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Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
...the chicks actually dig intelligent guys.
Really.
So do chicks from just about any eastern bloc country for that matter.
I work it in reverse. (And that does not mean "up the butt")
For every 3 girls I talk to, I'll get one number.
For every 3 numbers I get, I'll get a date.
For every 3 dates I get, I'll get a 2nd date.
For every 3 2nd dates I get I'll score.
For every 3 girls I score with I will continue to date.
So this means I'll actually have 1 in 243 chance of meeting a girl I like beyond just sex.
Given that I date about once a week (on average) that mean every 4.6 years I'll be in a relationship.
And checking my work, that works out to seem right.
I *HIGHLY* recommend the book "Mathematics and Sex" which I believe I bought because of a /. book review...
In it, it says 12 relationships is what you need to find your best match. Given 4.6 * 12, I'll be 56 before I find the one...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The mistake is presume that the factors are independent of one another. When you assume independence you can take the logical intersection of the probabilities which is multiplying less-than-unity probabilities together. You can obtain a rather small result choosing enough factors. But if the factors are correlated, the correct mathematics is the largest probability number. Both the astronomical conditions and girlfriend factors are correlated to some degree makeing the results less than valid.
This is the identical mistake made valuating debt securities. The mathematical underpinning was that you can offload most of the risk into a "junk tranch" by assuming failures like foreclosures are statistically independent. By "drake equation magic", i.e. multiplying probabilities to obtain the group probability, the group risk appears rather small. Independence is a decent assumption during good economic times because economic failures are more individual luck or actions. But during a recession, economic failures are correlated, making the group statistical model invalid. The so-called good-risk securities turned into garbage and the junk securities became gold.
I fear since a economics grad student does not understand probability like so many of his peers, this does not bode well for the future economy.