The Drake Equation is used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilisations that might exist in our galaxy. I have used this approach to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. 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. Find out the details here.
The Drake Dating Equation
Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK, by Peter Backus, Warwick University Economics Dept.
Tags: doomed, perversions
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SAVED.
One can easily substitute boyfriends in here but as I am mostly a heterosexual male I will focus on the search for a girlfriend.
But you *are*, Blanche! You *are* in that chair!
Only 5% of age-appropriate University-educated women are attractive? Perhaps his problem is that he's a fussy bastard, then?
He specifically mentioned "attractive to him". Maybe he just doesn't want to lower his standards too much.
Also, he rates himself only atractive to 5% of the women as well, so you can't say that he is unnecessarily biased.
It is of course purely subjective, I know. But the idea of only finding 5% of age-appropriate women with a suitable educational background attractive is... not my experience, shall we say?
Also, as a 31 year old man he does seem to be skewing his age preference "young". He could probably improve his odds by increasing the upper bound without fear of the dreaded "cougars".
(That he even uses that term does not make me think well of him. Perhaps that is my problem here?)
I suspect that if I were a university-educated woman who lived in London and whose physical attractiveness was in the top fifth percentile, I wouldn't be looking for love among graduate students in the Warwick University Economics Department. Just sayin'.
Well, where then?
My customary practice of limiting PubMed advanced search to Human, adult, reviews or meta-analysis in a case like this has failed to indicate enough geographical detail about mating behavior. There's plenty to learn about the limbic system, social life algorithm acquisition, the problem of mate retention, and the good genes hypothesis of human female extra-pair mating. Clearly these ideas need unification in order to determine the most likely place to get laid.
Danm Quine, Wittgenstein, and their rejection of analysis and synthesis.
Well, they are British. I'd say 5% is generous.
Ah, you've been there?
Not really. But I still haven't seen a generic photo of a British street with people where 95% of them were hideous.
and yet he completely fails to add a factor for "percentage of women who will not immediately run screaming upon hearing that he performed such a calculation".
women start doing this math subconsciously once they hit 30-35 and the biological clock starts ticking. And then some re-eval their standards for "attractive" to "will put a baby in me".
"Well, at least he knows math."
I am sure this has been done before. Although slightly differently.
This is probably one of the better arguments I've seen for why the Drake equation is a lot of pulled-from-arse nonsense.
Well, the equation itself is fairly commonsense. Where you're supposed to get some of the numbers you plug into the equation, on the other hand...
Japan still has a space VLBI program.
The Japanese and the French also both have more sophisticated ideas for detecting life on exoplanets than simply looking for ozone spectra between 9 and 10 microns. Which we could do back in 1980, but we can't get three infrared space telescopes to do today: of all of them currently operational, only WISE currently detects those wavelengths, and on a very limited all-sky survey schedule which allows no opportunity for targeted exoplanet ozone interferometric spectroscopy.
Why not? Everyone I've asked acts like it's a classified military secret, probably because micron/terahertz space VLBI is almost exactly the same algorithm as sub-millimeter synthetic aperture radar mapping, and we can't have that in the hands of mere astronomers -- they might talk about it!
So the next time you look up at the night sky, please extend a middle finger at submillimeter resolution to the military bozos who are preventing you from seeing ozone on Earth-sized exoplanets.
So the next time you look up at the night sky, please extend a middle finger at submillimeter resolution to the military bozos who are preventing you from seeing ozone on Earth-sized exoplanets.
This comment is even better out of context.
Application of some modified version of the Drake Equation may be used to determined the probability of desirable persons unknown, but various applications give differing results and skew one's expectation and the answer that everyone really wants to know.
In one case, a modified Drake Equation was used to estimate the probable number of eligible mates, period.
This application differs from determining the probable number of eligible mates who satisfy a select number of criterion.
For example, the number of eligible woman is different from the number of eligible women who, say, like Star Trek.
The more conditions or criterion of selectivity imposed, the more restricted the set of potential sought mates.
The point I am attempting to make is how the Drake Equation is applied, in modified form, effects the answer which may or may not address the central or primary objective.
Prima fica I have no doubt that there exists a non-zero number of potential, eligible soulmates, borrowing the local population within a particular geography.
Before applying the conditions of selectivity e.g. compatible political persuasion, tolerated religious attitudes, etc., let's address the factor of how desirable the searcher is to the potential soulmates. In other words, how attractive the person doing the searching for a soulmate matters and I shall claim garners more weight than any other condition for selectivity.
The quick retort is adding the measure of desirability as a factor into the modified Drake Equation.
That would be an error because the factors in the Drake Equation are probabilistic values but the measure of desirability is an absolute value -- measuring how attractive the searcher is.
Put plainly, how attractive some one is is a measured or calculated value not a probabilistic value, some number that falls within the measure space of the Reals in the interval [0,1].
In other words, any modified formed of the Drake Equation is insufficient to accurately and fairly determined the answer to the primary question: How likely it is for some one to find their soulmate of mutual attraction?
In conclusion, let me repeat.
Application of the Drake Equation will only be enough to answer the question: How likely does there to exist eligible soulmates?
I posit for anyone that is a non-zero number.
Second, if one adds criterion thereby restricting the number of potential eligible soulmates, such as requiring a certain level of education, a particular political view, or that their potential soulmate must like sushi, then with each additional criterion, the selectivity reduces the number of potential eligible soulmates tending toward zero.
A major problem is I do not think it possible to collect the data to determine a satisfactory and accurate answer/value. In other words, if some one only prefers heterosexual women who like both Star Trek and sushi but hate Democrats and Adam Sandler, I question seriously how any one is going to collect the statistical data, assuming such data exists in some form, that will give an estimate of such potential existing persons.
The factor that matters most, so I claim, more than the prior probable values is an answer to the question: how attractive would any potential eligible soulmate find you to be? Such a value is not probabilistic and therefore cannot be determined nor factored in, as it were, through any modification the Drake Equation.