandatory psychological evaluations, dumping thousands into a custody battle to end up with 4 days/month with your kids, and a child support system that rewards the payee for alienating your children from you.
Hey, your lawyer's kids will have no problem paying college tuition! Don't worry about yours.
Do you like the things you've earned over your life? Hold on to them by avoiding marriage like the plague its become.
"Divorce rate" is a misleading statistic. It compares marriages in year X to divorces in year X, but divorces in year X can come from marriages in many prior years -- so it's not exactly a direct comparison.
People often mistake it for "the chances of an average marriage ending in divorce", which is a bit lower (the data I've looked at puts it in the 30-40% range.)
But wait, there's more! There are ways to determine, beforehand, which marriages are more or less likely to end in divorce. There are mathematical models based on behavior (James Murray, John Gottman). There are statistics related to various life decisions and behaviors and shared interests. You can dig through all sorts of interesting statistics and figure out your own risk profile if you so desire (see, for example, the General Social Survey at http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss10 ). People like to act like divorce is just a thing that randomly happens through no fault of your own, and on occasion that's true, but there are a lot of choices you can make to reduce the chances it'll happen to you. (Making choices like my grandparents seems to work out -- one pair celebrated 65 years last month, the other celebrates 67 years this weekend. And yes, the statistics bear out that making similar choices to them results in lifelong marriage a very high percentage of the time.)
Reading through my HN comment history, and my wife's HN comment history, can give you some insight into what we learned from our grandparents (hers also had lifelong marriages.) Reading through the books published by the mathematicians I mentioned, and digging through the statistics I posted, are additional methods you can use to gain insight into what works. Talking to people you know who've had long and successful marriages (ie, not my grandparents, but yours) can help.
The quickly disappearing stigma against single-motherhood combined with the demonization of men as deadbeats and child molesters, when paired with massive amounts of state handouts to single mothers (wic, welfare, child support, alimony, state medical insurance, housing subsidy, single-mother scholarships, affirmative action jobs, etc.) has made divorce as inconsequential as possible for women while dramatically raising the consequences for men.
Marriage is broken and men who go into it without understanding the disparity of legal, psychological, and economic outcomes between the genders are in for a rude awakening.
Which totally explains why my parents and my wife's parents, both married in the 1970s when those social movements were in full bloom, also have wonderful and happy marriages going on 40 and 38 years, respectively.
Either way, your advice is more of the same feel-good nonsense that we feed our young men, hand-waving away the outcomes of divorce and custody law, and pushing them towards a statistically likely devastating outcome.
It may feel good to preach the traditional loving family of your grandparents, but the data shows that they are the outlier. A much more likely outcome is a split family and emotional and financial devastation for the husband.
I am also not giving "feel-good nonsense" advice, nor hand-waving. I'm suggesting avenues of research that require a level of effort commensurate with the task at hand, namely, creating a long-term stable relationship.
Statistically, relationships with the same attributes as my grandparents' relationships don't fall apart. Statistically, the most likely outcome in that case is "til death do us part". (You really should read some of JD Murray's books/papers. We can predict with a fairly high likelihood which relationships are going to lead to a split family and emotional/financial devastation for the husband, and which are not. But it takes a level of introspection and a level of honesty from friends and observers that most people don't have.)
I whole-heartedly agree with you that there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point.
It's shortsighted and a case of "ignoring the elephant in the room" to pretend that a dramatic shift in our social environment is having no effect on the stability marriage or that factors which contributed to past-generation's successful marriages have been unaffected by this shift.
I have already said explicitly that it is not. Please don't be obtuse.
> "there are many factors that can help predict the success of a marriage. This is somewhat besides the point."
No; it's exactly the point. Your initial comment used misleading statistics to argue that marriage is a "plague" that should be avoided, and you later hinted that my grandfather would have been a victim of this plague if my grandparents had lived in a different era.
I've countered that those statistics don't apply to every situation, and that in fact marriage remains quite a worthwhile pursuit especially for those whose circumstances and life choices put them in the "very high probability of success" category. My grandparents, my parents, and my wife and I are all in this category.
Repeating your assertion that current marriages lead "towards a statistically likely devastating outcome" is useless. The assertion, while true for many couples, ignores the reality that some couples are statistically likely to enjoy the benefits of marriage for their entire lives.
This is extremely misleading, though, because the first marriages are much less likely to end in divorce, and subsequent marriages are more likely to end in divorce (with increasing probability for each subsequent marriage).
> women get custody of children 90% of the time.
Women get custody of children far less often when men seek custody. Women get custody more often because women want custody more often.
The statistic touting men's success rate in seeking custody ignores the price of entry. Men /want/ to be in their children's lives, but must be wealthy to fund a custody battle (while also paying child support and alimony if he was married) in order to do so.
Women are the automatic receivers of custody, it is then the father's "privilege" to hire a family practice lawyer and sue for custody to the tune of thousands of dollars and invasion of his privacy via drug and psychological testing.
No, they aren't. They need to actively choose to seek it just as much as men do, they are just more likely to choose to do so.
You should educate yourself about the fact that the tender years doctrine has both been legislatively replaced in most states starting in the 1970s and also struck down by various courts as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution and similar provisions of various state Constitution if you think it is relevant now, rather than historically, to policy on child custody.
Unwed parents are a somewhat different case (because the legal presumption of paternity, and the implicit assumption of stable cohabitation, doesn't exist outside of marriage.) Yes, in the case of unmarried parents, the mother has automatic custody, and the father must both establish paternity and make an active claim for custody.
Do you also earnestly believe that the custody process is affordable and accessible to poor and middle-class men?
If everyone did this, you have to assume the other candidate is doing the same, thus your choice after 36% may end with you being insider their 36% bracket. This works only at a selfish scale and dubious at best.
This only really works for a gameshow situation. You have 20 boxes with money inside. You don't know what is the minimum or maximum amount, you get to look at a box and determine yes/no. So you do the 36%. Then the very next box that is close enough or above the maximum of the first 36% is what you chose.