A better explanation is that older men date younger women more often than older women date younger men. So there are extra old women and young men. No need for combinatorial game theory, just supply and demand.
The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
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Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#12the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1/e fraction of this time. and then say "yes" to the next person as good or better than the best you could have had during your trial/dating period. can anyone name the theorem or is this apocryphal?
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#13The author is actually indireclty referring to the stable marriage problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem , don't bother reading the paper the slate writer links to, it has no substantive content), in which you have two sets of agents which we label the "men" and the "women". Each agent has a preference ordering of the members of the other gender. It is really easy to prove that you can then f…
Steven Rudich has a good lecture on this: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/di...
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#14the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1…
thats only a nice algorithm if you can go through the process several times, because i think that its a bound in expectation rather than point wise.
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#15> Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness . I think this one quote from the article is important. > What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make…
Most of those people sound really self-absorbed.
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#16[deleted]
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#17There's a simpler explanation than appealing to math the author admits not understanding: male attractiveness ages better. A 40 year old man can be attractive to 20 year old women, but a 40 year old woman is rarely attractive to 20 year old men. In other words, women past their prime who restrict themselves to mates their own age will may be in relatively low demand.
The opposite is true. Because women in their narrow age range of attractiveness get paired with men in a much broader age range of attractiveness, that would create a shortage of women. Say, if women 25-35 date men 30-45, there are 50% more men in that group.
or combining folk wisdom and math: d(half your age + 7) / d (age) However, the fact that men propose and women decide creates an inversion. Early marriages take decisive women and attractive men off the market, leaving beautiful women and schlubs. Hooray for graph theory!
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#18> Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness . I think this one quote from the article is important. > What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make…
Good read. "What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime." I smiled as I read this because that's my exact choice of words when describing what I'm interested in.
hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out?
I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#19the Gale-Shapley algorithm requires an authority (like the medical school establishment) to make it work. in real life, if you want to get married, you face a much more amorphous situation: a series of prospects, and with each a decision, "are they good enough"? i can't find it anymore, but iirc the answer was, to estimate the length of the game (say 20 years on the marriage market) and then just date for the first 1…
37% rule
> Estimate how many people you’re likely to date in your life, dump the first 37% but keep a photo of your favourite on your bedside table. Then, marry the first one after that who beats your sweetheart! Of course, every rule has exceptions and sometimes you get an offer that’s too good to refuse, 37% or not. Sometimes, mathematics doesn’t have all the answers!
> Using this process, we find that we can be successful in selecting the best from a group of N by letting approximately 37% of the available positions go by, then selecting the first choice better than any seen before about 37% of the time. And this is true no matter how large N is! This is a strikingly high probability.
Re: The Eligible Bachelor Paradox
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good read. "What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime." I smiled as I read this because that's my exact choice of words when describing what I'm interested in.
hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out? I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.
I think Alexander Smith put the "point of love" quite well: "Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition."
You can love a friend in that sense to a point, and that may be enough for many people. Obviously romantic love is an entirely different story: irrational and perhaps less efficient than a work partner, but the sort of thing that contrasts and enhances the purely logical.